Free The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk Page B

strolling through the Castro, making private comments about all the beautiful young men they passed. She’d been living off Johanna’s charity then, just back from Mexico, trying to write. And the beautiful young men had not yet wasted to living skeletons, to die blotched with lesions, gasping for breath.
    “I wish I could help you,” Maya said.
    “You do,
madrina
. You help a lot.” Madrone closed her eyes. Really, she could almost sink back into trance, here in the sun with Maya’s hand to soothe her. When you’re tired enough, Madrone thought, the
ch’i
worlds are just an eye blink, a breath away. Like yesterday, watching beside Consuelo’s closed coffin, surrounded by lighted candles in the Sisters’ living room. Rosa sat, looking solemn, almost hidden behind a huge bouquet of calla lilies.
    “I’m sorry,” Madrone had said to her. “I’m so sorry.”
    “It’s not your fault,” Rosa had said, with tears pooling at the bottom of her eyes.
    Not my fault but my inadequacy, Madrone said to herself, settling down to keep vigil. She had focused on the coffin, letting herself sink into the searching trance, moving down through the wood of the box, until she could
see
, with her inner eye, the body, shaped by light, its energy form already starting to come apart. Traces of Consuelo’s spirit, shreds of personality, lingered like wisps of scent. Madrone sniffed emotion—anger, outrage, a sense of being cheated, the aggrieved surprise of the unexpectedly dead. She felt sweat on her face and willed herself to breathe deeper, to sink down further. This was the worst level, and she could only get through it by saying over and over again, “Not mine. Not my pain. Not my grief.”
    Down. And yes, there was something else—that elusive something she had
felt
after Sandy died. But what was it? Could a microbe have a personality, or was she just anthropomorphizing—what? If only she could see whatever it was, grab hold of it, learn how it spread and how to defeat it. She could track it, patient as any hunter, but what was there to scent but elusive traces in the air, shifts in energy? Not a flu virus, not something patterned on the old HIV series or a spirochete like syphilis or Lyme disease. They each had their characteristic signature in the energy realms, and she could recognize them aseasily as she could identify mugwort or comfrey in an overgrown garden. No, this was something else, and she was beginning to recognize its
feel
but she still couldn’t
see
it, only follow, down and down.…
    “Where are you drifting to?” Maya said sharply. “Madrone! Come back!”
    Maya’s hand gripped her arm sharply and brought her back with a jerk. She felt a sharp sense of vertigo and fought down nausea.
    “Diosa
, Maya, don’t do that to me!”
    “I called your name three times.”
    “Really? I didn’t know I went so far down.”
    “You shouldn’t trance like that, unprotected, ungrounded. You didn’t even cast a circle.”
    “I didn’t mean to trance. I was just thinking about Consuelo again, and the virus—oh, all right, I guess I was starting to
search
for it.”
    “You be careful. You’re becoming obsessed with the thing, and obsession opens the door to the Bad Reality. Did I ever explain the old
curandera
’s theory to you?”
    Madrone smiled. “At least a dozen times.”
    “Well, I’d better explain it again, because you don’t seem to get it. Doña Elena used to say that there was the Good Reality, or
El Mundo Bueno
, literally the Good World, and the Bad Reality,
El Mundo Malo
, and they were always vying with each other. In the Good Reality you have a mild headache; in the Bad Reality you have a fatal brain disease. In the Good Reality, you catch hold of the rail as your foot slips; in the Bad Reality, you miss, slide down the stairs, and break your neck.
    “We walk in the Good Reality as if we were treading the thin skin on warm milk. It’s always possible to break through and drown. When