Your Family Has a Secret, by Manuel Aragon
Your family has a secret; hushed voices and whispers, they say things that you cannot quite process. Your abuelita, a storyteller, a curandera, tapping into the magic of the world that your mother has asked you to stay away from.
Abuela leads the family circle and shares the hands and the power, your mother and grandfather, their wisdom, and their stories, too. You gather weekly in their small, tiny, welcoming, warm apartment in the Northside. They tell and talk of the things that move and moan about in the night. But you’re a child, young, taking in the stories as just that, stories, nothing more, nothing less things that are not true. But your family has a secret.
Your family had always told you never to wander the neighborhood at night, but that never stopped you; no fear was holding you back. They say that you should be afraid of what lays behind the shadows, moving in the night; beware, you’ll see her, wandering and weaving and moving towards you when you’re out at night.
Children, where did you go?
Where did you first see her? Hear her voice? How did she find you? She knew your name and your family, she had been waiting for you.
Mi hija preciosa, is that you?
They say that there’s a woman walking, crying, wailing, screaming, moving through the night. You can hear her on some summer nights when you keep the windows open, on those summer nights when you can’t sleep and it’s too quiet. It starts with the wind, a slight breeze, feels like it’s cooling you down, and turns into a howl, a shriek, a howl, a desperate yearning, heat, a call for souls.
When you heard the howls as a child, your mother would tell you that it was a creature, an animal, because you were afraid of ghosts, of monsters, the truth, of death, you are afraid of what happened to this particular woman and her children, where did they go?
Before you were brown, before we were Indigenous, Latinx, before Spanish came from our tongues, she was there. She’s been wandering the land since the first sun before time began.
She has been searching for years, looking near rivers and streams, calling out names in a language we no longer speak, in search of our loved ones and hers, who have moved on and away, and those that have been taken from her. They say that she lost the children or that she killed her children, but the stories of men often obscure the true horrors of this world.
Your abuelo did not believe in ghosts but believed in this woman because she was not a ghost. His mother had seen her wandering one night, with the moon fully lit, and had watched her disappear and reappear again.
Your family is on the run from her. She’s been chasing us for generations, from Guanajuato to Texas, along the rivers and lakes in the rainy season when the land would flood. From Texas to Illinois, along the plains and the farmlands, perhaps she too could travel by train. From Joliet to Fort Morgan, along the plains, until she found her way here, roaming the streets of the Northside, the Westside, GES, and the Southside.
Your father’s family has seen her in the rivers and valleys along the pueblos of Nuevo Mexico. She’s there at the family church in the valley where we lived for generations; she’s there in the town square after the Fiestas, shutting down the parties; she is there in the cemetery across from the catholic church, the one where they buried all of the Indios y Latinos, the headstones with no names.
Your family ended up here; the sounds of the city terrifying, the wails and the screams, and if you leave your windows open, there are reminders that people are living, that people are dying; there are reminders of ghosts, a red light that emits from the house down the block where the father-in-law killed his son and daughter-in-law, reminders of the ghosts sitting on the benches at the basketball courts dreaming of what could have been, reminders of the ghosts when the music plays through the vents in your house, and there are no musical instruments anywhere. Reminders on the corners and in the bars, yelling and shouting at one another.
Living off of Federal Blvd, on a Saturday night, the life and the sounds and the sirens and the terrors of the cops flying overhead with their ghetto birds. Boys pulled over, searched by cops, drugs planted, and the horrors you have heard, you have seen.
But through the noise and violence, the silences were even more piercing, a warning that danger was on the horizon. That’s what your dad told you, where he was from, silence was always in the air.
Niño, ¿necesitas ayuda?
And there she was, bright like the moon on that fully dark night. Bright, like the night your abuela saw her on a farm where her family was spending that summer, the long hot days of Texas picking crops like they did each summer, moving on the backs of trains across the country. This was not home but had become home. The children did what they could to entertain themselves, while the adults, tired from the day, would sit around and play cards.
She had been out playing with her primos, a game of hide and seek amongst the crops, the best place to hide when it was dark. She had gone near the river, under a road, waiting for cousins to find her, and she could hear something scratching at the crops. At first, she thought it was some animal tearing away at the crops until the voice spoke to her.
Niña, ¿dónde están tus padres?
Your grandmother was a young girl, 9 or 10, and had heard the stories. She had been told to stay near the house in the dead of night because they were a woman wandering the streets.
Don’t talk to her, your bisabuela would tell her, and she would recall this, years later, as she had not talked to the woman, but the woman to her and looked through her.
Chica, estoy hablando contigo. ¿Cómo te llamas?
She is glowing, her face at once full of beauty, at once full of death. The woman washed her hands in the river like she would have washed her clothes.
It’s okay, niña, you can talk to me.
She tried to reassure your grandmother, to calm her, and reached out to hold her and caress her. And your grandmother stays frozen, terrified. The woman combs her hair and laughs and smiles. Before she just disappears.
Your sister said you were looking for me. It’s okay, I’ll wait with you.
Your grandmother and her sister would not talk about this night until they were well into adulthood, their mother was in her failing days, crying out on her deathbed, No, No, No, please leave me alone.
Your great-grandmother had seen her, too, by a stream in Guanajuato one night, lonely, sad. She could tell by the way her shoulders were slumped, her shawl sliding off of her shoulders. A woman in distress, lost, broken, looking for something.
Mujer, ¿te puedo ayudar?
They had not heard the story until then and shared their own. And yours is a family that’s haunted by this woman.
Your dad saw the woman, he and his friends were messing around in the cemetery, the one where the local catholic church had buried the bodies of the children that they had taken from the nuns. The children of the priests who had fathered them. The secrets of the church are buried in a cemetery with no headstones. And your dad saw the woman watching over the children wandering the night. Your father talked to her, and she held his hand. He cried with her about his father, whom he, too, had lost, and she comforted him.
And yours is a family with a secret, the stories that you don’t tell, the stories that refuse to tell.
Your brother asks you to tell him.
Tell him.
Where did she find you? Did you hear her talking about her son, how his hair and yours were darker, brown, black, as the night, and comparing your eyes to his?
Mi’jo, ¿estás llorando?
There’s nothing to be afraid of because she is here to take care of you and comfort you, watch over you, protect you, and tell you it’s going to be alright.
You can still hear her voice when the night is quiet, and my mind is racing. You can still hear her voice inside my heart, trying to find its way to you, even when I’m no longer near water.
And you ask your brother, Do you still see her?
Manuel Aragon is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on a short story collection, Norteñas. Norteñas is a collection of speculative fiction short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican-American-centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there.
His work has appeared in ANMLY. His short story, "A Violent Noise," was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He is a 2021 Periplus Collective Fellow, a 2021 NYFA IAP Mentor, and a 2023 Tin House Residency winner. He is also a Colorado Book Award finalist as editor of the anthology, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Vol 2.