Healed or No Deal?

The Reike woman continued her healing process on Narcisa’s slumbering carcass, knowing that, in Narcisa’s case, sleep was just as crucial a form healing as any, since for the past two and a half years Narcisa had not once willingly fallen asleep. She was afraid of it, and it usually happened without her permission, as her body would often shut down between hits of crack or even mid-sentence.

This sleep was different and we all knew it.

It was peaceful and serene and nothing resembling the usual tormented nightmare reel that ran through Narcisa’s tortured brain every other time it’s been lights out. We all breathed silently, afraid to interrupt it.
A good twenty minutes went by, and she woke up as Ana Lucia finished her magic. Jonathan and I stared in awe, waiting for her to start speaking in tongues, or shape shift into an angel, or the devil… or anything.
Anything. A sign.

She lay still for a beat with her eyes lit up before looking over at Jonathan and suggesting in a half-whispered croak, “Sushi?”
“Uhh… Sure,” We both said, shuffling to our feet.

Ana Lucia chuckled as she handed Narcisa her clothes. As Jonathan thanked the healer profusely, Narcisa got dressed and it was big hugs and kisses all around as we left the building with an overwhelming sense of ease.

The sushi restaurant was closed so we settled on a kilo joint next door. Narcisa ran to the buffet while Jonathan and I claimed a table.

“So,” He whispered to me, looking back at Narcisa who was ritualistically plucking palm hearts from a big bowl of salad with her chopstick fingers. “What do you think?”
“I donno…” I replied. “It’s hard to tell.”
“More will be revealed, I guess,” Jonathan nodded as he stood up to go grab some food for himself.

Narcisa sat down next to me.
“Well?” I said.
“Well. I feel good,” she told me as she ravaged a plate of mashed potatoes and palm hearts. “I trust these lady, man. It’s hard to explain. She make me feel comfort-able…. Is only first time I can relax when some body putting the hands on me an’ I don’ feel like they gonna molesting to me.. Is good like these, an’ then I can relax, got it?”
I got it, alright. “I could tell you were relaxed.. you were snoring…” I laughed.
“Oh man, It was SO good. I don’ sleep like these in a long time.”

Jonathan returned from the buffet with his plate of food, smiling brightly. We were all having a pretty successful day and he was finally letting his guard down enough to show it, which is the reason why, I believe, it was precisely that moment that Narcisa was hit full-force with a wave of madness.

NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw e Alessandra DeBenedetti. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

It’s fucking 10am now.
I never got back to sleep after she came blasting through my door like Hurricane Infantile Ego for her 8am tantrum/feeding frenzy.
“Where WERE you for TWO fucking DAYS?!?!?” I asked.
“Catha Fezzze” she answered, stuffing her face with leftovers from my poor tiny raped fridge. She took a big sip of passion fruit juice. ”Casa Verde. Now shut the fuck up. No questions, Cigano. Menos…”

I went back up to my little loft bed.
And now its another blazing hot pre-summer morning outside my shuttered windows, just like it was almost 2 years ago when I first started documenting my day to day existence with Narcisa.
That casual little practice eventually pushed and shoved its way right into the forefront of my consciousness, emerging now as my first published novel, Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes.
Now she’s fast asleep again, farting and snoring on my sofa as I lay up here in the loft bed above looking down at her in endless fascination and befuddlement.
Looking down at this devastating, compelling, paranormal creature, wracking my brains out under the lash of this merciless crackhead muse…
And I’m thinking, what a great fucking gig it must be for an eternal muse.
Just sit around all day smoking crack until you drop, then sleep the sleep of the righteous, waking up briefly from time to time only to bark out savage curses and orders and demands for food and drink and cigarettes.
Nice work if ya can get it..
I’m working on showing her what multiple orgasms feel like too, as well as the desire to survive an unhappy, abusive childhood and, eventually the will to live…
Little perks like that come with the job too, at least in my Narcisa’s case..
Fucking eternal muse even merits a full time on-call sex therapist and life coach!
Nothing but the best for an eternal fucking muse. Awesome work if you can get it, and my only advise to most of the lazy, overfed American cunts is to get off their pampered TV-watching asses and lose about
40 lbs and take up whoring and we’ll talk…
And I think when I finally do depart this crappy little veil of tears, I’d really like to put my request in to the big mother upstairs to be reincarnated, whenever the old karma clock swings around, as a crack
smoking homicidal whore with a pathological bad attitude and a wee bit of mental and emotional retardation thrown in for good measure…
Why not?
It all seems to be working out pretty well for Narcisa.
Right now she is passed out like a dead sausage on my sofa.
Later, she’ll be firing up a rock…
And then after that… Well you get the picture, boys!
Another hard day’s work for my beloved eternal muse, Narcisa. Our Lady Of Ashes.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008.

NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

I woke up with the noonday sun scorching my face through the open window.
Shit. Instant panic! I looked over to the table.
My cell phone was sitting there and it was on. She hasn’t called me.
That’s a sign she must’ve run out of crack and just passed out.
It’s been many days now since she’s eaten anything she didn’t spit right up or rested her body with any sleep. A body can only take so much abuse.
But what about the other bitch? Narcisa had told me before I left her standing there that she wanted to give the other one some crack, “just to see her reaction.”
Another evil deed for her accumulating burden of rancid karma. But Narcisa claims not to believe in karma.
I knew a guy once who fried his brains out on bad trailer park acid and said he didn’t believe in gravity right before he took a swan dive off the roof of an 8 story building, shattering his spine like a popsicle stick on the cold pavement below… Whatever.
All The different possible scenarios flashed like an ugly slideshow through my frazzled mind as I dressed in a hurry.
I imagined them burning the Casa Verde to the ground with Narcisa’s stolen macumba candles. That was one brief vision.
But I hadn’t heard any fire sirens and that was good. Then I envisioned them floating back-side-up in the pool at my friend Dolo’s place, drowned in some toxic crack inflamed battle to the death.
That one flew by like a frantic sparrow as I briefly wondered who I could enlist to help me dispose of the bodies. Tonico wouldn’t want to get involved with that kinda shit and run the risk of fucking up his prestigious family’s good name…
Why hadn’t she called? Another more likely scenario I pictured was Narcisa succeeding in her dark plot to get the other one strung on out crack and off they have gone off together on a whirlwind of drug-fueled whore adventures together.
Yeh. That’s the one.
Cunts…
Narcisa.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008.

NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Tonight was the last straw, the final indignity of a day which has started out pretty bad and has been headed steadily south to Hell ever since.
I just fired up the bike and rode off, leaving her standing right there with her ugly dike friend in the street.
The last thing I heard her say was, “So you just gonna go off an’ left me here?”
Damn straight, bitch!
“I already did!” I shouted back as I rode off into the night.
Two can play this ugly little game of rejection and abandonment.
Even so, as I pulled onto the wide aterro road and wound out the throttle, heading for Copacabana, I felt just the slightest pang of remorse…
I never like to just bail out like that on Narcisa, and I usually try not to – knowing full well the sort of deadly trouble she can put herself in whenever she’s left unattended at the end of a long mission.
It’s a little like leaving a retard in the middle of a gang-fight…
But this time, she’d really gone too far.
She’d been treating me like shit for hours. For days. Now it was her fucking turn.
So off I went.
And now I’m sitting here by the rolling waves one more time, wondering where she’ll end up tonight, trying in vain to figure it all out, understand her insane, anti-social, self-destructive behavior, trying to console myself with the certainty that she really gave me no choice but to leave her there like that…
Shit. I give her forty five minutes till my phone rings.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008.

NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.
But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
- Thomas Szaz, 1920

Today she’s kept herself busy juggling, dancing to the little radio she’s brought into her laboratory, which she never comes out from anymore, spending endless days and nights in there aranging and rearanging scraps of trash and junk and do dads, creating her surreal, timeless, baffling art.
  And as I awaken now into the cooling afternoon shadows of a new go-round, I vaguely wonder who she will be this time around, even as she fucks my mind, my body, my soul for the 7th time today, fucking me into yet another world, another dimension of paranormal reality for yet another trip back up the hill for more crack to open more portals to more endless, timeless new personalities and archetypes to be explored, until the cows fucking come home to Alpha Centauri….
She really is The Dakini.
The Exterminating Angel of myth and legend, art and madness and redemption….
The Muse and the temptress and The Path.
The one crucial element I never could have dreamed of…
Narcisa.
A thousand amazing, exotic, intoxicating, hypnotic women and girls, all in one mysterious, fucked-up, alien being. Narcisa, Lady of Ashes.
Phoenix rising..
Reborn.
Dakini.
Ever-changing, ever-evolving, expanding, disintegrating in a flashing fantastic fireworks show of insane poetry of the sacred and the profane.
She who traverses the sky in a thousand exploding, flaming forms of Mystery and Legend and white-hot Truth.
Salve Narcisa!
Nossa Senhora Das Cinzas…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008.

NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Hopeful Encounters, Elephant Slippers and My Narrow Escape from the Jaws of Death for the Umpteenth Time…

“Stop here!” Narcisa yelled to the cabbie, putting her hand on his shoulder. We were in the middle of traffic, but she jumped out anyway while I waited for him to pull over so I could once again pay, this time with money I made Jonathan cough up.
The back neighborhoods of Copacabana were bustling with bikes and cars and skinny beggars, and Jonathan was sitting on a corner waiting for us on his motorcycle.
I smiled at him in good faith, relieved to know that Narcisa had once again not duped by either flipping the fuck out on me or taking me hostage up to the roving favelas where, in my head, she was at any given second about to lure me into the boca, take all my money and leave me for dead as Urubu buzzards and little boys with over-sized machine guns would poke and probe my dying body like cartoon characters.
Anyway, he was relieved to see us too I think.
“Oi, Cigano!” Narcisa shouted as cars honked and dodged her, missing her lanky frame by centimeters. “Let’s go into this store! We got some time, right?”
“Yeh, you’re appointment’s in fifteen minutes,” he said, looking at his watch.
We walked into the little thrift store and her eyes lit up as she picked up a pair of slippers that were shaped like elephants. “I must have these Cigano!” she whined.
I picked up a small white gown and thought of Jonathan’s ex, Amy Fields and her husband Noah Levine, who just had a baby girl.
He knew what I was thinking. “That’s perfect!” He said as he put it on the counter with the elephant slippers.
Narcisa grabbed a purple hat and sweater and added them to the pile, along with a motley assortment of Zoo Cards that featured photographs and descriptions of all the members of the reptile family.
“What the fuck do you need these for???” He asked her.
“Is for the e’speriments, Cigano, you’ll see…” she explained as she dragged a floor lamp and a coffee mug shaped like a palm tree over to the counter.
“Right… Hey Sailor, I got you a present,” he said as he handed me a little key chain with an anchor on it, an homage to my nickname, and my epic Pirate-themed back-piece . “Happy Birthday!”
“Yes, Happy Birthday! You almost as old as the Narcisa!” she added, tangled up in what appeared to be a telephone cord.
I laughed and thanked him for his on-the-fly thoughtful gesture and after packing up all of our new things, untangling Narcisa from whatever mess she’d gotten herself into and haggling with the sales clerk, we were back on the street.
“Okay, I’m ready to be healed!” Narcisa exclaimed. Jonathan and I nodded as we walked toward Ana Lucia’s office for the much-anticipated Reike healing session.
When we arrived, Ana Lucia greeted us. First, she gave Jonathan an understanding and compassionate embrace. I could see tears begin to well up in his eyes. Things were hopeful…
As she gave me a big long hug I could feel her energy and warmth passing gently through my body. Narcisa’s eyes immediately lit up upon contact with hers.
This woman was a powerful healing spirit manifested in the body of a four-foot-tall plump little thing with frizzy hair, that much was evident.
She led us up the stairs and into a tiny room with a small brown cot, and a wide array of stones and candles, ordering Narcisa to undress.
Narcisa stripped off her clothes and proceeded to lie on a table where Ana Lucia put purple gems on her naked body.
“Iss coooold!” Narcisa laughed.
She wrapped Narcisa in a blanket, and told her to relax. I could see Jonathan was crying, and I started crying too.
Narcisa was full of life and she emitted a sepia-toned aura as her muscles tensed and her clenched fists finally opened.
Ana Lucia smiled, put a finger to her ear as if to say listen.
Narcisa was snoring.

NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw e Alessandra DeBenedetti. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.