Curse Universal

Alpha widowed and exiled from a dream. Siberian winter delirium, or maybe just mold poisoning. A beautiful old house rotting so fast you can watch the paint peel in real time. At least you’ll have something to do while your brain turns to mush.

You keep having dreams about a spider hiding under your bed. You scream and it disappears. You think it must have been a mild hallucination, the kind that bleeds out from half-sleep, so you choose to forget about it. Weeks later, you’re changing your sheets and you find it under your pillow, a huntsman like the one from your dream/hallucination, though it mustn’t have been either because it’s really there, and how long has it been there without you knowing? It has to die because it represents too much, like a hidden camera in a hostel bathroom. You run downstairs and your housemate is in the kitchen eating toast. You apologise for screaming and run back upstairs with the Mortein. You start blasting the poor beautiful thing, but it won’t die. It keeps running around like it’s lost its head, darting away from the death stream. You hit it maybe ten times with a plastic broom, but it won’t stop moving, until one final whack and a brutal twist. The spider’s legs retract into this tragic shape resembling a baby mud crab or a deflated heart. You scrape its body into the dustbin and tie the bag up to suffocate it, just in case it still isn’t dead.

You comfort yourself by looking at images. If you scroll fast enough, it’s possible to enter a state where your vision blurs around the screen and it feels like the object you’re looking at is the only thing that exists. You turn into the object on screen for a moment, then morph into the next thing. You’re a hot pink flip phone. Noodles like a pile of ribbons. Four tomato slices. A t-shirt falling off one shoulder. A girl licking apple juice off her ring finger. Panfried dumplings. Dumplings in soup. Slim hands shuffling tarot cards. A Blythe doll with one eye.  A cow with a woman’s head and dragon wings. Refreshing bright citrus jalapeño salad. Models standing in front of a truck. Pilgrims journey at Kailash mountains. Brittany Murphy in legwarmers. Lucky rabbit feet. Sago lychee and rose water pudding. Mother Mary’s body made of crystals. Socks and Nike flip flops. You can be anything when you’re nowhere, but it all starts to mist together after a while.

Your ultramarine iPhone 16 gets lost one night between the cracks in the sandstone at Marrinawi Cove. You try to get it out with sticks and a flashlight, but you’re crossfaded and you don’t really care. You’re daydreaming about your new life without a phone. This is how it’s supposed to be. Maybe you’ll get a brick, one that flips open like a shell. Except you can’t pay for anything or text your parents and you don’t own a watch so you can’t check the time. You’re limited to being exactly what and where you are right now and it blows to be left outside the mystical group with the rest shut inside. 

Your best friend Ecstacy’s boyfriend Testosterone agrees to give you a lift to the cove so you can look for your phone. You bring a wire coat hanger, looking deranged in athleisure. T brings a hockey stick that you can already tell won’t fit down the crack. You’re like junkies in activewear. You’re scratching up your knees and knuckles on the rocks, excavating. You can see it right there, but it won’t come up. The tide is coming in quick and each time a boat goes by it sends ripples of waves that submerge the phone completely underwater. You’re not even thinking of it as your phone anymore, it’s more like dust. A man comes over with his scruffy looking wet rat dog and just stands there with his hands on his hips. You notice a pair of girls in white string bikinis sitting nearby, vaping. They’re watching you in a bored way when they’re not looking at the eshays fishing off the rocks. And suddenly you remember its Invasion Day, hence the speedboats. T is bleeding somehow and you decide to call it. You’re secretly hoping he will get you an ice cream from the Mr Whippy van to make you feel better and he does, but it doesn’t really work. You ask T how Mr Whippy works, like do they all work for Mr Whippy or are they all Mr Whippy? He isn’t sure. 

You’re hanging from the doorframe, lamenting the loss of your phone to your housemate, the toast enjoyer, who says it seemed to resist being saved. You drag your feet up the stairs to your room that smells like smoke. But Toast calls out, wait I just got a message, it says hi Toast, we found a phone with a missed call from you, do you know who it belongs to? You dial your own number, and they pick up and you’re like how the heeeeeck did you get it out of that crack? And the voice on the other end just says, chopstick method. Something about her tone tells you it was one of the girls watching you in white bikinis. She sounds like she truly doesn’t care and would rather be doing anything else than talk to you. Your reluctant angel. She sends a photo of a Woolies bag stuffed in a bush. You and Toast get the metro to the cove, and you feel much lighter already, like maybe you’re not cursed. You find your phone without a single scratch on it. In its case, there’s a perfectly intact four-leaf clover right where you left it, which seems so miraculous that you can’t help interpreting it as a sign that the curse is lifting. Perhaps this was the action needed to swing you back in the direction of the light. The truth is there’s only one kind of curse, it’s universal. Out of the trenches and into the meadow, and back again.