12/01/2025
When shamans get together, they don’t talk about “love and light.”
They talk about the taste of their own blood in the mouth after three days without food.
They compare notes on which ancestors scream the loudest when you try to sleep.
They laugh, low and rough, about the time a spirit followed one of them home and fu**ed up the plumbing for six months because it was pi**ed about being ignored.
They speak of the client who showed up smelling like a slaughterhouse because something with too many teeth had been riding in the passenger seat of her soul for twenty years.
They trade recipes: how much to***co to burn when the dead won’t leave, how much vodka to pour when they won’t shut up, how much silence to offer when the client finally starts crying the black tar they’ve been carrying since childhood.
They don’t say “everything is one.”
They say, “That thing in the desert? It still remembers when we had fur and ran on four legs. It wants its bones back.”
They say, “The river took my name last year. I haven’t decided if I want it returned.”
Around the fire, they speak of the weight of carrying other people’s monsters in their ribs.
They speak of the nights they woke up speaking a language no one has used for ten thousand years, with someone else’s grief burning behind their eyes.
They pass the bottle, nod at the scars, and get back to work. Because the world is older than kindness, and darker than forgiveness, and someone still has to sit in the mouth of the cave and sing the damn thing quiet when it wakes up hungry.
You don’t need to thank them. They already know the price, and they’re still paying it. A’ho
~ Katerina
