Today I'd like to share a piece of fiction with you. I hope you enjoy it!
Cursed
Love
Once upon
a time, a girl named Harriett learned a lesson, even though most days she
didn’t even remember that she’d learned it.
The
lesson was this: one should be careful of curses.
One
should also be careful of people who know how to cast them. Unfortunately, those who can cast curses don’t
typically advertise the fact that they can.
It all
began when Harriett was fifteen, and she did what many of her age tend to
do. She fell in love. Perhaps it wasn’t the mature kind of love
that most adults take seriously, but it was certainly the most intense feeling she’d
ever known.
The
mysterious boy moved in next door in the middle of the night. That alone added a level of mystique to the
situation. However, when she saw the
black-haired boy with the gray eyes on his front porch the next morning, her
heart practically did a great flip out of her body and landed at his feet.
Unfortunately,
he didn’t go to school like most kids their age, so she couldn’t hope to run
into him in the hallway. She wanted more
than anything to talk to him. To get to
know him. She just didn’t know how to
take that first step.
It took
three weeks of seeing him outside every morning before she approached the chain
link fence and offered him a simple greeting.
“Hello.”
The boy
smiled tentatively and introduced himself as Jonah.
Several
weeks passed with daily greetings at the fence.
Smiles were exchanged. Fleeting
glances paved the way to longer conversations, and within a few months, they
started sneaking away from the fence to spend time hidden away in a grove of
pines behind their houses.
Every
time Harriett smelled a brand new pine-scented car freshener, she recalled
their first kiss.
* *
*
Jonah
wasn’t supposed to fall in love with someone normal. A mundane life would have only drained him of
his magic. Yet when he looked into
Harriett’s cerulean eyes, he couldn’t help himself. The risk didn’t matter. After spending an entire childhood in
solitude, it was good to have someone.
Those stolen moments made his days brighter.
Every
time Jonah’s mother added pine needles to her cauldron to make her signature
anti-wrinkle potion, he thought of Harriett’s embrace and the sweet scent of her
straw-colored hair.
* *
*
During
another intimate moment in the pine grove, Jonah buried his face against
Harriett’s neck and breathed her in. “I
wish we could run away together,” he whispered.
She
laughed softly. “We’re only sixteen.”
“I
know. Maybe one day we can take off and
see the world together. I don’t want to
be worried all the time.”
Harriett
never understood why Jonah’s mother was so strict, but she didn’t want to risk
losing these moments with him. She hugged
him closer. “We will. We’ll go, and we’ll see everything we can. Nothing can stop us.”
* *
*
Jonah’s
mother had been on her way to collect pine needles when she caught sight of her
son and the neighbor girl kissing among the trees. Her blood boiled. She slipped away soundlessly, all thoughts of
her anti-wrinkle potion banished. She
had something more important to do.
* *
*
Neither
Jonah nor Harriett noticed the difference right away. The curse made them forget what they had
previously meant to each other. When they
saw one another from their respective yards, it barely registered. Why would Harriett notice the strange boy who
never spoke to anyone? And why would
Jonah care about this girl he didn’t know when he had to work on honing his
powers?
Only one
day out of the year was any different. Each
year on Valentine’s Day, they remembered everything. For twenty-four hours, they looked at each
other and saw just how much they’d once meant to one another, and they were
allowed to spend that time together before the veil dropped between them once
more.
Jonah’s
mother designed the curse that way for a reason. That single day wasn’t enough for Jonah to
devise a way to break the curse, and it was just enough to keep him from moving
on entirely. The vague sense of
wrongness would keep him from looking at any other girls who might distract him
from his life’s path. That outcome was
worth letting them have that one day.
* * *
Each
Valentine’s Day, the lovers met in the pine grove as soon as their memories
returned, and they spent the entire day together hidden away from the
world. Once they were both eighteen,
they started renting hotel rooms so they could have the intimate moments they
craved.
When they
were twenty, they decided to run away.
Jonah wasn’t sure what would happen, but he knew he had to try. They made it as far as the state line by
midnight.
The next
morning, they both woke in their separate beds, the memories of the previous
day nothing more than a blur.
* *
*
When
Harriett was twenty-two, she discovered she was pregnant. This came as a shock, because she wasn’t in a
relationship. She’d never been with
anyone. She thought back to various
college parties she’d been to, and though she couldn’t recall anything
happening at any of them, what other explanation was there?
Her
parents were disappointed, but they invited her to stay at home even after she
finished school. They didn’t want their
daughter to be alone.
* *
*
Harriett
walked carefully down the sidewalk. It
was the week before Christmas, and she didn’t want to slip on the ice with her infant son in her arms. He’d been born
with gray eyes and a headful of straw-colored hair adorning his head. The doctor had commented on how unusual that
was, but the boy was also healthy, so she wasn’t concerned.
She
reached her car on the side of the street, and she was about to place her son
in his car seat when someone bumped into her.
“Oh, I’m
so sorry,” the young man said, his eyes wide.
“I wasn’t paying attention.”
Harriett,
barely recognizing him as the neighbor, clutched the baby to her chest. “You’re lucky I didn’t drop him,” she
scolded.
The young
man looked down at the child, while she focused on his face. Something stirred inside her as she looked
from the neighbor’s gray eyes to her son’s gray eyes. They were identical.
“Jonah,”
she said quietly as something snapped into place inside her.
He looked
up, the recognition evident in his face as he studied her. “Harriett.”
That single word was filled with wonder.
He silently offered her his hand.
She took
it, vowing never to let go again.
