To Follow Her Home (And Other Stories)

By Lydia San Andres

A birth-day curse, a creature out of Dominican myth, a family curse and a grief so deep it can only be overcome by supernatural means are some of the things you will find in the four short stories that make up this collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lydia San Andres
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005761431

Lydia San Andres

Lydia San Andres lives and writes in the tropics, where she can be found reading and making excuses to stay out of the heat. A Summer for Scandal is her first novel.

Book preview

1

The Earth and the Wind and the Sea

Ifinished sprinkling herbs into the water and got to my feet just as the clock in the town square stuck the midday hour. The sound reached us faintly, but we all heard it in the heavy stillness of the day.

Now, Abuela Fernanda said from the other side of the tub, gesturing towards Nelsa and me, help me get her in.

By her, Abuela was referring to our client, the young woman looking to free herself from the spirit of her former fiancee, who had been as much of a controlling bastard in life as he apparently was in death. A stubborn one, too, which is why Abuela had decided to try the despojo—the second one we’d attempted on this girl—at the cemetery, where we could seek help from El Baron.

The girl, barefoot and dressed in a white shift, laid her offerings in front of El Baron’s gravestone, between the gardenias and the short white candles Nelsa had arranged on the plain stone slab. Then she held her hands out to us so we could help her into the bath.

I felt it as soon as my palms grazed her clammy ones—the unpleasant buzzing crawling inside my limbs, as if an entire hive of bees had gone in through my nose and mouth and were trying to find a way out through my skin. The sensation was so familiar—and so horrifying in its familiarity—that I almost dropped the girl’s arm.

Almost. Anyone who’d been trained by Abuela as I had knew better than to let fear get in the way of a working.

I held on while the girl knelt into the tepid water, her shift darkening as moisture seeped into the fabric. Abuela, her dark brown skin gleaming with sweat, asked Nelsa to do the invocation. As Nelsa’s chant fell over the cemetery’s dense quiet, it was not her voice I heard, but another, lower and far more sinister, that whispered in my ear, I’ll have you, even if I have to wait until I’m dead.

It’s a curious thing, going through life followed by certainty that it wasn’t meant for you.

Have you ever thought about all those people who, for whatever reason, never got a chance to be born? Those whose would-be parents came within a breath of meeting but something got in the way, those whose grandparents met ill fates before they had a chance to pass on their seed.

I’m the complete opposite of them: I was never supposed to be born.

I was saved in the womb, and again at the moment of my birth, and a handful of times after that. First by my grandmother’s quick-thinking, then by a clever midwife. Once the midwife lay me in my mother’s arms, it was she the one digging half-chewed pieces of guava out of my constricting throat and shoving my perambulator to safety when the grocer’s cart was upset by a kicking horse and careened our way. It was by the grace of her protective spells and the azabache charm around my throat that I lived to see my thirteenth year.

Hanging from a gold chain of indeterminate quality and accompanied by the assortment of saint’s medals Mama and Abuela had collected over the years to aid in my protection, the azabache was a diminutive closed fist carved out of a stone as black as my eyes. It lay against my skin for thirteen years yet it never warmed—it was always cold as foreboding.

Though from a young age I had been enlisted in the preparation of the spells and potions Mama and Abuela made to sell, I was not apprised of the details of my birth until that infelicitous birthday.

The day began with an argument: Mama and Abuela in the patio, their voices pitched lower than usual. In a rocking chair, Mama was stripping leaves from a mayaguito branch, her nimble fingers moving light and quick from the branch to the tin basin at her feet. Abuela, shelling guandules to go with that day’s rice, spoke over the plinks the peas made as they fell into the chipped enamel bowl. We ought to send her away. She’ll become a señorita soon enough. And then where will she be?

Here, Mama answered. With us. We can keep her safe.

He won’t stop until he’s got her.

And I won’t stop until he’s dead.

If my mother was stubborn as a mule, Abuela was the mare that bore her and soon enough, she had her way: they were sending me away to Tia Betania’s