A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,1
their wings tangled up in curses.
Over the years, my friends and I came up with our own stories about the house at the end of Calle Sol. Rico said the scientist’s wife died after giving birth. She’d been in labor for five days, and after her husband held her green-skinned baby girl up to her face, she mumbled some prayers up to the saints. Then she kicked the bucket.
Ruben had a better version. He claimed the woman had been so upset by the fact that her husband was never around that she’d thrown herself off the highest of the stone walls of the massive old fort known as El Morro. It happened in the middle of the day, as dozens of people were out steering their kites through the wide blue sky. The last thing anyone saw was the woman’s long black hair and the thin white fabric of her dress as she took a running leap. When the kite-flyers rushed over, expecting to see her broken body on the ledge many feet below, all they saw was a hibiscus bush with a single flower the color of fruit punch.
Carlos said he didn’t know what happened to that pinche woman. All he knew was that every single one of the street cats knew better than to walk in front of that pinche house. Once, however, a tiny kitten, its eyes barely open, got separated from its mother and found itself alone on the sidewalk in front of the courtyard. The kitten mewed and mewed all night. The next morning someone found it curled up into a ball, dead from chewing on a leaf that had fallen from the one of the tall bushes.
“Everybody knows,” Carlos claimed, “that the plants in that courtyard are full of poison. If you touch them, they’ll make your nightmares come true. Then you’ll burn with fever. Then you’ll die.”
I thought the kitten story was bullshit. There are thousands of cats prowling around Old San Juan, and they could die for any number of reasons. The kitten could’ve been born sick and cast away by its mother. It could’ve had rabies. It could’ve eaten some of the chicken scraps Señor Guzmán mixes with glass and leaves out on the street in small piles to try to kill the ferals.
The summer I turned eleven, while we were sitting on a pier watching the cruise ships go by in the twilight, was when Rico claimed the scientist who’d lived in the house at the end of the street had a daughter and that she still lived there. He’d seen her. She was a little girl with green skin and grass for hair. He said he’d even talked to her. She’d told him she was a witch who could grant wishes.
We ran from the pier to my room at the hotel as fast as we could to scribble our wishes on the stationery the housekeepers kept stocked on my nightstand. It took Ruben the longest to figure out what his wish would be, but I knew mine right away. I wanted to lift the curse from the house, so that birds would fly over it again and the woman with the long dark hair would come home and throw open her shutters.
Once Ruben finally decided that his wish would be for his dead dog Pepé to come back to life, we folded our wishes in half, sprinted down to the end of Calle Sol, and tossed those wishes over the courtyard wall. The paper fluttered into the bad air and disappeared.
While my friends raced each other back to the pier, I stayed. I waited in front of the house to see if a bird would fly over and to listen for the sound of a woman crying. Nothing happened. And, as far as I know, none of our wishes ever came true.
One summer soon after, the stories stopped. Of course, the house at the end of Calle Sol was still there, still crumbling. The broken sidewalk had never been fixed. The blue paint was still chipped and faded, and the tops of plants still waved over the courtyard walls, trying to tempt me, but my friends and I had gotten too old to care about wishes, curses, and green-skinned little girls.
That’s because there were other girls—real girls—whose bodies we could press against the walls of buildings in alleyways late at night. Up close, their skin smelled like warm, wet sand, and their mouths tasted like coconut water. They wore