Read More: A brief Q&A with Liz Rosen
The house had always had a hex on it. Children who had sleepovers there came home describing dreams that they’d floated free of their tangled sleeping bags as they slept. Tradesmen noticed how the house seemed to hum around them as they worked, not unpleasantly exactly, but unnervingly. But until the wife died and they found the bones she kept to throw in the attic, they hadn’t realized it wasn’t just the house.
Then the signs seemed everywhere. In the basement, they found a sigil scratched into the back of the water tank. A bundle of sage tied with red twine was tucked next to the dryer sheets above the washing machine, and a well-thumbed pack of tarot cards was found shoved in the back of a kitchen drawer. Others recalled the way she had often been seen bending down to pluck a leaf or flower from a plant and pocketing it.
People marveled at how normal she had seemed. But now the cookies she brought to the P.T.A. bake sales that no one could ever get enough of began to make sense. The women of the neighborhood gave each other knowing looks and whispered between themselves about how put together she always was, so upbeat and youthful-looking, even as strep throat felled her children, even as her husband’s business fell on hard times.
The bones had disturbed them at first, but then someone had done an internet search on “witch” and “bones” and learned that they were used for divination purposes. Once they learned that, her infallible awareness of the moon phase and her interest in the I Ching made a lot of sense.
It was common knowledge that the house seemed to attract bad luck. The real estate market had taken a turn for the worse as soon as the mortgage was paid off and the house lost a fourth of its value. The children seemed more prone to getting the sniffles, and one had a terrible allergy to shellfish. A decent-sized sinkhole had developed in the corner of the property, and there was the gardener who had stepped in a gopher hole and twisted his ankle, badly.
But in spite of the hex on the house, the neighborhood children loved to be there. Maybe it had to do with the way the wife had special nicknames for each of them and let them help her prepare dried herbs. Or maybe it was the cookies. It was hard to say. One thing was sure: there was more than one child who secretly cried, knowing that the lady who had listened so intently to them was gone. […]
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Liz Rosen is a short story writer whose work has appeared in Litro, Ascent, Pithead Chapel, The Macguffin, Sanitarium, Best Short Stories of the Saturday Evening Post, and others. Her story “Tracks” was the 2021 first prize winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition in the mainstream/literary category. She is a former: writer for Nickelodeon TV, Associate Producer of primetime news, and academic. Her current obsessions are book art and ghost hunting shows. Previous obsessions include, but are not limited to, hip hop dance tutorials, Victorian fashion, and strange words like “slubberdegullion.” She has an on-going obsession with dogs.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Liz Rosen