She dreamed of black earth and red thread, of hands that healed and hurt, of old women who could see straight through skin. She dreamed of a voice, not hers, whispering: “You could be free.”
The Mangkukulam's Gaze
Laundry clung to Lina’s back like a second, sticky skin as she pegged shirts and towels to the sagging line on their apartment’s rooftop. The morning had barely begun and already the sun’s weight pressed down, compressing the city’s stink into a syrup that coated the tiles and her lungs alike. She worked quickly, movements economical, all wrists and fingers and careful twists of the hip - a danceperfected by necessity. Even in solitude, she could not escape the feeling of being observed. Three floors below, the barangay seethed with life: the yowling infants, the radios tuned to indistinguishable noise, the hawkers volleying insults and bargains across the reek of open drains.
She reached to pin a pillowcase and the sleeve of her blouse inched up, exposing the purpled shadow blooming on her inner wrist. Lina glared at the bruise as if it were an enemy, then let the fabric fall back into place. The mark throbbed with its own stubborn pulse, proof and accusation both.
When the line was filled, she wiped her hands on her skirt and surveyed her work. The sheets billowed in the wind, too white, too fragile for the city that threatened to swallow them whole. Somewhere beneath her, a baby wailed and a motorcycle coughed itself to death. Lina shut her eyes, savoring the fleeting anonymity that came from standing above it all. For a few seconds, she pretended the world beneath her was a landscape she could shape and redraw at will.
A horn blared from the street and the spell snapped. Lina exhaled, gathered her woven basket, and descended to the street, a half-dozen tasks lined up in her head like dominos: deliver forms to the clinic, buy eggs and vegetables, pick up the right detergent for Ramon’s work shirts. Each errand was a small knot in the rope she used to tether herself to the present.
The market was only a fifteen-minute walk, but the city bent time around it, turning each minute into something slow and rubbery. Lina hugged the basket to her chest and kept her eyes low, weaving between tricycles and the pop-up stands selling fried bananas and off-brand cigarettes. The crowd thickened as she neared the talipapa, pressing close with the desperate energy of people who had always lived just slightly below survival.
If the market had a shape, it would be a labyrinth: aisles twisting and dead-ending, vendors reappearing in places they hadn’t been a day before, the boundaries redrawn at whim by whoever set up earliest. Fishmongers and vegetable sellers flanked the path, their wares leaking smells into the air - sweet rot, brine, the sharp ammonia of crushed shrimp shells. Children darted underfoot, faces streaked with snot and mango juice, while the elders squatted beside their buckets and watched the world with eyes narrowed by both suspicion and sun.
Lina moved through it with practiced grace, stopping at her usual stalls to select ampalaya and okra. She let her fingers drift over each item, never taking the first one offered, always searching for a texture or weight that felt right. The vendors recognized her, sometimes greeting her with a nod or a familiar joke. She nodded back, a performance of normalcy that cost her nothing and meant even less.
Today, however, the current in the crowd was different. People moved with a tension that puckered the air, glancing not at each other but at something ahead. Whispers chased her through the aisles, and she caught fragments of Tagalog shaded with old dread:
“She’s back again.”
“Don’t look. Just pass.”
“If you lock eyes, you’ll lose your soul.”
The source of the disturbance was not hard to find. Near the far corner, where the stalls grew older and the canopies drooped like tired eyelids, a cluster of women hovered around a low table draped in oilcloth. The table was crowded with jars - some filled with cloudy liquid and knotted roots, others stuffed with feathers, coins, or the slick brown bodies of unfamiliar insects. Behind it sat Nanay Rosita, the market’s unofficial witch, her frame hunched but her presence as dense as a thunderhead.
Rosita’s skin was the color of dried tamarind, mapped with fissures that hinted at centuries of stored knowledge. Her hair, more silver than black, was twisted up and pinned with what looked like an animal bone. Around her neck hung a lanyard of red and black beads, each one different - some glossy, some matte, all faintly menacing. But it was her eyes that froze Lina in place: small, bead-black, and so impossibly clear that the world seemed to drain into them.
Lina’s pulse quickened. She could feel the weight of her bruise, the memory of Ramon’s hands like a hot wire wrapped around her wrist. Her basket was almost full; all she needed was a final handful of green chili. She told herself she could ignore Rosita and move on. Just one more purchase. Five seconds, ten at most.
She turned, intending to finish quickly, and that was when her basket slipped from her grip. It struck the edge of a table and upended, sending a rain of vegetables and coins across the mud-packed ground. Pechay leaves fanned out like wings; tomatoes rolled into the gutter. The sound snapped everyone’s attention in her direction.
Heat flooded Lina’s cheeks. She dropped to her knees, scrambling to gather her scattered goods, but her hands trembled so badly she couldn’t hold the coins. Laughter trickled through the crowd, cruel and low. Someone muttered, “Careful, or she’ll curse you.”
Then, before Lina could react, Rosita was beside her, moving with a fluidity that belied her years. She crouched with a neat, birdlike motion and began plucking vegetables from the dirt, her fingers long and uncannily nimble. Lina watched, transfixed, as the old woman’s hands darted and wove, collecting the pieces not just quickly, but precisely, as if she knew the pattern they were meant to make. The eggplants, the tomatoes, the chilies - each one retrieved in a sequence that felt both random and inevitable.
Rosita’s face was only inches from Lina’s now, and in the close air Lina caught the scent of burnt sugar and something metallic. The old woman’s eyes flicked up, pinning her. For a moment, Lina saw herself reflected in those black beads, smaller, diminished, but somehow more real.
Rosita pressed the rescued chili into Lina’s palm, her touch dry but strong. “Careful,anak,” she said, voice low but clear. “Some things bruise deeper than you think.”
Lina stared, unable to speak. The words slid under her skin, nested somewhere close to the bone.
The stallholder across the way spat onto the ground. “Witch’s tricks,” he muttered, but didn’t meet Rosita’s gaze.
Rosita ignored him, rising to her full, unimpressive height and dusting her hands on her skirt. She smiled at Lina, but the expression was wrong - it carried too much knowledge, too little comfort. “Next time, you come see me,” she said, almost whispering. “I have something for pain.”
Lina could not nod, could not move, only watched as Rosita slipped back to her stall, arms loaded with the jars and bottles she guarded like relics. The crowd parted for her, and the whispers returned, but this time they carried something like awe.
Lina reassembled her basket, stood, and walked home through the heat, the chili burning cold against her skin. The imprint of the witch’s hand lingered on her palm, a silent promise.
The walk home gnawed at Lina, each step dredging up the memory of Rosita’s eyes and the dry, splintered grip of her hand. She moved through the thinning crowd, careful not to look back, but the sensation of pursuit curled up the length of her spine, hungry and insistent. Even the heat seemed to conspire against her, pressing her breathless and sticky against the limits of her skin. By the time she reached the stoop of her apartment building, she was slick with sweat and the sense of being contaminated, as if the old woman’s touch had left a residue that nothing could scrub away.
Inside, she washed the vegetables, set the basket on the counter, and tried to focus on her tasks - yet her mind kept skipping back to that moment: the way Rosita’s hand had darted out, quick as a frog’s tongue, and closed around her wrist.
She could feel it still.
It happened in the market’s narrowest aisle, where the tarpaulins crowded low overhead, filtering the afternoon sun into a feverish red. Lina had just paid for a clutch of green onion when Rosita’s fingers snaked out from behind a curtain of dried tobacco leaves and locked around her wrist, pinning her pulse in place.
