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A few days ago there was another big shooting war up in the crowded complex of favelas where Narcisa buys her crack and, more and more often lately, smokes it.
I was sitting out on the balcony of the house on the hill, watching the sky when I heard it all jumping off just across the way.
It was a stormy afternoon, just before dark. Distant lightning flashes covered the cloudy skies, as thunder aproached dramatically from all around.
Suddenly the stacatto pop of machine gun bursts, then a booming rally of exploding grenades filled my ears, coming from over the hill. I could see the muzzle flash of automatic weapons firing wildly in the dark maze of ghettos just across from where I stood watching.

the Favela from my house

It was on.
I crouched down behind the little balcony wall, taking cover to avoid catching a stray one. That happens to a lot of people around here. That would suck.
So I huddled down, got my back to the wall and listened as all holy fucking hell broke loose over there…
I knew Narcisa had gone up a few hours ago to cop, and I hoped she hadn’t stuck around there to smoke it.
I felt kinda bad, guilty for not just letting her hole up here and do her thing where at least she’d be safer from immediate annihilation.
But I just don’t like to let her smoke it around me anymore, don’t like watching her change from Jekyll to Hyde, don’t like the little heaps of ashes that pile up all around her and become her whole fucking world when she’s smoking that shit.
I don’t like the smell of it, and I especially dislike all those creepy bottom-feeding supernatural entities who posess her after she flicks her Bic and opens the roaring gates of Hell right before my eyes..
Sometimes she smokes it in a little crack shack right there in the “boca”, the drug spot up in the favela - usually when she wants to avoid the shuffling zombie hordes of the Casa Verde, which by now has become a full-time crack-house, with all the attending horror-show cast of psychotic characters and their spooky, low minded paranoid antics.
Other times though, she just buys her stuff up there on the morro, then splits to go off and smoke it in the bushes somewhere else, up in the hills around Santa Teresa, or whatever… Cowering in the shadows, talking to spiders and ants and monkeys and bats and darting shadows and whatever the fuck else she winds up with up there in the trees and jungle.
The other day she told me she’d been invited by one of the armed teenaged thugs who run the spot into a dark room in a run down shack at the back of a narrow alley to smoke in there.
But when she took her first hit, which is usually the worst and most paranoia provoking, she saw in the glow of her cheap plastic lighter that the walls of that little room were all covered in streaks of dried blood and riddled with bullet holes.
She was smoking crack in a fucking makeshift execution chamber.
And soon enough, in her hyper-aware state of raw fear and supernatural sensitivity, the anguished ghosts of murdered rats and deadbeats and informers and crackheads and undercover cops were all clamoring so loudly in her ears that she had to beat it right the fuck out of there.
After that she didn’t go back there to smoke again for awhile.

Just as well, I thought now, as I listened to the raging gunfire. I really hoped her boycott of the volatile deadly favela was still in effect today.
But with Narcisa you never know.
After half an hour, the machine gun bursts became more sporadic… then finally it quieted down over there and I stood up and looked at the sky.
The lightning was getting closer, giant mile-long white rays of fierce raw electricity crackling down over the city and all around as far as I could see, the heavens rumbling as if to answer the puny gun shots below with a raging spirit war overhead.
Just as I felt the first big raindrops falling from the sky, Narcisa appeared out of the dark house behind me, looking like a pale hollow-eyed zombie ghost.
“Tudo bem, Cigano?” She croaked.
“Baby! Come give me a hug! I was worried about you,” I said as she melted like a flaming rubber doll into my arms.
“Worry? For me? Por que, Cigano? Que foi?”
I told her about the big shootout I’d just witnessed. Told her it sounded like a serious one.
“Shit! I just miss it again.”
“You sound disapointed, baby. You should be glad you weren’t up there. I’m sure there’s quite a few bodies laying around your favorite spot right now…”
“Is incredible, man! So much as I wan’ get a bullet in my head an’ get the fuck out from these shit world, it can never happen! I only just was in there, only two hour before. I start to e’smoke in there, an’ everything was cool. Then something just say to me get the fuck out right now from these place, so I go! These all ways happen with me. What the fuck, man? The death she always keep missing me. Every time! Why, Cigano?”
“Maybe God just don’t want you to die right now, baby. Who the fuck knows about such things?”
“Fucking God!” She spat.
I just shook my head.
Fucking God.
Narcisa.

War Zone

The next day she went back up there to the favela. Looking for drugs. There’s hundreds of other favelas all over town where she could go. But she had to go right back to that one.
When she got up there, the whole place was like a ghost town, all commerce closed, not a soul in sight.
War zone.
That didn’t stop Narcisa from walking boldly right down the empty alley to the spot.
Right into the heart of a raging guerrilla war where even the local bandidos, armed to the teeth, didn’t tread that day.
Narcisa didn’t care. She wanted to cop. Or die trying.
She stumbled along the labyrinthine bullet-scarred alleys of the deserted, post-shootout favela, raving, yelling, “Show your face! Shoot me, kill me! Where are you, cowards!”
“Where the fuck is everybody?” She cried out desperately, an abandoned child running around like a frantic white rat in a maze.
The only answer was her own echo in the eerily still kill-zone.
“Show you face, you shits!” She shouted again and again to the invisible Drug War snipers hidden in the shadows, holding her long white arms out like Christ the Redeemer.
“I wan’ some crack, porra! Show you fucking faggot faces or just go an’ shoot me… I wan’ it the DRUGS, man, got it?”
Nobody showed their face. Nobody shot her. Nobody sold her any drugs.
Finally she got bored hearing her own lonely voice echo there in those lifeless empty alleys of the dead.
Then she finally gave up and went away to look for drugs or death or whatever she could find somewhere else.
The end.

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.