Has tenido un aborto. You’ve had an abortion.
This observation is from Fernando, my acupuncturist in Málaga, Spain where I live now, where I’ve turned over a new life. Not that my old life was depraved or corrupt. No, it was perfectly ordinary, including the abortion part.
Fernando delivers his observation after looking at my tongue and feeling my pulse. While not fluent, I have a high degree of proficiency in Spanish and there is no mistaking Fernando’s words. They dumbfound me, robbing me of the wherewithal to ask him, ¿Cómo lo sabes? I mean, really, how does he know?
Neither does it occur to me to correct him and say I’ve actually had two abortions. Not that it matters. Not that I care if he or anyone knows. I’m a seventy-year-old woman who in her thirties exercised her bodily autonomy in choosing twice not to be pregnant. And since it’s nobody’s business why I made that choice, I’m leaving that part out. Because that’s what bodily autonomy is—my body, my choice. Period. Or in Spanish, punto, which sounds more pointed.
Fernando’s observation is just part of the inventory he takes of the state of my body which he gleans from reading my tongue, my pulse, my ear: I consume too many carbohydrates, I like sweets. There is disequilibrium in my pancreas and kidney, which contributes to my insomnia.
What kind of magic does this man have? Because, really, how does he know this stuff?
After Fernando sticks needles in various parts of my body—my stomach, ankles, wrists, feet, head, ears—and leaves me to lie on the table for the acupuncture to do its thing, I allow myself to relax, encouraged by the calming, traditional Chinese music diffusing through the long room of patient cubicles. I try to focus on my breath but my mind wanders to food, to books, to a secret desire and then I am seized with a thought. What if Fernando can read my mind the way he can read my body? I try to erase everything from that interior screen, to hide it from his magic.
When I tell my Spanish teacher about my first acupuncture experience and use the word mago (magician) to describe Fernando, he offers up the word brujo, witch. I like the sound of it, the suggestion of the supernatural, the unearthly. The dark arts, which these days, have standing. Witches are hip.
But if this were sixteenth-century Spain, Fernando would be burned at the stake. Though it was mostly women who were so condemned. Because aren’t women intrinsically sinners? Aren’t women to blame for, well, everything? At least, that’s the story that’s been told over and over. To keep us from exercising our own power. But sometimes that story is stolen, exploited for depraved and corrupt purposes.
It’s a witch hunt, cries the man with orange hair. He means to imply he is being falsely accused of trespassing on the bodies of many women, bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, attempting to overturn an election. He is all about overturning the meaning of words.
It’s enough to drive someone out of the country, across the ocean, to another country. Spain is where I live now, where an acupuncturist can perceive from a deep understanding of the body that I had an abortion forty years ago—at a time when my fundamental right to have one was recognized.
When Fernando observed that I’d had an abortion, it was just that— an observation. About something that is part of my body, my life, my story. Not unimportant. But not out of the ordinary.
Donna Miscolta’s fourth book of fiction is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in fall 2026. Her third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and named to the 2020 Latino Books of the Year list by the Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club. It won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and an International Latino Book Award Gold Medal for Best Collection of Short Stories. It was a finalist for the American Fiction Award and the Nancy Pearl Award. Her previous book Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories won the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, an Independent Publishers award for Best Regional Fiction, and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. Her short fiction and essays appear in many journals and anthologies, most recently in What’s Next: Short Fiction in Times of Change. A recording of her work is included in the Library of Congress PALABRA Archive. She blogs at donnamiscolta.com.