Something good and magic so she would feel like we’d gotten something done. I tried to change the subject, to ask her what she thought of Señor Scott, our Spanish teacher. Had I done this ceremony many times before? Eventually I ended up telling her that I needed to concentrate my psychic energies, that talking about it could knock the chakras out of line. She gave me an eyebrow, but she didn’t say anything else.
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.
Who knows where they come from, “ and then, remembering what brought her here, “No problema.” She nodded again and almost smiled, and I thought this is going well. Then she kept looking at me, and I froze just a little. I was—don’t act all surprised—not actually a witch, which up till right now had never been a serious problem. I knew that there were such people, that a woman had been called in to whisper and rattle over my father’s knee when the doctors said he wouldn’t walk again.
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 [pii_email_ec57038ea8aa71036915] 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.
Don’t ever literally throw me your hand because that would be scary, unless you are Buster Bluth. Echar una mano means to help someone out. The origin of this expression is pretty self explanatory; when you lend someone a hand, it’s to help them in some way. Two down, one to go, I thought, and reached for the last candle.
Attaching an ‘o’ to a word does not make it Spanish. She was also beautiful, and I thought—we’ll be dancing soon. She drove us to a part of the county that probably no college students ever saw.
The hills that broke away from the river like fat waves evened out here into something wide and flat, a place built to be flooded. The land dropped again into a gulch and sprawling off to the right was a gray metal building big enough to build airplanes in. A line of trucks piled with poultry cages idled at one end, waiting for an army of men in blue raincoats to lift the living cargo onto a conveyor belt of hooks.
” I stood in the doorway and leaned my head back in. Every eye in every icon looked focused on me and I almost couldn’t find where the voice was coming from. She spoke to me in a lower raspier tone than before and in rapid Spanish. I know it started out with “Si quieres”—if you want—but I couldn’t follow from there until the very end—“con cuidado cabron”–watch out friend. I wondered who we were supposed to pay and then noticed that there was a woman watching us from the corner.
” I asked her, hitting the r like the Univision announcer, hoping to hell she wouldn’t answer in Spanish. “That means seven times for sex!” Lito, the vendor, confided in English with a leering grin. We all know that friend who talks on every occasion, no matter what. Well, if you are my friend, that person is me.