Cursed In Utero

This post is the continuation of a fiction series. I’m reworking a discarded chapter from my existing WIP manuscript and sharing it in pieces here. If you missed the first five installments, read 5 Posts. 1 Story. 1 Place. before reading this post. Come back next Monday for another installment.

Jewel cursed on the sidewalk outside the New Orleans House of Voodoo.

The stuccoed one-story building wasn’t what she expected. Crooked walls marched up to a jagged slate roofline. Here and there, bricks peeked through cracks in the stucco, made more glaring by the spotlights shining on the ramshackle facade. She imagined darkness. A forgotten building hidden in the heart of a city block. Not this establishment, center-of-the-block, its /House of Voodoo/ sign lit up like New York City.

Jewel felt satanic energy pulsing in the air.

Ah yes, she needed a good dose of Lucifer, and she didn’t care what he cost. Holding her head high, her heels clicked up the brick walkway and through an open door draped in black velvet. A bell’s tinkle drowned in the heavy air. Burning incense singed her nose hairs and clotted in her lungs. With all the street noise, revelers and whores and degenerates weaving their way on the sidewalk steps from where she stood, inside the building was like what she imagined King Tut’s tomb must’ve been like before it was disturbed.

She always wanted to see Egypt.

“I know what you’re here for.”

Jewel cursed at the voice behind her. Turning, she came face-to-face with a pale blonde woman. Her child-like features were unadorned, no makeup anyplace, and her knee-length hair framed her waif-like body like a cape.

Jewel stiffened. “But I need a professional, um, voodoo person. You can’t be more than twelve.”

The right corner of the girl’s mouth turned upward slightly as she tilted her head. “Age is relative here.”

When she showed Jewel her back and headed down a dim hallway, something – stupidity? desperation? – compelled Jewel to follow.

“What’s your name?” Jewel wondered, but the girl never answered, didn’t even slow her pace as she passed through a doorway and disappeared. Jewel hurried to catch up, the blasted fetus awake and kicking her lungs and diaphragm all the while.

Beyond the door, she found herself standing on an enclosed porch at the back of the house. A fabric shop’s worth of black velvet hangings covered the windows, spangled the wooden ceiling, even crept over the table in the corner where the voodoo girl sat with her eyes closed. Jewel saw the outline of the veins in her hands as she approached, uncertain what to do. The girl’s cursed lips moved faster than Jewel ever thought possible but no sound escaped. And since she cound not find another chair to relieve herself of the cumbersome hulk of her baby, she stood a few feet from her. Waiting. Willing something, anything, to happen.

“You don’t want what you think you want.”

Jewel started backward. The girl’s former soprano was a deep, rich bass, the boom of a man four times her size. Jewel shielded herself with her purse but she stood her ground. “How’d you change your voice like that?”

“Why kill your daughter when a curse can be so much more satisfying?”

TO BE CONTINUED…..

To see what else I’ve been writing in series fiction, visit The Aftermath of Death, She Was Venus in Fur, Grief Out of Balance, For the Love of a Gun, Death by Toilet, Biscuits, Gardenias and a Funeral and Everything Dies. I’m also on Medium HERE.