Curses and Will Chapter 1: Chapter 1: She Who Held

Read chapter 1 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The ceiling fan turned in slow, tired circles, the same way it had every morning of my life. I watched it before I let myself fully wake ,that small mercy of three or four seconds where I hadn't yet remembered who I was. Then I remembered. My hand came into view as I sat up. Pale. Too thin. A stranger's hand that happened to share my nerves. The room hadn't changed. It never did. Damp had crawled up the walls years ago and never left, leaving long brown continents across the plaster. The one window let in light the color of dishwater, filtered through grime I'd stopped bothering to clean. There was no reason to make a cage beautiful. In the corner, it waited. I didn't look at it directly ,I'd learned that lesson young. A hunched shape, folded in on itself like a question mark made of rot, with two red eyes that never blinked and never looked away. I felt them on the side of my face the way you feel sunburn forming before it hurts. I didn't scream. I never did anymore. Screaming had only ever taught me that no one was coming. I got up. I brushed my teeth with water that had gone stale in its cup overnight, because the tap took too long to run clear and I didn't want to stand there waiting, alone, with that thing breathing wherever things like that breathed from. I pulled on the school uniform that had been new four years and two sizes ago. In the cracked mirror, a tired face looked back at me, looking older than seventeen, looking like something people crossed the street to avoid. Cursed , they said. Not unkindly, usually. Just factually, the way you'd mention the weather. Maybe they weren't wrong. The walk to school took thirty-one minutes if I didn't stop, and I never stopped. The street was never quiet; even when no one spoke, it buzzed, a frequency under the silence made of held breath and turned heads. I kept my eyes on the cracked pavement and let the world happen around me like weather. They were there too. They were always there. Thin shapes pressed into doorways, draped over telephone wires, curled beneath parked bicycles like something that had died there and forgotten to stop existing. Spirits. Yokai. Whatever the right word was, I'd never found one that fit cleanly. They didn't bother me anymore, not in the way they used to. We had an understanding, the dead things and I. I didn't look. They didn't follow. Mostly. At the school gate I saw Mio. We'd dated for four months in middle school, before. She was laughing about something with her friends, head thrown back, sunlight catching her hair, and for one half-second her eyes slid across me the way eyes slide across a parked car. Recognition, then nothing. I didn't blame her. I remembered exactly when it had ended, the day she'd seen the shape standing behind me on the train platform, the day her face had gone the color of old paper, and she hadn't said a single word, just stepped back, and kept stepping back for the rest of that year. You can't argue with a person's instincts. Some part of her brain had simply decided: whatever that is, I am not getting any closer to it. I'd have made the same choice, if I could've. Class happened around me, not to me. Words slid past without finding purchase. I left before the bell rang, the way I always did, because staying for the last five minutes meant walking out with everyone else, and walking out with everyone else meant being the empty space they walked around. The walk home was when the real ones found me. Not yokai. People. "That's the cursed one." Soft, the way you'd point out a stray dog. "His whole family burned up. Everyone but him." "Should've been him too." They never said it loud. They never had to. I had thirteen years of practice reading a sentence in the half-second before it was finished. I was four when the fire took my parents. The official story was a gas leak, written up clean and filed away, a tragedy with an explainable shape. I knew better. I'd been there. I remembered the thing that climbed out of the smo