The Last Shaman:

The Last Shaman:

It was I that won the battle for Alanna’s heart.

Her letter to me was sincere. It was simply final.

I thought that such a love as had appeared upon that page would last a lifetime.

But like a fading ember it would spark and then dissolve.

She lived at much too great a pace for me.

It was Tony that sabotaged this harmonious ending.

It was he that suggested, as though by a matter of fact, that she had broken her promise to me.

It was TONY that offered me not only the solace of knowing that she was still Alive, but all so the dread of imagining her to be a vile Selkie who could  not be trusted*. He did this subtly. He did it under the auspices of defending her for sins she had not committed. Such sins, of course, could not be defended.

I seemed threatening, surely, when I spoke of justifying rape. But I was merely testing the limits of my own patience. I thought she would accept this as open arms, pardoning the Evil that Tony had planted into my mind as belonging to her. In fact it surely looked to her as though I were trying to pardon some Evil on my own part, an Evil that had likewise been planted into her own mind by similar forces. So the open arms that I expected to be greeted with crossed.

But it was through no fault of either of us. And I remain victorious over Evil.

*So much so that I began to crave her to be dead, only to spite the lengths I had gone to in order to preserve her Life.

Tony insisted that she would appear again once our film project had attained a degree of success. He seemed so certain in his Hope. I do not doubt that he was. It was selfish Hope for him as much as it was a neurotic one for me. And it was one that he could afford to shed at any time, so long as I continued to believe in it. But I could not afford to keep holding onto it. It could too easily be shed, and so there was no incentive on the part of any one but myself to see its fruition. So the Suburban Shamans came to an end.

Dm.A.A.