Brujas Y Putas.
Being Chapter 2 in the tale “The Only Way Was East.”
“So,” he said, “tell me about these whores.”
He spoke from the slushy of guts beside me on the freeway. More a worm than anything else, he slithered from the land of the dead and used the puddle of innards and slop as a doorway into our world. Then he stood up, making a skeleton for himself as he did. Muscle fibers crawled across the cracked and brittle bone. Finally, he carpeted the carcass with a haphazard stitching of brown and dirty hide, thrown over his mangled body like a blanket. For a while, the skin sagged and didn’t move right with the rest of him as he stretched and cracked his limbs back into place. But the fingerling pores of the fur eventually sunk in. Whatever the freshly flattened animal was before, it had now transformed itself into the king of roadkill. The Coyote.
He startled me, but he didn’t terrify me. He’d been doing this since the baptism. Whether it was during a piss on my morning run through the Joshua trees, or while I was staring emptily at the stain-glass in Saint Junipero with my family, or on lonely nights after I’d quit porn-hub and thrown my phone across the room, he’d be there. Staring. Always barking curses at me, calling me an infidel, conquistador, dirty Spaniard, or something along those lines. It happened so often that it no longer bothered me. I realized he must be very lonely.
This time, he caught me daydreaming. An easy thing to do if we’re being honest. I was staring at the half-moon and Monte Tres Reyes below it. But the statues of the three kings were gone. They woke up in the moonlight to wander their camels through the saguaros and yucca and dirt.
In my daydream, I was reliving my trip to Tijuana, but I thought I was doing it silently. I wondered how he heard me all the way from the land of the dead. That was until I looked up and noticed that my third eye was open and gawking and that the small green spark that floats above my head had turned into a flame.
“What whores?” I asked, looking down at this dead little desert dog that had (and would continue) to cause me so much trouble.
“You were about to go into the house of the putas in your story” Spoke the Coyote through a burp as he scarfed down the fried onions that had fallen from my impossible burger as I was looking at the moon. “Before you trailed off, staring at the sky with those god-damned conquistador eyes of yours.”
“Oh right,” I said, “those whores. Well, I have to go back a bit because I forgot an important detail: the house we stayed at in Mexico was actually owned by a witch.”
The coyote sat and patiently waited for me to continue the story. Next to him, the flattened remains of a field mouse and a javelina had also crawled out of the bloody portal from the underworld to hear the tale. They gathered around the heat of my body that was exuding from the emerald bonfire floating above my head. In the green light their shadows were not their own, but in the shapes of Kokopeli, the demonic trumpeteers.
“We have plenty of Brujas where we come from,” the field mouse whispered to the Javelina in a voice that would have already been tiny in life but was even fainter now as he was speaking through crushed lungs.
“He’s right,” said the javelina to the Coyote, “Tell us about the putas!”
“Putas! Putas! Puuuutas!” they demanded in unison until the Coyote threw his paw in the air and they stopped in fear of him. There was a terrible silence.
“We have no stories in the land of the dead, so we must hear the tale the way he wishes to tell it.” And then he looked up to me with his patient and blank canine stare and said “So, grandchild of murderers, we will gladly hear about this bruja. But then, please, get back to the whores.”
