Embodied Memories

A speculative gothic tale about about the temporal rupture of a maternal line

Author’s Note: This essay was written for the final project of my Time Travel Narratives class asking us to consider time travel in relation to bad loops. I chose to write a short story connecting the ideas I’ve been most compelled by throughout the quarter: trauma and ghosts as mechanisms of time travel.

Read while listening for maximum immersion🎧

The women in my family are inextricably tied to one another. Our pasts, our lives, our futures, they are all linked through an endless string of knots, becoming embodied memories.

I was 10 years old when I had my first one. Thinking of it now, all I wanted was for it to be erased from my memory. Someone who was a brother to me in everything but blood had violated my trust, showing me things I was too young to know, too young to see...

Staring up at the fluorescent light, his skin flushed with a bright pink.

“That wasn’t me, it was a demon…it was a demon,” he cried pathetically.

In my confusion and shame, the bathroom walls surrounding me flashed wildly as though a light were flickering on and off. Pale tiles dissolved into red earth and my house became another in a coruscating frenzy. My heartbeat synchronized with the speed of its constant changing, and as I looked down at my trembling hands, they were no longer just my own.

“No fui yo, fue un demonio…fue un demonio.”

A stranger I knew intimately groveled before me, before us. He repeated the words like a chant and made the sign of the cross. Somehow, I understood the meaning.

The man and my brother phased into one another, becoming a shadowed blur. Our body radiated with grief, curling into a premature rage.

“Que siempre recuerdes, hija mía…” a voice rang in my head, overwhelming me with its echoing whisper. Then, just as suddenly as it came, my reality—or what was left of it—returned.

I got up from the bathroom floor and ran out of the room.

Sleep did not come that night. Time had ceased to flow as it was supposed to, crashing into me like the mighty tides of a raging sea. As I lay on the deep, red velvet couch, I sank further and further into its depth as the overwhelming unreality hit me all at once.

I never spoke of it to anyone. I kept it to myself, hoping that would dilute the pain. It didn’t.

Instead, I found myself trapped in a never ending cycle. I was put in harm’s way again, and again, and again. Eventually, I began gravitating towards it myself. And each time, the ancestral memories haunted me, the rupture of our many pasts becoming indistinguishable.

It wasn’t until I was well into my adulthood that I learned what they really were. One day, I saw a glint of recognition in my mother’s eyes. She always felt so far away from me, like she was constantly drifting, but this whole time a small part of her was only too aware of the truth. She was ensnared by the same web, but she never said a word.

The only reason I know as much as I do now is because she wrote about it. I was trying to print something using her computer and the document was already open. Even at a quick glance, I knew what it was about. Without thinking, I took my USB drive and downloaded everything. Maybe it was a violation of privacy, but a deep gut instinct told me I was meant to see it.

When I was by myself, I read everything. She wrote about her life, the embodied memories, the events that triggered them, and all that she had discovered in her research. My experiences echoed her own. She has lived with these temporal rifts, and so has my grandmother. Was this what she was so engrossed in throughout my childhood? When she would respond with her fake smile and fake interest in whatever it was I was trying to show her, was this what she had been doing? I wanted her attention so badly, for her to really look at me, to tell me that she was proud, that she loved me, that she was there. But she couldn’t. Not when all of this was weighing on her. Scrolling through the pages of her writing and research, I finally understood why. It still hurt to think of my younger self being ignored, but I understood nonetheless.

She had done quite a lot of research on her own, though it was limited. I learned quickly that our family has deep roots in New Mexico. We used to be native Spanish speakers and devout Catholics, but we assimilated, becoming Christian Americans instead. Was this why I knew what the man was saying? Had we lost our language as another form of silence?

My curiosity burned, and from there I traced the maternal line as far back as I could. María Rosalía Dolores Montoya. Born November 1st, 1860 in Ocaté, Mora, New Mexico.

There was not all that much information I could find on her. All I had were census records, a date of death, and a single photo one our relatives had archived online. Staring back at the woman in a shawl standing in front of her adobe house, I wondered if she was the source of our embodied memories. Determined to continue my mother’s work, I bought a ticket to Angel Fire airport and from there got a ride to Ocaté, Mora. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find, if anything at all, but I hoped that maybe it would lead me towards that first knot in time.

Leaving the car and stepping onto the reddish soil felt like returning home, though it was nearly a ghost town now. The blue skies, the forested mountains, and the wind blowing through the valley were reminders of our obscured history on this land.

Wandering near the life-giving creek, I found some locals and stopped them to ask about the photograph of my 4th great grandmother. Upon seeing it, their eyes widened and they immediately turned away, only returning apprehensive half-answers and reluctant gazes. Every person I asked refused to give me a full reply, but then an old woman crossed my path. When I showed her the photo, she shook her head gravely.

“We don’t go near there,” she said simply.

“Why not?”

“Because, mija. A witch haunts that place.”

“What? A witch?” I couldn’t help but sound bewildered.

“Yes. It is as they say. Yo no creo en brujas, pero las hay, las hay…” The old woman narrowed her eyes, taking another good, long look at my face and then back at the photograph. “You’re from here, aren’t you? Not you yourself, but your family.”

I blinked in surprise. “They are, yes, but how did you know?”

“You look very much like her,” she said, pointing her frail little finger at my ancestor. She met my gaze, “Tell me, what is it that you hope to find there in that old house?”

I took a moment to consider my reply as another breeze brushed past us.

“María Rosalía Montoya…is she the witch that lived there?”

Silence—it seemed as though that curse had its roots here.

“Will you show me the way to her house? Please?”

The old woman nodded slowly, carefully, turning away to walk northward, not waiting to see if I was following her. We were traveling for a short while before we came upon a small, dilapidated adobe house. The air shifted as we stood in place. Although we were in an open field teeming with natural life, the wind didn’t seem to reach us there.

Clearly unsettled, my guide bowed her head and went away.

Left alone, I slowly approached the worn out home and laid my hand against its surface. A sense of familiarity rolled throughout my body. The door was opened, revealing an unnatural darkness within. It was no wonder that it was said to be haunted.

Stepping foot inside felt like crossing a threshold, one that was not bound by the laws of the outside world. Through my infinite haze, a light flashing like a ball of fire appeared before me, manifesting outward into the figure of a woman transparent as glass. She dimly lit the pitch black atmosphere, revealing a large spiral carved into the dirt floor below her. Dried blood marked its shape as she stood over her skeletal remains at its center.

“Que siempre recuerdes, hija mía…” Her voice resonated with a metallic sound. She sounded like my mother. She sounded like me.

Instinctively, I followed the spiral from the doorway, circling the floor while a weight as heavy as a bolder sunk down on me, making every movement seem to take ages. For a moment I hesitated, but when I reached out, her form draped over mine like a sheer curtain.

Outside the open doorway, the weather flashed violently between clear skies and roiling thunderstorms. In a rapid flurry, our spirits inhabited each other’s bodies, throwing me between the past and the present before finally settling into María’s time. I—she—or perhaps we were standing over Felipe who had groveled before us, his fresh blood still dripping from the knife in our hand. We did not tremble, despite the pain aching from where we had been hit. My ancestor had found the strength to fight back, to tear herself away from him. She had found it for the sake of her daughter who was crying in the wooden crib beside us.

“No era un demonio…eras tú,” we said under our breath in defiance.

Dropping the knife, we rushed by our baby’s side to console her, to hold her in our arms and dry her tears, but they did not stop—nor would they for generations to come.

Felipe’s wife, Juana, came bursting into our home soaked from the rain, letting out a piercing scream upon seeing her husband dead on the dirt floor. Falling to her knees, she clutched onto the rosary around her neck, and wailed in prayer to Saint Anthony. The other villagers followed behind her soon after.

Pointing an accusatory finger at us, she exclaimed that we were a witch who had created a love spell with our Indian magic to seduce and now murder her husband. It was true that María had given Felipe an herbal remedy when he was suffering from an illness, but as soon as he regained his vitality, he came to desire her company in other ways…We looked down at our exposed breasts protruding from a ripped linen blouse. Turning away, we cradled our daughter to protect her from the angry, fearful gazes of our neighbors. Juana did not see what had become of her adulterous husband, none of them did.

María’s bare chest spurred more accusations from the other villagers as they made claims that she could control men’s affection with the potions she had given other women. A rancher said that she had also turned into a coyote and killed his flock, proving her murderous intent. Among the sea of hysterical shouts, three men stepped forward.

We backed away from them until our back hit the wall, our grip tightening desperately around our daughter’s frail little body. Two of them held us down as the other wrenched the baby from us, handing her to Juana.

“¡No, hija mía!”” We fought against them, clawing and thrashing about wildly through shrieks of rage.

It was not enough. Using the same knife María had used in self defense, they stabbed us in the stomach four times and we fell to the ground.

The villagers took our daughter and left us to die as thunder roared outside our home. Crawling onto the dirt, we began to carve a large spiral that sprawled outward. Warmth seeped into our rust colored linen, blooming into a pool of blood that spilt onto the lines, forming red creeks in the reddish soil. Making our way back to the origin point, the lives of many women from past times rushed through our minds. The first Spaniards who had claimed the land as theirs, the burning of our idols, the many abuses wrought time, and time, and time again. María was not the source, but she had become the bridge between it all. Giving voice to all that had gone unspoken over hundreds of years. She reached out backwards, forwards, in spiraling circling motions, extending into my own time. Death had been the final tear, the last pulling of the curtain, rupturing the temporal continuum for good. Before María went to her Godmother Sebastiana—The Bony Lady—she thought only of her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, wishing that they might know the truth so that this knowledge would not die with her.

And her spirit never left. It lingered long after her body rotted away, so that she may continue to send her memories into the future as a reminder of their inheritance. As the years passed, the villagers grew to be afraid of the murderous witch who haunted the small adobe home. Parents warned their children not to go near, but when they disobeyed on a whim, they momentarily slipped into her time before running away in fear.

So, María waited. She waited until her progeny would return, willing to see all that the spiral had to reveal. After descending through the oceans of time, I was at last returned to my present reality, back into my own body. To ensure I was once again in control of my own flesh, I waved my hands in front of my face. Lifting my head, I stared back at María’s translucent form as my throat painfully ached, begging for release.

My ancestor no longer had eyes to cry with, so in carrying the burden of generations, I broke down into tears.

There was nothing I could do to change her past, just as I could do nothing to change my own. It all simmered within me, inside every woman from our lineage, but at least now it could be properly witnessed and felt. It was then that I promised her, every woman before her, and every woman after, that I would carry them with me.

I would break this loop for my own daughter, never again allowing our voices to be silenced, loosening one knot at a time.

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If you enjoyed this story, check out some of my other ones:

His Creator’s Lie

The Mirror’s Image