The Shine

Untested

The first time I saw a dead body I went cold all over. I felt like I might die myself. Just from seeing it. I saw a guy lying in the street at an intersection. I assume he got hit by a car but there was nothing around to indicate what had happened. He was just dead.

I ran to an abandoned bar and stood in the corner like I was hiding from someone. Later in that same building a guy would spray wasp poison in my mouth as the opening move in an attempted sexual assault. He must have thought it would work like chloroform.

A few years after the intersection corpse I saw a guy tearing ass down the sidewalk get shot down from behind by plainclothes cops. A few months after that I saw two guys in the back of a car mutually stabbing each other to death. The winner of the stab off managed to get out of the car to stumble and fall down and die not that far from where I was watching.

Those two didn't bother me nearly as much as the first one. I hate to think about it but I didn't have much of an emotional reaction those two times. Back then I was headed towards some issues.

Did those two not bother me as much because it because it wasn't the first time I had seen it? Was it because I was older and in theory more mature? Was it because those were active incidents where I was more concerned about making sure I stayed clear and unharmed?

I don't know. None of that prepared me for what I saw today.

After our chat Madame X disappeared, JoshDan reappeared and her cook/maid fed us lamb kebabs and homemade chips. JoshDan and I sat on her back porch drinking her fancy beers, eating and enjoying the view.

It was a nice time.

I thought that the guest room she put me in looked like what you'd see behind a camgirl. That might have been my prejudices. I'm not proud of it, but I checked for hidden cameras. I was struggling with Madame X. She had done nothing wrong. I find aggressively sexual people off putting. She just had a different life than me, I shouldn't think of her as a monster.

I was worried that she would want me to participate a sexual ritual. The 800 times she talked about the power of masturbating for an audience stuck with me. In movies the hero says they'll do anything to save the world or stop the bad guy. But they aren't tested. All they have to do is kill and maybe die. The envelop of "anything" is never pushed.

It makes sense, no one wants to see a movie where Sebastian Stan humps a goat to save the world. Okay, some people want to see that do but they don't make movies for them. Okay, they do make movies for them but famous actors aren't in them. Okay, they are sometimes but they're deepfakes.

I didn't sleep well. I was churning in my mind if I was a big enough asshole not to stop a demon or a monster or whatever Eterno is because I don't want to get freaky.

It didn't go down like that.

The next morning Madame X said she was "charged up" and ready to work magic. She did have me watch a video of her and two guys going at it but I don't think that was even part of it. I think she just wanted me to see it.

We went out into her backyard where she had a tilework square 20 feet on a side with a ton of lines on it. Hundreds of lines. There were also rocks stacked at various points.

JoshDan was watching from the deck. She had warned him to stay away. His masculine energy wasn't welcome. She had asked me when I was born and when I said that I didn't know she gave me a funny look and said that she'd figure it out for me later. She had me sit outside the main circle in a smaller circle

She moved around in the circle touching certain parts with her hands and feet. She shifted some rocks. She started chanting. I could feel her power. I was shocked by how weak it was. It was like that time I accidentally touched an electric fence. I thought it would knock me on my ass. It barely hurt.

"That's it?" was my thought both with the fence and with her ritual. I channel more power than she was gathering all the time. And I barely know what I'm doing.

I wanted to ask her more about what she was going to do but I didn't want to interrupt her and have her miscast. You never know what a miscast will do. Maybe I had opened my mouth she'd still be alive.

When I had just about decided to speak anyway she lifted up off the ground. It wasn't smooth. It was like an invisible rope jerked her by one leg, got caught, and then yanked on her again. She was off-kilter. Even at that moment I thought she might still be in control. Hoped maybe.

Brown smoke started pouring out of the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her loose pant legs. It looked sickly and heavy, like something from an old war movie when they used to gas people in trenches. I jumped up from where I was sitting. No idea what to do. Didn't matter because before I could do anything she came apart like she had a zipper running from her navel to the crown of her head and across her chest to her arms.

She just opened up and all her insides fell out. It happened so fast I couldn't even react to it. One moment she was a woman. The next she was a steaming pile of viscera on the ground. The slopping sound of her inside slapping down on the tile will stick with me forever.

I looked back at the porch and JoshDan was gone. I second later I heard his car roaring away and saw dust kicking up from the front drive.   

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