by Heidi King
I was the first to break the silence. “María, there’s nothing here that looks like the gold idols of the Ngäbe.”
Without responding, María stood up and pointed to another throne in the opposite end of the room. “Sit,” she commanded. I obeyed.
María stood up and slowly circled around the altar, resting on the balls of her feet with each stride. She stopped at the altar with her back to me and blew out one of the candles. There was something else there that she picked up – a digital camera. She turned and lifted the last candle to her face, casting a giant shadow of herself on a dark curtain behind the velvet seats. She approached me, turning toward an electric organ near my throne. She pranced over and turned it on. A low electrical hum resonated through the room. On top of the organ she found a cordless microphone used for addressing groups. She tied it tightly around her neck like a collar.
“Under your chair you will find a strip of cloth,” she breathed. “It’s your blindfold. Put it on.” I did as she told, without knowing why. I felt a current of excitement run through my body. I could see nothing.
She spoke slowly, in a whisper, but when amplified through the organ speaker it sounded like she was all around me at once. “This is the story of the princess Janca, the daughter of the great warlord Chief Urracá of the ancient Ngäbe tribe. Janca fell in love with Tam Weh, a man from the next village. But she was already promised to a powerful shaman from that same village because the Chief Urracá needed the shaman’s magic to protect the villagers from the invading Spanish. When the shaman learned that Janca had fallen in love with Tam Weh, he cursed her. He cast a spell to transform her into her power animal on the next full moon. The shaman did not know that she was to become a black jaguar.”
I heard a soft click and the quiet hiss from speakers. She turned up the volume. Her voice and breath, even louder now, resonated throughout the room.
“Frightened at what she had become, she ran home and went to the room where she slept. When her father entered, he saw the jaguar and thought his daughter had been eaten. He ran at her, ready to tear her to pieces with his bare hands. Janca, in the form of the jaguar, fled.”
I could see nothing through my blindfold but I could smell the waxy smoke and knew she blew out the last candle.
“Urracá summoned all of the best hunters in the land to hunt the jaguar. Thinking that the cat had killed his one true love, Tam Weh took up a sword he had won killing a conquistador, ready to kill the cat. He tracked her to a cave high in the mountains. Catching a glimpse of her shining eyes, he drew his sword. Janca, defeated and overcome with sadness, waited to be killed. But then a strange thing happened. Their eyes met and he saw the sadness, saw Janca behind the face. The shaman had only given her the mask of a jaguar. Tam Weh dropped his sword. When Janca rested her paw on Tam Weh, he was transformed into a jaguar too.”
The room went silent. I listened carefully. María took in a sharp breath that echoed through the room.
“Matt?” She spoke softly but her amplified voice echoed in the temple hall. “Have you ever seen two cats fuck?”
“No.” I kind of squeaked it out. My throat was dry. The darkness and the pulse of the organ mesmerized me. I felt like I was floating.
“The male cat seems quite uninterested even though he can smell that the female is in heat. He can smell her from yards away. Maybe the male cat knows that she’s just dying to come. Cats have an uncanny ability to see in the dark. When the male of the species doesn’t pay attention, the female brushes by the docile male with her tail straight and stiff in the air and lets out a low pitched growl.”
Although my blindfold held tight I knew she was near me now. I could feel the air change around me.
“She’ll stick her wetness right into his face. He can smell her. He wants her but still he’ll wait. Just sitting there in the dark. He loves to humiliate the dripping female. He wants her to beg for it. But inside the male is an intensity he cannot suppress.”
She was right in front of me now. I could feel the heat of her breath and smelled her – like lavender and sweat -- but her voice came through the speaker and echoed in all directions.
“The female turns around and swipes at the male’s face. The female draws blood and quickly turns. With a ferocious hiss the male digs his claws into the female’s back, sinking his nails into her flesh. His cock is hard. He thrusts into her with his claws firmly tangled in the flesh of her back. He hisses with dark intensity. The female’s claws dig into the ground. She growls with such pain and ecstasy that the sound carries for miles.”
She stopped and told me to take off my blindfold. The moment I pulled it off a blinding flash assaulted me from the darkness. It was her camera. For a brief moment, a stunning red glare blinded me and I felt a sharp sting across my forehead and right cheek. She whipped me with the cord that was tied around her wrists. I don’t know what happened to me… I never lose my temper but that fucking hurt. I swung my arms around trying to catch what hit me.
I calmed down. It was a game. I could hear María breathing harder now. I just didn’t know from where. I got down on my hands and knees and slowly crawled in a kind of twisted adult hide-and-go-seek. There were brief moments where I could make out the camera’s red glare. I found her robe. She was using it to block a little sliver of light from under the door. I took off my belt, pants and underwear there. I moved her robe to let some light through so I could at least try to catch her shadow.
She taunted me. “Meow, I’ve been a bad cat.”
I felt my way to the throne where María had been sitting and rested behind it. I closed my eyes, trying to get them to adjust to the dark. When I opened them I could make out a nebulous dark form. She was sitting on one of the velvet movie theater chairs and there was something metal catching and reflecting the scant light under the door.
“What will you do when you find me, Matt?” She had a sword. She had the point pressing into the floor and the hilt resting between her legs.
“I’m wet, Matt,” she breathed. “When you catch, are you going to fuck me?”
I could see her hands moving along the sword. She moaned softly through the organ speaker.
“Osiris.” She took in a sharp breath. “The little ridges along the grip …”A pause. A breath. “Good exercise for the muscles.”
When I moved from my position, I lost sense of where she was. I slowly crawled down the center of the floor. All of a sudden I felt something. She heard me. She stopped breathing. It was the loose end of the cord tied to one of her wrists. Then I could see it – the red battery light for her camera. She heard me and we both lunged for it at the same time. She pulled the camera away from me, so I grasped at the cords. I got them just as she blinded me with another flash. She put her foot on my chest and forced me to the ground, but I wouldn’t let go of the cords. I pulled hard and she toppled on top of me, naked.
This is all very graphic I know. I am not a porn writer but it is hard to convey just how the hell I would have done what I did – commit a serious crime that would get me time in the closest thing to hell – unless you knew how María has this ability, this ability to seduce you into turning off your rational mind. It is like she does it to herself, too.
We were set to have sex and she stopped. She killed the momentum. It was like the details of some ritual in her mind were more important than the sex. She turned on the lights and made me help her push the marble altar between the pillars, the wooden pillars with the globes. She bent over the altar, and with her cords, I tied her legs to the base and her wrists around the pillars. Once she was tied, she told me to turn out the lights.
Now most people would be pissed if they were having sex and the girl called out another guy’s name. It started as a whisper but then she didn’t hide it. As she climaxed her voice reached shouting level that brought me to reality. Images of a Panamanian jail almost destroyed my orgasm. She was calling out, “Osiris, Osiris!”
Then María did it again. She flashed the camera
and I fell back in temporary blindness. I heard her pull off the microphone and stumble around. I groped around for a moment, looking for my clothes. Suddenly I heard a crash – breaking glass. I jumped to my feet and smashed my toe against the altar on my way over to find my underwear and pants. They weren’t there. María must have tossed them aside.
Then there was the blaring of a siren -- very loud.
“María!” I shouted. “Cops! María, cops!”
I found the light switch and then jumped into my pants that had been thrown across the floor, stuffing my underwear into my jeans pocket. If I get hauled off to jail in Panama, I thought, at least I have to go with my clothes.
I recklessly ran past broken glass at the top of the stairs and stumbled down to the kitchen where I had entered. It wasn’t the cops, not yet. María had pulled the plug on the sink.
There was a happy face below the note she had written there before. And another note: I bet that’s a face from the ancient gallery you never wore before… I love you.
Outside, Maria was stuffing robes into her bag. “No time to wallow in the mire,” she said, “Let’s run!”
Second in the Cock Fight
By Steve Banks
Poopy Pants,
Gabriel hasn’t come to work in a while. Could he be sick?
Minor setback on the zip-line. Came down when we were looking for Papa Smurf and clipped a backpacker. Looked pissed. But that might have just been because of the way his face was cut. Idiot… he needed plastic surgery before the zip-line clipped him. “Hahaha,” I laughed when he said he would sue. I don’t even own the place. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him that.
O.K. some errors were made but if there is a law suit we can find people to blame.
P.S. what is your address there in Canada? Do you have addresses in Canada? Do igloos have house numbers?
P.P.S. Good new! We found Papa Smurf. Turns out Gabriel had taken some people to town for the cock fights. Well, they dressed Papa Smurf up as a rooster. Good news… he came in second! But, bad news too I guess… Gabriel says it is not so good to come in second in a cock fight. And here’s me… I thought a cock fight was two dicks making a dive for the anus in a threesome. I learn something new every day.
P.P.P.S. Patrick I will no longer make fun of you… it is like poking a stick at a Down syndrome baby.
P.P.P.S. I fart in your general direction.
New Employee
By Steve Banks
Andrew,
You should see me now. I got the cigar and accent now with the Panama Hat and wife beater. Snap my fingers and say, “Luz, una margarita más por favor.” Now all I need is the cocaine. Wait…
Luz wears a tight little French Maid’s uniform now. Billed that to you.
Looking for cleaners that can fit through the door, so we started interviews. Here is the girl I interviewed at a cool little bar called La Esmeralda:
Can you speak English?
Sí.
Why is the letter C in the word yacht?
Qué?
No C, C, bitch.
How do they get the Caramilk into the Caramilk bar?
Anal es mas dinero.
How do you feel about this uniform?
Muy bueno.
If I were an animal what animal would you want me to be?
Grrrrr.
Have you met Papa Smurf yet?
I can smurf yes. I smurf real good. Grrrr.
How do you feel about reporting people who do soft drugs?
I having to go.
Can you fit through this door?
Does Patrick really need to come back?
Steve
P.S. Like you have never smelled your own dental floss. Why on earth would you eat yuka?
If I could only screw her while she is on top of me and I had to keep eating a bowl of her shit then I would. And she stops riding when I stop chewing. And I would do it with a smile... you wouldn’t? I would eat her inner labia after that doctor from doctor 90210 removed. Hell, I’d eat it a week after it was removed.
Return of the Blue Bus
By Mathew Hope
Consciousness is the road lit by the waking mind. The rest is darkness. The life of the soul reaches beyond the consciousness into the night. To find the light we venture into the darkness. The shaman can guide us through the darkness in ritual, or, as Freud said, we can ride the “king’s highway, the best route into the unconscious” and be our personal shaman through lucid dreaming. And when we truly understand our unconscious, when we have touched it, then we feel true freedom. Then we become a whole person.
I looked down at the palm of my right hand and saw the crown. I knew I had entered my dreams with control. It was like greeting an old friend.
María appeared in the distance in a white robe, the wind blowing through her hair and her arms spread open like she was welcoming the wind. Or maybe me. She smiled and then gestured for me to follow her up a flight of stairs. Above the stairs was a stone lintel with the words Novus Ordo Seclorum engraved upon it. I followed behind her up the stairs but after a bend in the staircase I saw that it was a little girl, not María, that I was chasing. She stopped and stared back at me with such a sad face, that of a little dark-haired girl in a tattered blue dress. Tears drove clean trails down her muddy cheeks. She ran to the top of the stairs and a vast wilderness opened up. As soon as I arrived, the trees began to wilt and die. They turned to ash and blew away. Now there was nothing but desert and two tall pillars. The little girl in the blue dress looked so sad, like she wanted me to help her. Suddenly a third pillar rose from the ground and the girl hid behind it, watching me shyly. At the top of her pillar was a crescent moon, and on top of the pillar to her left was a five pointed star. On the top of the pillar to her right was a shimmering cup. I thought it must have been the Holy Grail.
I look down at my hand to make sure the crown, my dream symbol, was there. When I looked up again I saw that the three pillars were now people – angry looking people with weapons and Roman helmets.
“Do you have the word?” one of them shouted.
I looked up and he belted me on the forehead with a kind of wooden hammer, like a gavel.
I fell to my right knee. When I regained focus I could see I was in what looked like the courtyard of a great temple with high stone walls.
I got up and saw a door to my left. I ran to it. Another man hit me on the head. I saw a door to my right and ran to it.
I saw María. She was wearing a white robe, billowing in the desert wind, and her arms were outstretched, waiting to embrace me. Then they turned to the sad eyes ... sad for me. And they were for me. A snake wound between her feet. I felt a sharp burning pain in my groin then a blunt thud on the back of my head. I tried to look at the palm of my hand but everything went black. I have never experienced going black in a dream before. Like I was dead. I was frozen, I couldn’t move. Petrified in fear. At first I heard nothing. Then I heard the sound of a bus, followed by the sound of children singing, getting closer … the blue bus of children from the Volcano.
I woke up struggling to breathe. I reached beside me in the bed for María. She wasn’t there.
Dream Analysis
By Dr. Mike Anderson
Dear Mathew,
Thank you for your email. I know we will see each other again next week for the next phase of our journey into the collective unconscious, but since you felt the urgency to share with me the details of your dream, I thought I would respond promptly in written form.
Mathew, please don’t take this as if I am passing judgment, but my limited experience here has taught me to exercise caution before considering engaging in activities contrary to the law in countries such as this. As a Freemason, it would have been quite possible for me to arrange a visit to the Rosicrucian temple. You see, our fraternal orders, at the core, are one and the same. Rosicrucians are but Freemasons that believe our philosophies and rituals are owed to a much more distant period in antiqu
ity – ancient Egypt. Let me start at the beginning, for the beginning is the end of your last lucid dream, the dream you have asked me to help you interpret.
If you recall, the ancient Egyptians worshipped the gods Isis and Osiris. Isis was widowed but used an artificial phallus, the obelisk, to fornicate with her husband and give birth to Horus, the reincarnation of Osiris. Horus was the son of the widow. This was depicted in the fresco at the Rosicrucian temple and the story María chose to depict with her painting on one of the walls at The Lost and Found.
What I didn’t explain was that this myth, if you will, was preserved in ritual through the Cult of Isis. The reason it resonated beyond ancient Egyptian culture was because it addressed a primordial fear, death, by unlocking an archetype of the collective unconscious: the resurrecting god.
The cult traveled across many lands, but each culture adopted it with slightly different metaphors and symbols. The Greeks translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and gleamed information essential for learning the arcane practices of the cult. Dionysus, the dying and resurrecting god of ancient Greece, substituted for Osiris. The Greeks of the Dionysian cult erected theaters for the performances of the cult’s mysteries. Theater, after all, is simply ritual with an audience. The members of the Dionysian/Osiris cult became the most skilled builders of the Mediterranean. But beyond that they were rumored to possess symbols with which they concealed the mysteries of the soul and the secrets of human regeneration. King Solomon needed their skills to complete his temple. But an obvious contradiction arose. Could the monotheistic Jews of the Yahweh cult and the pagan resurrection cult build a temple together?
Solomon hired Hiram Abif, who like Horus was known also as the son of the widow, to build the shrine. So charismatic was he that when he converted to the cult of Dionysus/Osiris, so too did the Jewish builders. The Cult of Osiris then became the cult of Hiram Abif. They shrouded their mysteries in the symbols of the construction of the temple so as not to upset the cult of Yahweh – the symbols of building tools like the compass and level. That’s right, Mathew, the cult of Hiram Abif is the Freemasons.