A Short Exerpt from The Curse

Note: This is a short story I have been working on. The second installment will probably be posted at some point if I receive any interest in it. If not, then I haven't wasted any time, as the second installment has not been written. "Pragmatism" has a much nicer ring to it than "laziness."


They were talking about a waterless well in India on the radio this morning. No water in it, they said, but piled high with baby parts. The commentator described the pieces: skulls and ribs and femurs and spines, all stacked high in the well. It seems that a lot of people in India do not want girl babies. Being born a female is a curse. Hide them deep in the earth before anyone finds out it's a girl baby. I wonder who stumbled on the well. Was it a bright-eyed boy catching grasshoppers who happened across the uncovered grave? Did he wonder at first if it was a pile of animal bones? And then, kicking up the sand, running to his mother, crying out to come look at what was in the well, and what is it mother? She ambles over, laughing, wondering what her curious boy stumbled upon. The intake of breath, the gasp as her hands fly over her mouth when it settles over her, the macabre vision of those tiny wrist bones and arm bones and chest bones and toe bones all stacked down in the dusty, abandoned well.
Why is there such evil in the world? Who has taught us that boy babies are better then girl babies? A mother and a father must live out the rest of their lives never having loved and cared for their daughter. Every pink bonnet, every ballet slipper is a reminder of the void left from dropping their daughter into a dry, dry well. Something must shrivel inside after such an act. Death can dwell among the living. There are those whose weakness betrays them, those whose souls have been claimed by darkness. This is not a story about them. This is not a story about the weak, or the dark; this is a story about the victorious—the women who wrestle with the destructive powers and pin them to the ground. This is a story about triumph.

***
I met Miku at the park on a chilly Thursday morning. My son was swinging upside down on the monkey bars as I sat on the bench, wrapped in a warm parka, sipping my Starbucks. Miku was straddled atop a blue Schwinn, her dark eyes soaking in the children kicking up the fall leaves. Their air smelled of fall: wood fires and wet leaves. Eventually, she wheeled the Schwinn over to my bench. We smiled, the polite distant smile that strangers give.

“Which one is yours?” I inquired, assuming that she was there with a watchful eye on her child, just as I was.

She gave a self-conscious laugh. “Oh, none of them,” she replied. “No children, myself. How about you?”

“Over there,” I pointed. “Riding the tire swing.”

We sat chatting about the weather and the new library being built—those mundane things that you discuss with strangers.

“Well,” Miku announced, standing up and mounting her bicycle, “I better head off. Nice to meet you.”

I watched her ride off in the same direction I had walked. She was hunched over the handlebars, her dark pony tail blown about in the wind. I turned back to my son, wondering why I was left with a weighty sadness at her departure.

I did not give much thought to my brief encounter with Miku until the following day, when I saw her wheeling her bicycle across the road near the grocery store. I caught her eye and gave a little wave as I turned my minivan into the parking lot.

“How are you?” I greeted her as I stepped out of the van. “It's strange we never met before. It seems that we frequent the same places.” I bent over to lift my son out of his car seat. Miku smiled down at him.

“And what's you're name?” She asked him.

“Jason,” He replied, gazing at her curiously.

“What a good helper, Jason, to go with your Mommy shopping,” she said with a smile.