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Another excerpt from Jonathan Shaw’s upcoming novel Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes

NARCISA LIKED: Bad Brazilian TV, Soap Operas and asinine American sitcoms dubbed in Portuguese. She also liked children’s shows, cartoons, pizza, chocolate, Coca Cola with lots of ice cubes. She liked to chew up ice cubes. They say it’s a sign of sexual frustration for a woman to chew up ice cubes. That would’ve made sense, given her surreal background of abuse and trauma. She also liked eating messy snacks in bed or on the toilet, in the shower too. She liked to eat and chew on ice cubes while I fucked her. Go figure. Sometimes she liked to sing during sex, mostly when she was good and high.
Narcisa liked attention. Lots of attention, especially the negative kind, and she talked real loud and cursed a lot, especially in public. She dressed eccentrically and sometimes liked to wear her bra and panties outside her clothes, then hurl evil venomous curses and insults at people on the streets of Rio de Janeiro when they stared and gawked.
She liked the mountains, but didn’t like the solitude. She liked rain, didn’t even mind getting soaked to the bone, caught in an apocalyptic tropical downpour. Probably because it gave her something good to complain about. Narcisa liked to complain a lot. When not complaining, she liked Classical music, old Brazilian rock and roll, bubble baths, bubble gum, and anything to do with smoke and fire.

She smoked cigarettes, copious quantities of weed, Crack, tobacco pipes, and even cigars. She said she’d smoke anything and insisted on being cremated, not buried under any circumstances, when she died, which she hoped would be very soon… Often, she’d leave several cigarettes burning on the furniture in random places around my apartment, maybe in hopes of fulfilling her death wish and smoking herself as a final act.
Narcisa.
Our Lady of the Ashes.
One time as she dropped her cigarette ashes on the freshly swept floor of my apartment, I handed her an ashtray. She looked at me with utter disgust for a beat before speaking. Spitting on the floor for emphasis.
“The world is my ashtray, Cigano!”
She liked to argue with anybody about anything and dreamed of becoming a lawyer someday. She would criticize everything she saw, machine-gunning an endless barrage of terrible hurtful insults at everybody who was ever close to her. By the time I found her there weren’t any more people close to her, so it pretty much was all for me. Somehow I didn’t mind.
Narcisa loved the color Purple. The color of Redemption and rebirth, oddly enough. Everything she owned and wore had to be purple. Sometimes she couldn’t find stuff in purple, so she would settle for pink. Even her food had to be purple or pink, and she ate heaps of beets, big plates of beet salad at the Kilograma restaurant downtown we ate at sometimes. Maybe in hopes of shitting purple. Just for good measure.
She also chewed great quantities of pink bubble gum and stuck it to the walls and furniture all over my place like a dog pissing to mark its Territory. One time she bitched me out on a busy downtown street for ten minutes straight because I bought her blue bubble gum.
“This shit is blue, Cigano, blue!” She yelled, throwing a wadded up ball of gum at me, bouncing it off my head as passersby stopped and stared on the crowded sidewalk.
“Blue is for the boys, Cigano, don’ you know?” She ranted on. “Could it be you didn’t noticed I am the girl and my color is the pink?”
I stood there watching, horrified as she suddenly pulled her pants down right there on the street, flashing her bald, shaved pussy at me accusingly, like an undernourished pet I’d forgotten to feed. A crowd gathered and stood watching, gawking.
“You know what this is, Cigano? This shit is a poo’sy! The very nice one too, don’ you think so, peoples?”
She stood there defiantly flashing the shocked crowd gathering. Some of the men leered, agreeing vociferously, as I cringed in shame and embarrassment.
“You like it, this Poo’sy, Cigano? This is what the girl got, Cigano. The Girl, No the boy, got it? The color for the girl is pink, Cigano, no the blue, no the black, no the yellow, no to any other color, got it? The Purple she ok, very good for Narcisa, Cigano. And after the purple, only the pink, got it? No the any other color. Now you got it!”
I got it.

….

NARCISA HATED: Waiters, uniforms, Police, fat people, Argentines, country music, newspapers, newscasts, poor people, rich people, soccer, bad taste, the beach, airplanes, old people, especially her family, or so she said.
She hated her body, and punished it every chance she got, often provoking street fights with random strangers, getting them to do it for her. Battle scars and stitches and bruises and contusions everywhere. She hated her bodily functions as an extension of the body- she hated, hated going to the bathroom, shitting… defecating, she called it, not liking even saying the word shit… She hated her period, her pussy, her tits especially, and she talked about having them cut off, tiny as they were, if she ever got enough money from peddling her odious snatch to afford plastic surgery… she hated the fact that she was a female, and didn’t like women, but was tolerant of teenagers and young girls, probably because she wanted something from them - usually sex. Narcisa also hated men. Or that’s what she said sometimes.
Being- despite her eccentric and abrasive ways- quite charismatic and charming in a most surreal manner, Narcisa usually got what she wanted. She professed to be something of an expert at mind control techniques she’d picked up reading books on Satanism and black magic. She also claimed to have participated, from an early age, in more sinister, ritualistic pacts with The Devil…
She especially hated any words printed on clothing, particularly clothing labels, and she would cut all the labels off her clothes, even the expensive designer stuff she latched onto. One time I gave her a tee shirt, and the first thing she did was take scissors and cut out the words on the front, leaving her hated breasts exposed, rather than be a walking advertisement for parasites she didn’t derive any benefit from.
She also hated machines, and was fond of breaking radios, telephones, blenders, and televisions. She hated the sunshine. Narcisa despised food. Eating was an unpleasant necessity. She said she wished she could just dehydrate her food and smoke it up in a pipe for the unpleasant but admittedly necessary chore of nourishment, that someday she would invent a way to do just that and get rich selling it to other people like herself. Problem was that there wasn’t anybody else like her. One day she realized this, and as the terrible reality of it sunk in, she sulked and pouted for days on end. A very dark time for her…
“Everything’s going to be alright, Narcisa,” I said, trying to soothe her.
“Is never gonna be alright!” She screamed hysterically.
And for just that moment, I almost believed her.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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