Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,38

this had ever happened to her before. She told her mother she thought she was sick. Her mother—the girls’ grandmother—brought her hot licorice tea and told her that, no, she wasn’t sick. She was just unlucky. Some of the dead people in the graveyard, her mother said, release mal aires, which enter a living person’s body through the holes in their heads, like their nostrils and their mouths. It can happen any time of year, but especially in winter, when the ground is frozen and the corpses are uncomfortable.

“That’s what happened,” Rita Torres told her daughters.

During the funeral, mal aires had worked their way into her body. They wrapped around her bones and fastened themselves to her muscles. They dug in and gave her chills. They wanted her to know what it felt like to be dead. Rita’s mother told her the feeling would pass in a day, and if it didn’t, she’d take her to a lady who knew how to deal with these kinds of things.

The feeling didn’t pass. It got worse. Jessica’s mom woke up in the middle of the night with aches in her ears. By morning, one of her eardrums had burst. Fluid started leaking down the side of her neck. There was something in her head, pushing against skull bones, and it wanted something—it wanted to get out, or it wanted her to get out and make more room.

Jessica’s grandmother drove her mother across town to some lady’s house. That lady had just finished making ham sandwiches for her young sons when they’d arrived. She washed her hands and led her mom into a back bedroom. Once there, she rubbed alcohol on Rita’s head, pressed her thumbs across her eyebrows, and whispered a short prayer. She told Rita to go home and take baths in hot salt water, twice a day.

The next morning, Rita was still a little chilly, but better. The day after that, she was back to normal.

Many years later, long after their mother had died, Ana asked Jessica if she remembered this story. Jessica said she did—she remembered sitting in the back seat, looking at Ana’s dirty sleeves, and watching their mom reach over and grip her small hand.

“So you held your breath?” Ana asked. “That whole time?”

Jessica nodded. “I still do—every time I go past a graveyard. What about you?”

“I never even tried,” Ana said, with a flash of a grin. “So who knows how many angry spirits I’ve been carrying around with me all this time.”

Jessica

(Friday, June 14th)

“Sign Peter’s card?”

Jessica looked up from her dinner of caramel corn and chocolate milk. Her manager, an older lady named Mathilda, was holding out a red envelope and a pen. Jessica was confused.

“What?”

Mathilda gave the envelope a little shake. “Peter’s card. Everyone’s signed it but you.”

Jessica was still confused. “Is he sick?”

Peter didn’t look sick. The last time she’d seen him was yesterday when they’d passed each other between shifts. She’d been in the employee bathroom for nearly half an hour, clipping her fingernails and then shaving her armpits over the sink. When she’d finally come out, there was Peter, leaning against the wall, waiting. He’d smiled and said hey, like it was no big deal that Jessica had hogged the bathroom for way too long. Even under the harsh fluorescent store light that made everything it touched look bleached and corpselike, he appeared easy, relaxed, like he was outside waiting for the bus on a warm spring day. Peter was infuriating.

“Are you kidding?” Mathilda asked, her smile crooked. “His last day is Sunday.”

“Sunday?” Jessica replied. “As in, two days from now?”

“Well . . . yeah.”

Jessica blew past Mathilda and charged out into the store. Her shift had been over for almost half an hour, so she’d changed out of her work shirt and into a gray V-neck that used to belong to John. She still had her khakis on, though, and the fabric swished when she walked. A Celine Dion ballad was blasting through the store speakers. It was the ironic soundtrack of her life.

Jessica found Peter in the candy aisle, up near the registers, where he was