A Curse

• Raylene D'Cruz, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2021

It was the perfect place to be on a cold, rainy, evening, especially if you were a cursed child. Why? I’ll tell you, but first, let me introduce myself as Alice. I’m short, have onyx slick hair, wear leather school shoes, and love wearing my black silk dress. However, people hate my style. Being a cursed child means I’m blamed for every loss and catastrophe you could possibly think of. I’m abandoned but cared for by another cursed person.
At the back of Worcester Woodlands, lay the perfect place for a magical adventure. Rainday Antiques, was a snug, little cottage, in the middle of the forbidden woods of curiosity. This little cottage was narrow but seemed large. Dusty, but every speck was full of history. Creepy, but full of thrills. Magical, simply full to the brim with adventure. One glorious night was about witches with scraggly black locks on brooms, flying into the white moon, or you’re on a mission to find the gleaming Emerald of life which contained all the power in the whole entire universe.
The woodlands were a deadly place. Sounds of howling wolves in the distance and the pitter patter of rain echoes through your body as you wander through this alive forest. It roamed with gnarly coyotes and rats. The place itself was dark, shadowy, unpredictable, sultry, deep, mysterious and awfully quiet. Rainday Antiques was surrounded by trees, the size of skyscrapers, as if never ending. They were a dark peacock black and their branches were vast and thick, like giant trolls in vests of inky brown, like the rough bark on trees. On the ground, the dirt was moist, lush and shamrock ferns covered most of the scene. Shrubs of violets and marigolds against pebbles made the woods quite mesmerizing and mildly colourful. Leaves, the tint of autumn, scattered around the floor and if you were to travel through this exotic forest during winter in the early hours of a dusky morning, you’d be right in the center of a magnificent and sublime storm of leaves pouring from the tremendous branches.
As for Rainday Antiques, it is sheltered by a rusted tin roof. The outside of the place is covered in irregular stones held together by coarse cement. At the front, a few terracotta pots filled with succulents of almost every shade of green. Around the back was ‘Evergreen’ stable, which was home to two stupendous horses. As you enter the cottage, from floor to ceiling, are brightly polished wooden shelves. About 5 or 6. In all, books of all colours, shades, tints, tones, shapes, sizes.
One cold night, I found a book about returning cursed children into ordinary people. It was navy with gold cursive writing inside. There was no title, so I opened to the first page.
“Three trials is all it takes.
Master all of them and an ordinary child you’ll make…”
A man shouted and I felt dizzy. From clues, I was being whisked into another world to save myself…