The Shaman

The Shaman - A Fantasy Short Story in the Style of As I Lay Dying

When he sold it to me he told me it would last for a year. Three days now and already I can see the seven straight black figures on the horizon. They're sharp as matchsticks, and still. Three days and I told Marie one year. She sits in the kitchen, near the stove, two needles going fast and clicking in the evening. She has no need for elementalists, but she doesn't see the seven matchsticks.

He was dressed in brown rough cloth, beads and feathers and sticks hanging from him like he was a tree losing its leaves in autumn. The coins chimed in his hands (soft and rough like the cloth) then disappeared. "Five totems, sir, around the perimeter of your ah of your property. Not next to any trees. Not next to any bodies of ah of water. Let them sit for five days and then you should be safe for a year. Take them out."

Three days it's been and already I can see them. Not moving closer, not moving at all. From the dirt in front of the barn I can see them, standing or levitating like opaque spirits.

In the kitchen she is knitting and the cloth lays folding over her stomach, shifting as if breathing over the roundness of her belly. She has no need of elementalists but I bought her a pendant which she wears now when she knits, and it hangs down big and dim onto the roundness of it. When I come in she looks up and her hands stop moving.

"You look like as pale as powder," she says, smiling a thin and worried smile. I put a hand on her shoulder before she can get up to stand next to me, but I feel too much like leaning my weight on her.

"Marie we are not safe here."

The figures are now six. In the morning light they are harder to see but there are only six now. Marie looks pale and cold as the frost picking apart the grass. She sits on the porch in a blanket, knitting, and hands me a hot cup when she sees me come out. Her eyes are blank and round and she looks through me. "We have a guest," she says in a voice as quiet as the cold grass.

I see him then, black here like the black of the figures, black like a scorchmark on the ground, or a dead tree blasted by storm. In his hands a faint violet acridity, more a smell than a smoke, and a small creature peering from under his robe.

"What are you doing on my land?" I ask, already knowing, hoping without seeing that Marie is now in the house getting ready to leave. Three days it lasted and it was him who said a year, standing in front of me. In his soft rough hands a smell and a smoke.

"Your flight was over quickly, Thomas," he tells me, in his mouth my name is a wheeze and painful to hear. Somehow he is now on the porch, and Marie is not to be seen. I can feel her upstairs, trembling.

"In your folly you brought her here to the very place we would look first. You are truly stupid." The words fall like dead birds from the sky. The creature is not to be seen is it upstairs.

"In your folly you brought her here and now she is dying because of you. Because you cannot hide from us, because you owe us something that you took."

There are no more black figures on the horizon, only rain and a silence heavy and pregnant. I try to move him away, out beyond the perimeter, but he seems at once to follow and to stay behind.

We have no need of elementalists.