Monstress by Lysley Tenorio

heard it before. “It begins here”—she tapped her heart, then three spots on her stomach—“then here and here, sometimes here. Bastard American doctors tell me nothing is wrong, like I’m so old, so crazy-in-the-head.”
    â€œThen it’s good you came to see us, ma’am,” I said. I helped her onto the massage table, laid her flat on her back. Then I lit a pair of candles, hung plastic rosary beads over the covered mirrors. A wreath of dried sampaguita flowers made the cigarette air of our dingy hotel room smell like Philippine countryside.
    I unbuttoned her blouse halfway up, rubbed coconut oil on her stomach, forehead, and chin. Then Papa Felix, my grandfather, stepped forward. He rolled up his sleeves, pulled his thinning hair into a ponytail. He put his palms on Mrs. Delgado’s belly and began to massage it, gently at first with his fingertips, then hard and deep with his fists. I closed my eyes, chanting Hail Marys over and over, faster and faster, and when I looked again Papa Felix’s hands were half gone, knuckle-deep in Mrs. Delgado’s body. Blood seeped out from between Papa Felix’s fingers, and one by one he extracted coin-size fleshy blobs and dumped them into the trash can by his feet.
    â€œNegativities,” he said.
    Mrs. Delgado lifted her head to look. “Thanks be to God,” she said with a sigh I’d heard a thousand times before—that breath of relief that there is someone in the world, finally, who understands what hurts you.
    There was a time when I might have apologized, if only in my head. “Two hundred dollars,” I said. “Cash only.”
    I wiped the blood from her stomach, helped her to her feet. She reached for her purse, gave me the money. But then she did something no other patient had ever done before: she took out a camera. “When I told my sisters that Felix Starro was coming to San Francisco, they didn’t believe me.” She pressed a button, adjusting the zoom lens. “May I?”
    Papa Felix shook his head: the camera flash could disrupt his spiritual vibrations, he said, which could thwart the healing of patients to come. “But for you,” he said, “okay.” He undid his ponytail, smoothed back his hair, and smiled. I moved to the right, to stand outside the picture.

    I n my family, the only recipe passed down was the one for blood, but Papa Felix said I could never get it right. “Too thin,” he said. “Like ketchup and water mix-mix.” He dipped a finger into the plastic jug of blood and held it up to the fluorescent bathroom light. “What idiot would believe it’s his own?”
    Too much water, not enough corn syrup. Always my mistake. “At least it’s red,” I said, but he just grumbled about my carelessness and lazy attitude and insisted that something in America was making me different; he guessed it was the greasy food, the low-quality air of our hotel room, my terrible luck of turning nineteen in midair, en route from Manila to San Francisco. “I’m the same,” I said, but he took my shoulders and stood me in front of him, flicked my temples twice and rubbed them in slow circles, as though what I was feeling could be diagnosed. “You’re not right, Felix.”
    I was the third Felix Starro (my dead father was the second), and whenever Papa Felix said my name it meant he was serious; this time, I decided, he was just talking to himself. “You won’t find anything,” I said, and returned to the room. I took the rosaries and sheets off the mirrors, peeled away plastic crucifixes we’d taped to the walls, blew out the candles. I reached into hidden compartments underneath the massage table and carefully removed tiny plastic bags of blood, then dug through the trash to retrieve chicken livers good enough to use for the next day’s Extractions.
    Suddenly my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I