"[…] women tired of life, women who, from one day to the next, would realize they no longer had it in them to reinvent themselves with every man they met, women who chuckled chipped-tooth chuckles to themselves when they recalled the dreams they’d once had; incidentally, the only women who, spurred on by the whispers and tales the older women would tell down by the river where they washed their clothes, or while they waited in line for their subsidized milk, dared to visit the Witch at home, in that hovel hidden among the crops; who dared to rap on the door until the mad shrew, dressed head to toe in black, poked her head out from a half-open door. And once there they would beg for her help to cook up one of her concoctions, the stuff that the women in town harped on about: potions to pin down the men, to really knock them off their feet, and indeed potions to ward the bastards off for good; potions that wiped their own memories, or that directed every drop of their destructive potential into the seed that those bastards had left in the women’s bellies before scuttling back to their trucks; or those other tinctures, stronger still, which they say could purge hearts of the fatuous allure of suicide. Basically, those girls from the highway, not the meddlesome old bags in town, were the only ones the Witch chose to help for free, without charging a peso, which was just as well because most of them could barely earn enough to eat once a day, and plenty of them didn’t own so much as the towels they used to wipe away the bodily fluids of the men who screwed them, although maybe, in the end, she helped those girls from the highway because they weren’t ashamed to be seen going to her house […]"
