Storytime Blog Hop - April 2023 - Cursed
HOW is it APRIL?
But it IS April, I suppose. Can’t really argue with my calendar. So it must be time for a blog hop again… free stories from around the world!
For your reading pleasure, I have an all-new piece of flash fiction I wrote this week - bite-sized like a cookie and a little… off… like Utah’s winter and spring this year (yes, we’re still occasionally getting snow).
I hope you enjoy it!
Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom after for the links to all the other free stories.
Cursed
The early twenties caucasian girl snapped her gum, and in a bored California valley-girl accent said, “Like, I curse you, I curse you, I curse you.”
With her spraytan and long silver fingernails and newest-model cell phone, she didn’t match the narrow but deep, velvet and crystals and ceramic dragons store. The second rack of nicknacks smelled faintly of peppermint and insence.
I was old enough to be her mother.
Over my shoulder, mall-walkers still walked, semi-feral teens still sauntered, fountain-of-youth peddlers still peddled. None of them made this suposed curse delivered so casually sound any more real.
“Uh huh. Thanks.” I backed out of that store and headed off to the next. Shopping at a mall any time irritated me, but I’d foolishly let Father’s Day in Suburb, USA get far too close, and now I fought the other procrastinators for trinkets for the kids to give to their father. Yes, my adult kids. Yes, their father, still my husband. Families are complicated, and sometimes it was just easier to enable all of them than deal with the hurt feelings.
Fifteen or twenty stores, two gifts, and a melting credit card later, a sharp pain suddenly stabbed at the center of my forehead. I doubled over, cataloguing it automatically— worse than pulling a muscle in my back, not as bad as childbirth. And it ended as soon as it began, so probably nothing to worry about.
A child shrieked. Automatically, I sought the child out, as if seeing them would lessen the shooting pain in my head… and did, actually. They were a tall three or a short four years old with dark hair, dressed in cheerful yellow, and garbling something incoherent about a teddy.
“Allá,” an old Hispanic man told me, and pointed.
I followed his gnarled brown finger and saw a bedraggled bear discarded behind one of the atrium pillars. The child’s screams had escalated to floor-flopping and snot. Mom’s two other kids hunted the area in the opposite direction, nowhere near the bear.
“Why don’t you get it?” I asked out of the corner of my mouth.
Hispanic man gestured expansively, and I finally noticed he was a little see-through.
Oh no.
Okay, me yelling “Ghost!” wouldn’t help at all.
The child’s ongoing shrillness sounded inconsolable, so I stalked toward the offending bear, scooped it up, edged closer, then thrust it at the child.
“I’m so sorry.” Mom hid her face. “He gets like this sometimes. Autistic—”
“Not judging.” Poor kid. Poor Mom. “I have a couple of my own, grown now. They all get like this sometimes… even the grown ones.”
The kid’s screams subsided into sobs as he cuddled his bear close, and Mom risked a glance at me. “Graçias for— You… have something, just there?” She brushed at her forehead.
“Thanks.”
I turned away and spotted my reflection in the glass of a jewelry store. My forehead did indeed have something— shimmery, like glitter, in the shape of an eye.
First I searched where I was sure the curse-store had been, and questioned the lotion and underwear vendors who hadn’t noticed an entire store disappear. Then I searched the whole blasted mall. No Nik Nak Gifts. No California valley-girl accent. No way to undo the curse.
Family with the upset kid and the bear— gone. Old Hispanic ghost— gone. Other see-through people— ghosts— darting close each time I paused, felt like gossamer cobwebs on my forehead and cheeks.
Mall security followed me since I’d snarled at the neighboring shop employees. Hadn’t asked me to leave yet. My hair fluffed from my fingers running through it and I smelled a bit of fear and sweat, and my eyes were a little wild, so any moment now…
Time to go.
The curse I might have to live with for now, but what obsessed me?
Why now? Why that store? Why that girl? Why ghosts? Why me?
Why?
Blog Hop Stories ——————————— Enjoy!!!
A Different Kind of Raise by Amy Keeley
Night At The Museum by Vanessa Wells
Flowers For Angela by Curtis Phills
Royal Assassin by Vanessa Finaughty
The Big Bad Wolf and the Easter Hare by Katharina Gerlach