There was no music, so you could hear our jeans scuffing against themselves. As soon as she moved in my hands, I could tell that she was a magnificent dancer, and I didn’t want to run away anymore. I lit a match and crossed myself with it, and then held it just above eye level. I mumbled the first half of padre nuestro and touch the flame to the Virgen’s wick. Then I turned around the candle and read the prayer on the back. The Spanish was mostly easy here—a lot of implore de socorro and other phrases I could piece togeher.
I nodded at her, hoping that I wasn’t supposed to say the ghost’s name there instead. I felt blood pump through my chest, and it felt like someone was almost touching the little hairs on the back of my neck. Speaking a language is cool, but speaking it with genuine expressions used by locals is, like, ten times better. Nobody wants to sound like a boring grandfather or a monotonous audiobook, and that’s why we thought we’d help you out with 10 of the most useful Spanish slang expressions you can know.
But I was Mexican enough to check a box on a quota sheet, and that’s how I ended up on a French horn scholarship to a school nobody’s heard of in Conway, Arkansas. When I opened the door she leaned around to make sure we were alone. Then she whispered at me “¿Eres realmente un brujo? ” Her name was Claire, and I knew her from Spanish class. I nodded at her all serious and led her to sit down.
I decided on things I recognized—a few sticks of incense and an assortment of prayer candles. I started with La Santisima Muerte—The Most Holy Death—the grim reaper in broken white lines over a red candle, a border of skulls and hour glasses at both ends. Then, because that one scared me, I grabbed La Virgen de Guadalupe, figuring she could balance things out.
And then last night she heard something like a door opening where no door was. And even then I was thinking, this could go somewhere. The origin of this expression is not clear.
She wasn’t smiling, but I felt her approval in the way she moved against me. But she didn’t want to look me in the eye. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a theory. Her telling her girlfriends she wanted someone burgundy and rose gold tuxedo tall, dark, and handsome, and here I was two out of three ain’t bad. I could fill her quota sheet just fine, if that’s what she wanted. The prayer hung in the air like the smoke from the incense.