Medicine People
by Jude Trail
The man pushed the needle under her flesh and smiled when blood spurted into the chamber. He whispered into her ear, as he pulled the plunger back. “Drugs aren’t good or bad, you know?” Her blood mixed with the thick, brown liquid, delighting the man. “You’re like a medicine man,” he mused. “You’ve heard of medicine men haven’t you?”
“Yeah,” she mumbled. Already able to feel the strong concoction. “They’re like Indians…”
“Yeah, well kind of, but many cultures have them. They’re the people who had the guts to try things the others were too afraid to do.”
She nodded. “Like shaman?” She pronounced it slowly: “Shay-men.”
“Exactly. They’d go into the spirit world and come back with knowledge that can only come from the other side.”
She liked the idea of that. It made her smile. “Like wisdom.”
“That’s right! And it changed everyone’s life? The medicine people found out things from the ancestors and from the angels. Things that never made sense to the people at that time. The ideas were decades and centuries ahead of the time. Thousands of years, sometimes.
“Yeah.” She was mumbling, her eyes were only pin-pricks between a sliver of eyelids.
“Are you afraid?”
She laughed. “Not even.”
He pushed the plunger and the liquid slid effortlessly into her vein. Numbness flowed up her left arm and across her chest. As it slowly crept up her neck, her eyelids closed out the world. Then, peace engulfed her. All the stress and worry stopped as she slipped from this world and entered the spirit world.
Copyright Thadd Presley — All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.