Chapter Text
Casita does not creak. Made of the strongest wood and bricks and stones that can handle the shift of Luisa’s stomping, Isabella’s flowers squeezing through the cracks in search of sunlight, and Pepa’s moods.
Yet, the home does breathe. It is a living thing on its own. Even as a child, Mirabel wondered about that noise and if Dolores heard it too. How when she closes her eyes, there is a periodical humming of an inhale and exhale as it was the lullaby she fell asleep to.
Asking her, Dolores said that it was the rats breathing all in unison. But she doesn’t believe her.
And as she closes her eyes, the glasses neatly folded on her nightstand table, she swears that the walls shift– not creak – with an exhale.
The garden was shrouded in shadows. The sky was pitch dark, angry clouds thundering and spinning as a hurricane threatened to blow in. Mirabel looks around, back into the house and trying to peek into the windows in hopes to see Pepa having a moment. But she didn’t. There was no one in sight.
One of the shutters swings limply in the growing gust of wind that attacked Maribel, dragging its freezing claws through her hair and scraping her skin as goosebumps erupt. She spins around, shielding her face with her arm and squinting through the glasses that seemed ready to knock off her nose.
The wind whooshes through her hair and her ear. Panting, she looks around to see if she could spot anything through the gust and the growing fog heading this way. It had swallowed the garden and the patio table and chairs. It’s bright paint being eaten away into nothing but a dull wooden table.
Mirabel escapes into Casita , locking the door. Glancing down, the fog started to creep through the gaps– through the cracks.
“Má!” she yells into the house, her huaraches slapping against the tile floor. It echoed. No one inside to absorb the sound. Alone. “ Pá!” Mirabel yells away, heart racing under her ribcage. Throwing a glance over her shoulder was a daring feat, the house shifting and moving so she wouldn't hit a support beam or a wall.
The fog was following her.
But Casita wasn’t as quick as her when Mirabel slips on a rug, landing on her face and feeling her glasses ready to shatter from the impact; picking her head up, she tastes copper. Twisting on her back, she sees the fog reaching with its claws and fangs to her ankle. A numbing cold ran through her racing veins.
Kicking it off, she ran. Numbing cold biting at her muscles as the house seems to never end. The front door was right out of her reach. Like her own door.
It's a shimmering doorknob taunting her own freedom. And finally, when she reaches for the door, twists the knob, it feels like the satisfying pop of fireworks. Pulling it open revealed the fog had already surrounded Casita .
Her heart drops, taking a half hazardly step back and away from the fog that had invited itself inside. Through the fog an eerie green emerges. A pair of eyes, staring and judging– knowing where this will go. Feasting on her bewilderment.
Another step back,she hits a beam and cracking follows as they creep up to the ceiling until finally rumble begins to rain. A scream was knocked out of her one last time.
Mirabel gasps awake, rolling off the bed and is ready to hit the floor until Casita bends the wood upwards to push her back on her mattress. Panting and her heart in her throat, she looks around and is reminded of her new isolation with Antonio now gone.
She sits up and swears she can feel Casita let in a raspy breath. The Miracle. She needs to save the Miracle.
***
“ Tia Pepa…” she hesitated to ask, biting down on her own teeth and still tasting the sand that Bruno’s tower had left behind. “If…” She catches herself as an angry cloud starts to hover over her head. “If… he had a vision about someone, what would it mean for them?” She eyes her, weary of what she might answer.
It started to drizzle. “We don’t talk about… Bruno,” she firmly spoke through furrowed ginger brows, knuckles turning white as she squeezes a sock.
“I know,” she defends. “It’s just hypothetically,” Mirabel feigns familiar curiosity, “if he saw you…”
Pepa waves her cloud away, standing up. “We have to get ready for the Guzmans,” she exclaims.
Pressing, she dares to take a step forward and the wood under her foot creaks. She glances down for a second. “I just wanna know if generally it was positive or less positive…”
All of the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand on edge, jumping when Felix swings the door open. “It was a nightmare!” he exclaimed with all his chest.
“Felix!” She scolds her husband.
He steps inside, closing the door behind him. As if that does anything to hide them from the person who can hear a pin drop. “She needs to know, Pepi,” he argues. “She needs to know.”
“We don’t talk about Bruno,” she stampers, trying to hush him.
But he pushed her hand aside. “He would see something terrible. And then…” he ticks like a bomb. “ Boom ! It will happen.” Felix whispers, inching closer to Mirabel.
Pepa pulls her husband off, scolding him once more by repeating a sentence that made Morabel itch all over. Maybe it was the sand or the rats. “We don’t talk about Bruno.”
Mirabel presses. “What if you don’t understand what he saw?” she asks, eyeing the tension that seemed to be growing and spreading in the room to the whole house. She can imagine it spreading like the warmth of a fire and outwards into town.
“Then you better figure it out,” he warns. “Because it was coming for you.” He spoke, waving a finger menacingly.
Pepa finally separated their taboo conversation. “We don’t talk about Bruno,” she vocalized. And before Mirabel could finally ask what was the reason for that; why someone so important to the Madrigals was pushed away and unspoken of; before she could ask why? Pepa explains: “He ruined my wedding.”
“Our wedding,” adds Felix.
Mirabel furrows her eyebrows, staring at her aunt who was fuming and how the whole room had started to grow warm and humid. The brewing of a storm.
An angry gust of wing flutters all around the nursery, flickering her hair and skirts as Felix consoles her wife, who was close to angry boiling hysterics with the druzzle starting to fall. The wooden floor absorbs the droplets, not giving it a chance to start a puddle around their feet. “We were getting ready and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky,” Pepa announces, face twitching with the pride of being able to control that. “It was supposed to be the perfect day! But then Bruno walks in–” her face sours, the drizzle and wind turning chilly as hail clatters doward. “With a mischievous grin…
“He would always have that look on his face. Like he knew better than you just because of his stupid Gift.”
“ THUNDER” added Felix.
The woman’s face went as red as her hair. “Are you telling or am I?” she crosses her arms, ready to leave and take the brewing storm with her.
But her husband reaches to grab her arm, petting the meat of her upper arm with his fingers and leaning his head against his shoulders. They were always the most affectionate out of all of the Madrigal’s. “I’m sorry, mi vida . Go on,” he reassures her.
Forgiving him, she continues, her grasp still around her husband’s arm and hand. Pale fingers tucked in his dark first. “Bruno says: ‘It looks like rain’, ” she spoke in a high pitched voice, mocking her absent brother.
“Why did he tell her?” he whispers to Mirabel, still watching the couple and as he puts her open palm against his face and lips to leave small kisses.
She snaps her fingers. “And like that, that’s all I could think of.” Pepa dabs her eyes with the corner of the handkerchief Felix had pressed into her hands. “I got married in a hurricane!”
Mirabel could feel the wind around her grow in spead and strength, stumbling and pushing her to hit the dresser and holding on. Both her uncle and aunt sat in the eye of the hurricane she had created, their hairs only flickering in the wild winds.
“It was still a joyous day,” Felix sighs, a wide smile on his face, undisturbed by everything around him.
“Because of him,” Pepa cries, “everything was ruined. That’s why we don’t talk about Bruno. He ruins everything with his visions and those… eyes.”
Mirabel stares at her, seeing how distraught she was as she leans against her husband, who was rubbing her back to comfort her. Eyeing the door, she sneaks out the door and locking the door behind her, still feeling the gust of wind creep under the gap and tickle her ankle.
A numbing pain reminded her of the nightmare.
Mirabel jumps three feet in the air when a hand wraps around her wrist, pulling her away. “Hey,” Dolores whispers. “I heard you were talking about… you know.” For someone who can hear a butterfly land on a puddle, she always mumbles her words through her teeth.
Mirabel takes her cousin’s hand as they hop down the steps, the stairs whining under their weight. “Do you remember Uncle Bruno?” she whispers back, breathless and the cool air from Pepa’s outburst still sticking to her lungs.
“I was eleven when he left,” she says, stopping halfway down the stairs. “We lived in fear of him stuttering and stumbling, always walking way behind us or ahead of us. Even alone in the halls. But he would always look at me with those eyes.” Dolores looks down. “I can always hear him sort of mumbling and muttering to himself.”
She follows her further down, jumping the last step as if she was still a child. Casita catches her fall, sliding down to follow her cousin. “Do you still hear him?” Mirabel asked. “Is he still in Encanto. The mountains are too high and the jungla is too dense for him to just, like, walk away.”
“When I try to listen to him all I hear are… rats scurrying away. And falling sand.” Dolores squeaks, her shoulders bouncing with her vocal period.
Mirabel touches her hair, feeling the sand roll down her back and some catch under her nails. She needs a bath.
“Some Gifts humble us, Mirabel,” her cousin said. “He always left Abuela and us fumbling. Trying to understand him. No one could understand him. How can you understand someone who is way ahead of you? Do you understand?” she whispers into her ear.
And her heart drops when the feeling of being watched– of being judged, washes over her.
Mirabel screams when someone snatches her away into the darkness of a hall that had opened up. Casita would often make new places, new rooms or libraries or dining rooms full of mirrors so simply fill up the place.
Brick lines the walls, her head spinning when she catches Camilo grinning ear to ear as his curls frame his face. “Why are you walking about Bruno?” a playful look shimmers in his wide eyes.
“I just… family tree curiosity?” she jokes, a crooked smile she adds so he could believe her.
Watching Camilo shapeshift is a bizarre sight. It’s fast, yes. But sometimes the brain catches sight of how his body pulls and shifts like gum. She wonders if he can still feel the phantom of his transformations long after he’s done.
Camilo’s body shifts, turning into a looming man as he makes himself bigger with his arms wide and his fingers twitching to reach for her. His unruly curls mimicked her own in the morning where her hairbrush bristles can’t get through the knots. But it was his eyes. HIs eyes made her shiver.
She’s seen those eyes before.
“He was seven feet tall, you know?” Camilo shrinks back to himself. “And he always had rats with him.”
“Rats?” she asks, her heart calming down from the scare he gave her.
“I don’t know why he loved rats so much,” he slouches. “Or maybe, the rats loved him?” He then cackles like a madman, transforming back into that man but quickly going back and away from his own dramatics. His body was basically jello at his own will.
It always amazed her, watching him do whatever he wanted with his body. How someone her own age had mastered his Gift. A fantastical Gift.
“He always scared me,” he confessed.
“You? Scared?” Mirabel asks, raising an eyebrow, her giggles spilling through her lips.
“ Mami always told me he would creep around,” Camilo flicks the curls out of his eyes before transforming into Senor Ernesto, who was a tall and bulky man with too much facial hair that it brushed against the front of his guayabera . He flexed his arms before puffing out his chest to show off. “But don’t worry, I’m sure I’d scare him off.”
Mirabel chuckles but her cousin continues by transforming back into ‘Bruno’, hunched over and skin a sickly gray while his eyes glow a menacing green. “He’ll call for you,” Camilo-Bruno rasps out with a menacing grin of playing make-believe. Even before his own Gift manifested, Camilo was too good at make-believe. That should have been a tell-tale sign. “It will all fade to black.”
She knows that it's not the real mysterious family member that she has no memory of. She knows that. But the sight of it still brought her discomfort. A stranger that shares the same bloodline, same last name, and once shared the same home.
Where are you now, Bruno? She thinks.
“I heard that he would see inside of you,” he reaches for her with those mock-fingers that Maribel knows can turn into someone else. “Sneak into your dreams. And when you wake up, he will feast on your screams. Eat them up like Tia Julieta’s cooking.”
She yelps when he suddenly picks her up her feet, leaning in close to her face. So close all she could see was the green glow. “We don’t talk about him,” he whispers.
He puts her down, transforming back into the face that she grew up with. “He would read people’s future,” he walks with her. “And none of them were good visions. He ended up killing a lady’s fish.”
She squints. “Maybe she wasn’t feeding it?” she suggested with a slight nervous laugh.
Camilo laughs, throwing his head up and laughing with his whole chest. “Maybe not. But he was the one being fed. He eats people’s hope.” He wavers his voice. “He even read all of our own futures. Not mine. Mami wouldn’t let him because I was too young. But she let Dolores hear hers.” They walk away from the dark corner as Casita seals it off to make it look like the room was never there in the first place. “Right, Dolores?”
Standing nearby was her cousin once more, her eyes wide but pupils dancing around to different directions as she started to listen to someplace else in the town. “ Your fate was sealed when your prophecy was read, ” she quotes.
“Who said that?” Mirabel asks.
“Him.”
Mirabel looks at her cousin, up as she pouts in concentration whilst listening to someone else. She wouldn’t really call it having her head in the clouds. More like having her head in someone else’s conversation. “Did he ever tell you something?”
Dolores eyes flick over to look down at her before staring at a tile. The tile twitches at the attention it was receiving. “He told me that the man of my dreams would be right out of reach. Betrothed to another.” There was disappointment in her tone.
“I think Bruno was trying to tell her that she was going to end up single forever,” Camilo bothers his sister. He ducks a swat that Dolores was gonna give his head.
“I can hear him now…” she whispers, eyes dancing to the oil painting.
Camilo stops by the front door, peaking to see Abuela and the Guzmans. Mirabel caught a sight of Mariano as she stormed upstairs, feeling the shards of vision glass pulsing in her
mochila
.
“Isabela! Your boyfriend is here!” Camilo calls out.
Catching a glimpse of Luisa’s door pulsing weakly and looking down from the balcony. She couldn’t even carry a potted plant, which was once like the weight of a pillow. Her eyes drop to look at her own feet carrying her away anxiously.
Mirabel locks herself in her nursery, Pepa and Felix no longer in sight and probably in the kitchen preparing. Her heart pounds, pouring the shards on the now empty wardrobe to rearrange the vision.
Perhaps she saw things wrong. Maybe she wasn’t in the vision. All she could hear was her own beating heart in her ears, her mouth running dry with the sweat making the glass stick to her fingertips.
Sliding the last shard into place, Mirabel takes a half-step back away from it. Clear as day. Her in the vision, standing in front of Casita , turning her back to the destruction that she may have caused.
Covering her mouth with her hand, eyes wide behind her frames.
Finally able to hear something besides her own heart loudly slamming against her ribcage, she’s able to watch the sound of happy talking and greetings of visitors to the home. To the home that is slowly falling apart.
Because of her.
“Why did I talk about Bruno?” she whispers, blinking and feeling the sand clumps on her eyelashes. They sting her eyes as they begin to water.