The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza by Rebecca Taylor

with her babysitter when she was nine, Her mother sells crack out of the back of their car downtown, He sucked a junkie off in order to get coke last week, She gave both of them blow jobs after the football game on Friday.” They kept coming. My body, like an instrument I could not control, arched painfully back and fell to the ground, their words pushing, never stopping, erupted over and over and over my lips.  
    With my back pressed to the dirt, I turned my head and gazed past all the feet circled around me, and I watched as hundreds more moved closer to join in.  
    The pain was unbearable. The lack of control, terrifying. I was a speaker. Almost inanimate. A collection of live wires with a correctly calibrated voice box to transmit the souls’ constant chants. Barely able to still breathe, I wondered if Ray were watching me fail.  
    I would die this way. No. I remembered Ray’s warnings. Stuck in this offense, my Day of the Dead protection would run out and then I would spend an unknown amount of time this way, painfully arched, spewing offensive gossip—and then the faints would come and suck me dry.
    Enduring another minute was too much, the thought of an entire day brought waves of misery and tears that streamed down my face. I closed my eyes tight to the sight of them all, that much at least I could do. Their horrifying lies pumped continuously through me but at least I didn’t have to watch their squirming mouths filled with wormy decay.  
    Lies.
    I had endured them for years, lies spread about my mother, lies spread about myself. Lies that cut so close to the painful truth, they were difficult to deny. Lies that started small, then grew and changed, lies rolled inside convenient facts until the various end results were so awful that by seventh grade I had begged my mother to take me out of school. By then, at least half the students called me “The Devil” behind my back before the principal put an end to it. All because a woman at our old church told several of her friends that the reason we stopped coming was because my mother had requested an exorcism.
    “For her own daughter,” they whispered.
    So many times I had wished to die because of that lie and all the others that sprouted up from it—now it seemed like I actually would.  
    The souls were telling lies, gossip. Ray’s words came back to me, “unbalanced energies have to figure out how one or more of the offenses shifted their energy in the physical world, it won’t be any different for you.” How had Daniel gotten out? I tried to remember him, at a distance, speaking with one of the souls. He shook his head and his lips formed a word I could read even if I couldn’t hear it.
    No.
    Daniel had said, “No,” to that soul, and that soul had turned away from him. I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to form my own word on my lips, but with their words, a river of bile rushing out of me, it was like trying to swim against a powerful current. My lips could not get around the sounds I needed to make.
    Desperate, I needed to get out. I forced my mind to focus and thought the word to the front of my mind— No .  
    Again.  
    No.  
    Again.
      No .  
    There was a feeling, the slightest muscle twitched in my upper lip—I did that. No, No, No .
    “No,” I shoved out among their cacophony of sound. A startled ripple coursed through some of them. “No,” I said again, feeling the use of my own mouth, I shouted louder, “No!”  
    A few of them stopped and began to drift away.
    “Lies,” I cried. “You’re telling lies,” my voice was growing stronger.
    All at once, their words stopped.
    “You’re spreading lies and gossip, and I don’t believe you.”
    And then, as if they were all only one thing, they turned from me, as if I had never been there at all, and drifted away.  
    Behind me, something shifted, pulled at my body. When I turned I could see that the space had opened up a hole in the offense, and on the other side, Ray stood