Sana, sana, colita de rana.

Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.

My mother and I, along with my children, have come to visit my Tía Eva. She is my mom’s tía, my great aunt, but I have only known her as Tía. It is what I told my children to call her, as well. Just as her name hasn’t changed, neither has her house. Even though I haven’t seen her in years, I walk the same cement steps leading up from the side of the house into the wood panel living room cluttered with memorabilia. Sit on the same floral upholstered settee sofa amid the photos and porcelain figures (myriad bells and keepsake boxes), crochet doilies like the crosshatch sugar crust of conchas, on the various coffee and end tables.

We brought tamales de puerco, her favorite, and also my favorite, and have to be careful not to get grease on the puzzles that adorn her dining table like picturesque placemats. Several more sit in frames stacked upright against the piano behind me. As we set out the disposable plates and plasticware I brought to save her the cleanup, she talks about how her father loved pig roasts, cooking the body whole, consuming everything down to the blood. “Even though we weren’t supposed to,” she says. Her mother would collect the lard and store it in a bucket in the kitchen, use it to make tortillas and refried beans.

My three-year-old cannot sit still. He has been up and down from his chair, all around the room, riding every plush tiger in her collection like horses, his tiny feet drumbeats on this wood flooring. When he climbs up into his chair this time, he hits his head on the table. He comes up with both hands on his forehead, clearly still deciding whether or not to cry. Tío Pete reaches over and eclipses the two small hands with his own gruff one.

“Sana, sana, colita de rana,” he says, rubbing his forehead.

“What?” my toddler asks. Blows an incredulous raspberry at the foreign words.

“Sana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.” My son is laughing now. My other two join in when Tía translates and then shares the version that includes farting.

This phrase was never used on me much growing up. But I understand its magic. A distraction—like counting the squished frogs on the road with my oldest when he didn’t want to go for our evening walks. Numbering the flattened bodies, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty, on each lap to make sure we didn’t miss one. Noting the level of flattening and decomposition. Some seeming to have exploded, red organs and pink muscles now outside the skin. Others seeming to have had all moist elements absorbed by the asphalt, resembling a green strip of leather accented by the eggshell white of their bones. No longer focused on bearing out his boredom through word and body or complaining of the heat. No longer thinking of the bump to the head.

When things have calmed down at the table, my mother points out a sepia picture of the Rangel family on the wall. My stoic great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and all twelve of their children ranging from young adult to toddler. Not one smile—remnant of older technology and cultural formality—though there are hints. I spot my grandfather immediately, his strong features unmistakable. Then I find Tía Eva off to the right. Her hair, now half silver, holds the same coiffed shape, cut short now instead of rolled under and pinned at the nape. The same long, angular eyebrows and spritish eyes.

Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo,

Santificado sea tu Nombre;

Venga a nosotros tu Reino;

Hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo.

I have always known my family to be Christian. My grandfather was an evangelical pastor, my mother and her siblings raised in the church. My tía reminisced on her own church childhood, how my great-grandfather required family attendance at services four times a week. So I was surprised when she asked if we believed en el mal de ojo.

I had heard of it before. My younger sister was born with blue-gray eyes that have become more green with each year that passes. Strangers were always asking to touch her eyes. Usually older women. “No te quiero hacer ojo.” After laying their palms across her face, between forehead and nose, they would sometimes turn to me and touch my hair. “Qué bonito pelo.” Run their knobby fingers over my curls. Probably more because they felt pity that my eyes were not colored than were actually envious.

“It happened to me,” my aunt tells me.

A man traveling the road that led past their ranch was fixated on her eyes.

“I thought he was another hombre grosero that just wanted an excuse para tocarme. Men were always trying to touch me back then.”

He left without laying a hand on her, but not long after, her eyes started burning.

“They stung like from chile. They turned all red.”

When he passed by later that evening, she asked him to lay his hand over her eyes and just like that, the burning sensation was gone.

“I don’t have it, but my mother did. Your Tía Mague tenia el ojo también,” she says, turning to my mother. “Very strong. My daughter Marcy, when she was a baby, she loved kicking her little legs. Mague commented on how cute they were. When she left, the baby started crying and crying. Nothing would make her stop. We called Mague and asked her to come back. She picked Marcy up, sobó las piernitas, and then she was calm.”

Here the conversation turned to another spiritual phenomenon I was not familiar with. Susto. Tío Pete was in the Marines. During his time overseas, he found himself out in the ocean, caught in a riptide. He and a buddy were swimming and kicking, trying to escape the current, but the ocean would not release them, relentlessly tugging their fire-bound legs, their boot-clad feet. The waves stinging their eyes, salting their mouths; their waterlogged uniforms drawing their heads closer to the waterline.

“At one point, I told my friend to just go on without me. I was so tired. My limbs were stiff. I was barely moving.”

One of their fellow marines spotted them from the shore and came out to lend a hand, pulling them from salt water to dry sand.

“You have to swim sideways,” he tells me. “Remember that. If you get caught in a riptide, you swim sideways.”

One time, when some missionaries from Mexico came to stay at the church, Tía Eva was asked to drive them across town. They were worried about operating a vehicle without a valid license. She agreed to take them on their mandados.

On the way back to the church, they almost crashed. An oncoming car entered their lane and my tía had to swerve off the road to avoid a collision. Even after realizing they were safe, she couldn’t move.

“I felt a weight on me. My hands and arms were tight. I wouldn’t let go of the wheel. I wouldn’t get out of the car. I just sat there.”

“Drive,” the man told her. “Drive or you’ll never drive again.” He convinced her to keep going the few blocks to the church.

“Do you remember Sister Inez? She could cure you of the susto. She would pass the egg over your body and then crack it open. She would see the shape of the susto inside. It would appear in the yolk. Then it would leave your body.”

Tía Eva swears there was the form of a car in her yolk. Tío Pete says he saw a man in the waves.

“I didn’t even know I was afflicted, but apparently it had stayed with me.” The limpieza brought to surface the subconscious trauma processed as personal parable.

“Would she pray?” my mother asks.

“She always said Our Father beforehand.”

“My dad used to say it was fine as long as they prayed. As long as they acknowledged where the power was really coming from.”

I never knew any of this side of my family’s beliefs. Our branch washed their hands of it. My grandmother didn’t like curanderismo. She was raised to believe it was evil, wrong. Brujería. Anytime Sister Inez tried to touch my mother to cease the transfer of negative energy, she would take my mother to scrub with soap in the bathroom. That I do remember. Washing our hands and faces anytime a stranger touched us with intent of releasing our bodies from the power of ojo.

I try to reconcile these stories with what I used to know. I find it not so dissimilar. Curanderismo. Faith healing. Belief in God. Belief in ancestors. The magic of hands that see and a spirit that listens. This interweaving of the biblical and the mystical brings the warning back to mind. Swim sideways. Not head-on against clashing current. It is a tapestry inheritance. Tucking traditions, rituals, beliefs in secret folds of the cloth instead of shirking it outright.

On my next evening walk I find an egg in my path. Knocked from a nearby nest. The work of hurricane season winds or street cat. Cracked on the caliche before my feet. Shrapnel shell splayed open in revelation. I search a shape in the splatter. I see a bird, a dove—white the body, yolk the stain-glass sunlight. Wings spread for flight.

-Melissa Nunez

Melissa Nunez is a Latin@ writer and homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley. Her work has appeared in Acropolis Journal, Sledgehammer Lit, Yellow Arrow Journal, and others. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. She is inspired by observation of the natural world, the dynamics of relationships, and the question of belonging.