Free Urban Shaman by Ce Murphy

complete, the extension of energy faded back into me, joining the rest of the power behind my breastbone. I felt a little like a battery charging up.
    I opened my eyes uncertainly, looking down at myself. I couldn’t do anything about my clothes. “I think I’m okay now.”
    “What about that one?” The coyote poked his nose at the long cut on my cheek from Marie’s butterfly knife. I put my hand over it; the new paint job hadn’t entirely taken care of it. Instead of disappearing, it had scarred over, a thin silver line along my cheek. After a moment I shrugged.
    “It wants to stay.”
    Very smart dogs can look approving. The coyote did, then snapped his teeth at me. “I’m not a dog.”
    “What is it with people reading my mind today?” I looked down at myself, the one lying in the grass. I still looked horrible, my skin a ghastly pallor that made very faint freckles stand out across my nose. My face wasn’t one that did sunken flesh well. My nose is what you might politely call regal, and my cheekbones are high, making my cheeks look very hollow and fallen. Lying there like that, I looked two breaths from dead. The drumbeat, my heartbeat, was still thudding with a degree of uncertainty. I put my hand out over my torso and chewed my lower lip. “There’s still something wrong. Like…” My car analogy almost fell apart. “Like the windshield is all cracked up and burnt from the sun.”
    The coyote did the approving look again. “This is the hard part.”
    I frowned at him nervously. “What do you mean, the hard part?”
    He pushed his nose out toward the me that was dying, there on the grass. “You have to change the way you see the world.”
    “Isn’t this place enough proof of that?” I asked,pitch rising. The coyote’s ears flicked back and he sat up primly, offended.
    “Is it?” he asked. “Do you believe what’s happening here?”
    I looked down at my body again. My heartbeat was drumming much too slowly. “I don’t know. It feels real, but so do dreams.”
    “This place shares much with dreams.” The timbre of his voice changed, deepening from a tenor into a baritone. I jerked my eyes up, to discover a red man sitting there on his butt, arms wrapped around his knees, loose and comfortable. He wore jeans with the knees torn out, no shirt, and he was genuinely red. Brick red, not a color skin comes in, not even sunburned skin. Long straight black hair was parted down the middle, and his teeth were better than Gary’s. His eyes were golden, as golden as the coyote’s. I blinked, and the coyote was back.
    “Is Coyote even a Cherokee legend?” I kept blinking at him, hoping he’d turn back into the red man. He stayed a coyote. Still, if men like that were wandering around here, I’d take it as a good argument that this garden had a lot in common with dreams.
    “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Coyote said. “You don’t have a lot of time, Jo. Is this real?”
    I scowled down at my body. If this is a dream, I decided, when I look up, he’ll be the guy again. I’m aware, so it’s a lucid dream, so I can affect it, and he’ll be the man because I want him to be.
    I looked up. The coyote was sitting there, head cocked, waiting for me.
    “Dammit,” I said out loud. A thin line in the spiderweb I felt inside me made a hissing sound like cracking glass, and disappeared. The drum missed a long, scary beat, then fell into a natural, reassuring rhythm.
    “Time to go back,” Coyote said, and the garden went away.

CHAPTER SIX
    S hit, I thought again, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true. I closed my eyes. The light continued to bore into my eyelids until I opened them again. The paramedic squatting above me clicked the penlight off, announcing, “She’s back,” to someone out of my line of sight.
    “I’m back,” I agreed in a croak, and closed my eyes again. Perhaps if I was very lucky I’d go away again.
    “Getting the crap beat out of you