Thursday, July 19, 2012

New Story - The Curse


This is an idea I had recently and I want to build it into a story and possibly even regular blog entries.  The concept is this - the main character (Me, because that's how I roll...) gets caught snapping candid devotee pictures of an old gypsy woman's wheelchair-bound granddaughter (who is over 18, of course), and puts a curse on the devotee.  Every morning, she wakes up with a new, totally random disability and has to live out that day in that condition.  Once she goes to bed and wakes up the next day, she changes again.

Anyway, here's a quick start to the story, I want to do more and as I said, maybe even turn it into a blog of some sort... like 'Dear Diary, this morning I woke up with no legs...'

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Cathy saw the woman wheeling through the mall and took out her camera phone without thinking.  She didn’t usually take public candid shots, wasn’t even a big fan of them, but this woman was stunning, with long dark flowing hair, wearing a very stylish skirt and blouse with dark stockings on her amazing, perfectly paralyzed legs, and - one of Cathy’s favorite things - no shoes, just soft slipper socks on her turned-in feet.  It wasn’t her typical thing, but for a sighting like this, Cathy couldn’t help but get a souvenir.

Unfortunately, Cathy was so focused on the gorgeous paragirl wheeling by that she didn’t notice the older woman, the woman with the long grey hair, wearing beads and silver trinkets and rings on every figure.  The woman saw Cathy though, saw the camera phone, saw Cathy snapping pictures and taking video of the woman in the wheelchair, her granddaughter.  The woman moved up behind Cathy silently and, without being noticed, clipped a lock of Cathys red hair and slipped it into a thick silver locket.  She whispered words that few people in this century could have translated, and she smiled and nodded as she caught Cathy’s eye.  Cathy felt a chill and suddenly felt uneasy.

Saturday Morning
Cathy woke with sunlight streaming into her bedroom and immediately realized her right arm was gone midway between shoulder and elbow.  The stump didn’t hurt, and Cathy couldn’t even see a scar - her arm just ended six inches below her shoulder.  She couldn’t really think of anything obvious to do in such a situation, so she fell back on thirty years of horror movie programming - she screamed.
Once the scream didn’t work, Cathy assessed the situation - no blood, no pain, no immediate or apparent medical danger.  She just had a stump... and she had to pee.  OK, she thought to herself - this will be interesting.
Cathy went through parts of her daily routine - she used the bathroom and, with some effort, figure out how to brush her teeth, squeezing the toothpaste between her stump and body as she held the toothbrush with her left hand.  She squeezed out way too much, but she was happy she figured it out.
Each little accomplishment in her new condition became a thrill - opening the peanut butter jar by holding it between her thighs, making coffee, buttering toast.  Everything was so much harder without a right arm, but Cathy was starting to get the hang of it.  She even cut a grapefruit in half by holding it between her feet and cutting with the knife in her left hand - that took some practice, but she was so excited that she was able to do it.
Cathy spent the day in the house - she didn’t want to go out and have people see her like this, she still had no idea what had happened and what she was going to do.  She knew she needed to tell someone, talk to someone, maybe see a doctor, but it’s not like there was a wikipedia page for ‘mysterious sudden amputation’.  She watched TV and tried to figure out what to do, eventually not thinking of anything constructive.  She went to bed early and fell asleep rubbing her stump.

Sunday Morning.
Cathy yawned and stretched as the rain pattered against her windows, then realized - she stretched.  Both arms.  She had both arms again - all ten fingers.  Before she had fully come to terms with this new development, however, she realized something else and pulled the blankets off.  Her legs were there, but they looked all wrong, thin and with no tone, and she realized she couldn’t feel them at all.  As her head cleared she realized she had no feeling at all, starting  under her breasts, and her legs looked like they had been paralyzed for years.  She tried as hard as she could to wiggle her toes, but she couldn’t.  She couldn’t move anything below where her body lost feeling.
“What the hell is going on?” Cathy sighed, struggling to pull herself up to a sitting position.  There was a wet stain across the bed and she realized she must have peed, loss of bladder control.  Great.
“So where am I going to get a wheelchair?” she asked herself.  “And how am I even going to get out of bed?”

To be continued...

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a very interesting story, please continue it and publish as soon as possible.

    ReplyDelete