The Curse

Triggers: Occult, sexual, mental health, discrimination against single parents, alien abduction and erasure of memory themes.

Swearing and depends what side of the fence you sit blasphemy and irreligious stuff.

Part 1: The Breach and the Sentinel

​The hallway narrowed; the fluorescent hummed deep and knowing. Evadne wailed, “It's happening again.” She was back at that place, trapped inside that loop—the loop of the chessboard dream. Her husband stirred next to her. He mumbled, mostly asleep, “Hun?”—his voice ending on a higher pitch.

​Something forced Evadne’s eyelids open, far apart till they dried, and held them there. She arched her back, trying to escape the pain as it lanced through to her optic nerve—a deep, searing light sourcing the mind behind the eye, to sever the chamber where she didn't belong. From her mouth came an exhale so loud her husband, now trapped in his own dream, reached out and grabbed her shoulder—instead touching the unyielding and violent black veil over a carved female statue, blowing open enough to spit on him. "I belong to God," it spoke.

​Wind wandered across—to the west, a black-and-white landscape formed. Flat leaves lifted to roll and tumble, then stilled as colour bled, morphing into a blurred image, then sharpening as a child sat on a patchwork rug next to a lemon tree. “Water and sugar?” she asked as she took another sip from a small, plastic, pink toy teacup.

​A blinding light—the wall of fire that keeps primordial creation from spilling into the human world—blew apart, soundlessly smashing through behind her as she danced with dusty used curtains and cut-offs from an old dress box. Alerted, the ancient heavenly lineage of King Solomon’s court summoned a local crow of the lowest order. Unimpressed, half-asleep, chewing gum, he landed with a thud, holding tight to balance as the old, unfamiliar wooden divider fence wobbled under him, "Fuck" he muttered.

​The subject, the girl, now a preteen having her first menstruation, bounced a tennis ball against the laundry wall—clapping before catching it, bouncing it again, triple-clapping, then spinning around to catch it once more. Satisfied with her performance, she cooed, “Yes, Legend!”

​Noticing from a new angle in the mulberry tree, the crow thought it seemed like a false alarm—a harmless human anomaly. He watched her dance again. Childish! His mind reasoned, She was normal, very normal; the case should be closed, yet something in his gut held tight when he witnessed a thin, warm air stirring from the east. First it drew the girl's long hair strands out as if counting her lifespan in her DNA with its bony fingertips, viewing an ancient scroll of her sun in the eighth house. "Ketu Mahadasha"(south node period influence), it whispered.

​Ark, Ark, Ark—it was high alert. Why? The crow could comprehend that something was deeply wrong: though unconscious, she was able to move the system. He filed a breach to Saturn. Immediately flying south, he pushed through the gales of fire like a fish swimming against the tide, struggling against the fury. He didn't know why he felt an emotional attachment to her—it made no sense, and he might even be disobeying corvid orders. The vapor, however, understood and nodded quietly to itself: the law of twinning bound human and familiar in an instant, inevitable attraction. “Well,” it laughed, “you both made your decision,” and slithered away—finding its anchor to voice in the static on Evadne's radio: “וּבְיוֹם הֻלַּדְתֵּךְ מָצָאתִי אֹתָךְ” (“U’ve-yom huladtek matzati otach”) [“On the day of your birth, I found you”].

​Part 2: The Gatekeeper

​Evadne’s eyelids folded as the dice rolled in front of her. She knew the verses as if they were an oversung hymn. Here we go again, she thought sarcastically.

​“I AM THE SNAKE,” she said dryly, as the primordial force howled wildly into her conscious mind. Ouch, that hurt, she winced, hunching over as the earworm took hold.

​“I AM the snake—” The air accelerated, surging in a raw display of dominance, “—carved in the dust.” Evadne bent lower; the reality of it set in heavy and serious.

​Breaking into a scream as sharp as a birth cry, the force ended the sentence: “—awoken unknowingly by a young woman descending to hell!”

​Light tore across the ridge of Evadne’s brow, branding Hebrew letters deep into her bone. She rolled sweating, speaking in tongues: “זְכוּת הִיא לִי לְדַבֵּר לִפְנֵי מֶלֶךְ, לָשֵׂאת אֶת כֹּבֶד דְּבָרֶיךָ בְּפִי.” (“Zechut hi li le-daber lifnei melech, la-set et koved devareicha be-fi.”) [“I am privileged to speak before a king, to bear the weight of his words in my mouth.”]

​Her husband’s eyes snapped open. Paralysed, his gaze locked onto the corner of the room. Though obscured by a thick, drab shadow, the sheer, unyielding force radiated like blinding heat, threatening to fracture his mind. With all his strength, he forced his arm up to shield his head.

​The apparition floated close—wearing a jagged, circular gold breastplate covered in strange, flickering symbols, his genitals bare.

​“What the fuck,” her husband muttered as his arm flopped back to his side.

​The gatekeeper bellowed with grounding authority: “I am between the unholy and the holy. Sleep!”

​From the husband’s stiff lips came a defiant echo: “No!”

​Evadne knelt, hands locked over her face as the shadow continued.

​“I am—I am the breath who sharpens the dag—dague—dagger.”

​Looking for vulnerability, a blue strobe of light sliced over her; as she shuddered, blood bloomed from her nose and under her fingernails. Her husband, finally overwhelmed by the cosmic command, dropped flat and snored as the shadow issued the order: “You will not remember, Henry John James!”

​Ropes tightened from Evadne’s wrists up to her elbows as she was dragged down the hallway at high speed. Lowering its voice, it began to search her mind.

​“Eclipsing your thoughts.”

​Finding the entry point, it hissed: “I take from this fair sister.”

​Wings rushed and circled the heavens. Ark, Ark, Ark, carrying the witness to a rabbi looking at the sky in Israel.

The cross held high. A prayer for the gentile and the sins of World War Two.

​Part 3: The Two Canvases

​The walls stood tall as King Solomon gazed, blessing Evadne with white wood and brass handles. Stunned, breathing deep behind her ribs, she moved down the hallway and turned the first handle that spoke to her.

​The room seemed empty, yet held a smell that immediately grounded her—turpentine, linseed oil, and the damp creeping through mahogany panels. On the right easel stood the first canvas. Approaching the dry oils, her fingers traced the woman in a heavy, hooded crimson cloak, the bridge beneath her feet, and the two paths—one ahead, one behind. But the towering columns of the redwood cathedral felt too distant; she yanked her hands away, staying clear of them.

​Something made her turn, her heavy long, black skirt swirling around her ankles as the scene dissolved. Suddenly, she was crushed into a throbbing, hypnotic dance—drums thumping, sweat sliding over almost-naked bodies. In her mind’s eye, she felt like a Victorian anthropologist watching a Haitian ritual. She strained her neck against her stiff, starched collar, peering past the bobbing and gyrating heads toward something she needed to see—the second canvas across the room.

​Pushing past the crowd, the noise abruptly stopped. The image was irreligious, brutal, and sublime. She reached out to touch the English rose lips, so agonized. A naked woman pinned to a jagged cross of driftwood—well, the Romans didn't discriminate, did they? she thought. And why was the cross rising from a churning sea, the salt crusting her hair?

​Evadne dragged her heavy notepad from a large pocket in her skirt and recorded her findings: “The worshippers mistake this frenzy of the nerves for divine possession—what they deem God, science reveals as pure hysteria. And a most strange and unsettling painting.”

​Part 4: Dream Entry

​Evadne wrote in her leather-bound dream book:

Entry 81: Large 8ft thing entering through sliding doors.

​Her husband plopped hot coffee on the bedside table, glancing at her sketch. "What did you dream?"

​"Arthouse."

​He laughed. "That thing needs jocks!"

​Part 5: Second Saturn Return

​A changed road sign blinked: New speed limit 50.

​Fred Astaire sang on the radio: “Can we go all the way...”

​Evadne turned off the car radio. Bored, stuck at the red lights, She stared out, thinking it really should be 40.

​Later, by candlelight with a sip of red wine, she tapped a note to the council on her screen:

​It needs to be 40km at the Riverlink bottleneck. Too many mindless pedestrians—me included—and far too many exits. All the best, Karen aka Evadne James.

​Part 6: The Eight Suns

​The linoleum floor was ice cold underfoot. Evadne breathed out, decompressing her nervous system.

​The corridor was quiet—it felt like a loaded gun left on a kitchen table. A pine door creaked open, revealing number 60, the exact door from a dream thirty years ago. From the realisation, she woke slightly, then fell back into her pillow to be lucid.

​Pleasure and uncertainty washed over her, buffering the shock. Isn't life like that? her mind spoke buffering the trauma. Pleasure, craving, love, hate, suffering, pain, surrender, and joy—all coinciding in your head.

​Rubbing her eyes at the doorpost, she looked into the dimly lit room at an easel and canvas, then slid on her reading glasses. Sadness hit. She remembered her thirties—the fragile, mostly alone creator-goddess painting away, hoisted on a cross by an angry God. Or perhaps "angry" was just a poor translation.

​Still the turps. Still the linseed oil.

​“It's benign, thank God!” she muttered, tears filling her eyes.

​She passed over the threshold, the familiar tension pulling in her muscles and sliding up her spine.

​But now, a new canvas.

​"It's small, rectangular," she gasped, looking closer.

​Eight black-and-white dandelions stood in rigid Victorian illustration, roots exposed, each clockwork face turned toward a different sun. Eight different suns? she questioned. What does that mean?

​Calling the muse, she found her brushes right where she’d left them. She decisively reached for the tube of cadmium yellow and chose her favorite heavy flat brush, loading it like a pianist ready to strike the keyboard.

​Hours went by as a heavenly orchestra played in the sky. She filled the flower heads with underpainting till they smiled. She bowed, sucked the end of her pointed brush so it was like an arrow, loaded it with terre verte, and filled the leaves, raising them from the dead.

​Eventually, she yawned, wiping out the distant suns with phthalo blue. Hmm, winter in my heart, she said sharply, remembering the guru's commanding words. Blessings and curses have the same outcome.

​Taping her photos she chose a picture on her phone, pulling herself down without help off the cross of single parenthood and the scarlet letter. She looked at one granddaughter ducked behind her mother, laughing, and the other looking straight at Evadne.

​Part 7: ה

​From the window, Evadne watched her great-grandmother step off a bus, carrying a molded plastic bag full of leafy things.

​Then the dream’s back door flew open onto a reserve where her great-grandmother had once walked. The window kept the image of the past alive—the hedge surrounding her nanna’s house remained, its gate suddenly thrown wide open by the force of an igniting bonfire.

​Sparks drifted on the wind as a shadowy figure in darkened robes solidified at the door. Summonedike a soldier, Evadne followed it across a bridge to the crossroad. There in the mist, she gathered a handful of dirt and slipped it into her pocket as if it were the most natural thing in the world, whispering, “I'm not afraid anymore. I will cross the sea to be with you. I am my ancestors' will.”

​Part 8: God's Will

​Evadne realized what she had said. The words felt forced out of her, less like a personal realization and more like a trigger, or truth spoken by something that believes secrets are dangerous. Heavy wings beat close by circling and calling.

​Without looking, she held out her left leather-gloved hand and waited for him to land. “Elias, thank you.”

​“Do you think I'd leave you now?” he said, panting.

​“No.”

​They perused each other, remembering fondly. She saw he had grown larger, older, and wiser. And he saw the same beautiful light as he chewed gum.

​“The ledgers are clean, my love,” he bent in and whispered. “You followed Saturn's rules. You loved deeply—though not always appropriately or perfectly.”

​“Oi,” she said.

​“Well, there was that guy...”

​“Oh, be quiet.”

​“...and then that other one.”

​“Shut up,” she muttered.

​Gathering his self-control, he continued. “Rule two: you put everything in plain sight.”

​“Yes, I painted it and wrote it from the subconscious. And what did I get, Elias?”

​“Madame, it happens to many we send—they get confused, disoriented.” He cleared his throat. “Moving forward... lastly, you served. You did your duty and what was asked of you—mostly.”

​“Oi,” Evadne protested.

​“Well, there was that time you put the bins out off-square.”

​“Shut up.”

​“So, you paid your taxes,” Elias concluded in his report.

​As they walked together deeper, Evadne smirked. “Elias, isn't it fortunate that for once my will matched God's will?”

​Elias skewed his beak as wryly as a crow can. “Amen. Let God's will be done...”

​They both cackled an old person's laugh, echoing say together to chicken little:

​“אלהיכם”