Nüwa Can Fix Anything - Flash Fiction by Marie C. Lecrivain

 

Nüwa Can Fix Anything

 

    In the north-eastern corner of Chinatown Central Plaza, perpendicular to the Wishing Well, and the Bruce Lee bronze statue is an alcove set between four concrete pillars. Nüwa, enthroned in her wheelchair and wrapped in colourful quilts, plies her trades; fortune-telling, jewellery restoration, and handmade plaited fans.

       Don’t hesitate to answer. She’ll toss the coins and consult the hexagrams. Nüwa’s never been wrong, though more than a few left in a huff, angry at being told not what they wanted, but what they needed to hear. These former sceptics end up being her most loyal customers. They know, at $15 a session, she’s saving them years of heartbreak and thousands of dollars in therapy.

     When you meet her, don’t be surprised or flustered when she smiles; her eye teeth are sharp as knives. She waves to passers-by, and the lucky ones who come her way are immediately enveloped by her perfume: lotus…  bamboo… and a touch of paprika.

     If you’re looking for advice or divination, Nüwa will take your face between her warm, dry palms, stare deep into your eyes and ask you three questions:

Water,
or metal?
     Earth,
or fire?
     Wood,
or ...?

 

    Nüwa fixes broken jewellery. Give her your wedding band with the loose stone, the rusty broken watch that belonged to your grandfather, or the tarnished locket with your parents' wedding photo. She’ll give you a ticket, and instruct you to come back in three days. When you come back, she’ll have you examine the piece to your satisfaction, to make sure all parts are in good working order, and the bad karma’s been released.

 

    Nüwa’s handmade plaited fans fetch the highest prices. You always know who’s in the greatest need of a fan. Right at the moment, Nüwa completes the last few rows of the fan handle, her customer appears. Regardless of race, creed, colour, or sex, they all exude the same sense of desperate hope. When the right-hand goes up to shade the eyes and they stare at the fan in her hands, they know they’ve found the answer to their deepest prayers. Nüwa will nod in their direction, place a small Closed For Consultations sign on her table, and take the customer behind the curtain. A few moments later, the pilgrim leaves with the fan, wrapped in black silk, and clutched to their chest.

 

  Nüwa’s labours keep us comfortable and allow us a degree of prosperity in a world that no longer believes in anything but fear and greed. No one’s guessed who she is, or what she’s done.

  

      Thankfully, no one can see Nüwa as I see her, every night when we close down her alcove. I carry her in my arms up to our apartment that overlooks the plaza. I place her on the couch and make dinner while she tells me stories of who she met that day. We eat, side by side, wrapped in the closeness of two beings who’ve known each other since the world began.

 

       If I’m lucky, she’ll toss aside her colourful quilts, and with the last rays of the setting sun catching the fire in her magnificent scales, she’ll put on a fan dance for me. With a heart full of gladness, I watch her sway back and forth, and weave the broken bits of the world back together for one more day, as she’s done, and will do, for all time.

"Act passionately; think rationally; be Thyself." - Liber Librae

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter -- often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter -- in the eye. - Charlotte Bronte

Marie C Lecrivain is a poet, publisher, and ordained priestess in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the ecclesiastical arm of Ordo Templi Orientis. Her work's been published in California Quarterly, Gargoyle, Nonbinary Review, Orbis, Pirene's Fountain, and many other journals. She's the author of several books of poetry and fiction, and editor of Gondal Heights: A Bronte Tribute Anthology (copyright 2019 Sybaritic

Press, www.sybpress.com).