Kate was cursed by her cousin on his deathbed to never stay.

She and her cousin Bo didn’t hate each other—far from it. They’d grown up together: same small farming town in the inland northwest, population 394. So small that when Bo finished high school, he and his classmates each got a lamppost of their own on the town’s single main road to feature their senior pictures.

Kate and Bo had gone out on the overgrown baseball field to snap his pic. She’d posed him up against the chain link fence by the dugouts, one thumb tucked in his jeans pocket, one leg bent as he leaned against the fencing. The planes of his face caught the sunlight; chain-link shadows dappled his shoulders.

She’d been proud of the composition. She flipped her old digital camera around to show him. “Cool angle, right?”

Bo gave an appreciative whistle, ruffling his hair with his free hand. She caught a whiff of the scented hair gel he’d nicked from his dad’s bathroom shelf for the occasion. “Shoot, that’s great,” he said. “Too bad I won’t be able to return the favor.”

“I dunno,” she said, lowering the camera away from Bo. She scuffed her beat-up sneaker against home base. “Maybe you’ll get a chance if you visit. Lots can happen in two years.”

“You couldn’t get me back here for a billion bucks.” Bo caught her eye, and her disappointment. “Except maybe for your graduation.” He pushed off the fence in one smooth motion, continuous—he had the sort of easy physicality of a pro athlete. It had served him well on the soccer field, back when he’d played.

“But hey, Katie-Kat, look at me. You’ll get out of here too. Promise me.” He tapped her camera with one callused finger. “You’ve got a gift. Don’t let it dry up. Get out there and use it.”

He’d always been like that. The confidence; the ambition; the tough-love, you’ll-be-glad-I-made-you-do-it attitude. Bo took nothing and crafted something out of it, like when they were kids and he’d made her a doll out of grass and dandelion stems.

That day when she took his senior picture, he’d just begged his way into an older friend’s spare room in Seattle and meant to try his hand at city living. He’d sworn he wouldn’t become his father, who’d left for New York only to end up right back where he started. And Bo was always right.

Or, nearly always. Because he ended up back in town a little less than a year later, no billion bucks involved, broke and with a criminal record for petty theft. And a little less than a year after that, he was in a hospital bed in Spokane, and Kate was perched on an uncomfortable chair by his feet, anxiously watching his vitals fluctuate.

He woke up. He cursed her. He died.

Kate toed the line of the speed limit as she rode, feeling the shudder-rumble of her motorbike growling beneath her. The landscape was scrub brush and scattered trees, a wide expanse of unbroken South Dakota. She’d gone to the library before she’d left Sturgis, logged in to her forum accounts while the ache in her feet crept up to a burn, and found a message awaiting her. An address.

It was in a small town in Dane County, Wisconsin. She’d be there in eleven hours—ten, if she pushed it.

She pushed it.

As the miles ticked past, she allowed herself to hope. She’d once thought hope was delicate, easily crushed; she’d found since that it was a more resilient thing. For each hope she’d felt crunch down like a bug under a boot, another had risen, fresh and new.

Kate’s hope was on the horizon. On dog_lover_vi, the username that belonged, if she was lucky, to another sorry soul who’d been cursed.

Kate was always:

1. Tired. She was homeless in the deepest sense. The more roots she put down, the quicker the curse spread. The longest she’d stayed in one place since Bo died was two weeks. She read once on a library computer about something called the first-night effect; that on the first night in a new place, the human brain sleeps like a dolphin, one hemisphere dormant at a time. Maybe that was why she was always exhausted. Why the bags under her eyes only ever deepened.
2. Broke. She was a promising student in high school—youngest of five siblings by five years, a surprise baby used to her parents letting her do what she wanted if she kept her grades up. She’d been on track to graduate with honors until Bo’s curse, two months before graduation. No high school diploma and no stability meant no money.
3. Angry. At Bo, mostly, which was hard because he was dead, gone where her anger couldn’t follow. She was angry at him for cursing her. Angry for how he’d done it. Angrier still that he’d had the audacity to leave her to deal with the aftermath of his choice. That he’d left her alone.

When Kate got to a new town, the first place she went was the library.

She had a soft spot for librarians, with their carts and organization systems and ubiquitous cardigans. Kate wore the same glasses she’d gotten in high school, with bright blue frames she went through phases of liking, and librarians always complimented them.

She usually started by finding the least-harried librarian and asking gently probing questions about the supernatural, about the occult, about curses. Typically, she said she was doing research for a school project. Early on, the librarians had assumed high school; these days, college.

Kate had read everything from new releases in shiny hardcovers to thick old tomes taped into usability to books written by locals and kept on special shelves. She’d learned more about crystallography, tarot, and auras than she cared to know, and could recite a few of the better ghost stories off the cuff, but she drew a blank when it came to her curse. The bona fide kind.

Kate called her curse a chafe. At the outset, it always felt like she’d gotten a mild rug burn on the bottom of her feet. Uncomfortable, but manageable. When she pulled off her socks, the effects of the curse looked at first glance like bruising, blue and purple splotches spreading across her soles. If she looked closer, though, the colors would shift and merge like goo in a lava lamp, an uncanny dance against the topography of her skin.

The curse would start to climb within a day or two, ebbing and flowing up her calves, stretching its blotchy fingers across her kneecaps and thighs. She’d tried over-the-counter meds, shoplifted rash medications and antihistamines, downed four shots of a stranger’s tequila in an experimental bid for numbness. Nothing helped; nothing stopped the ceaseless upward creep. By the time the curse reached her stomach, the discomfort in her feet was usually enough to motivate moving on. She’d once let it get as high as the underside of her ribs, turning her whole lower body into a shifting morass of colors and pain, before giving in.

Once, in Wisconsin, a hawk-eyed waitress at a diner had noticed. She carried a no-nonsense air: middle-aged, fast-talking, candid. “Things all right at home, honey?” She’d asked Kate bluntly, gesturing with her pen under the table.

Kate had reached down to tug her pants leg further over her ankle. “Yeah, thanks,” she said with a half-smile. “Just…uh…just a bruise from the road.”

Bo had always called her a terrible liar; even five years after his death, she could hear the admonishment in his voice. Should’ve told her you got it wrestling tigers in the circus, he might say, if you’re wasting your breath on a lie with shit delivery.

The waitress had raised both eyebrows impressively high, communicating in no uncertain terms that both she and Kate knew Kate was full of shit. Then she’d taken Kate’s order and Kate had scarfed down half the plate before skipping out on her tab when no one was looking.

Kate knew of three other people who’d been cursed.

The first she’d found via one of her forum accounts. It had been two years in. She’d long since moved past denial about what Bo had done to her; she was staunchly rooted in anger, with a taste of bargaining on the side. She holed up in her sister Lauren’s spare room in west Kansas for four days, long enough for the curse to make its undeniable mark, and took a picture of the result.

Even in the still image, the colors on her legs shifted and spun. She uploaded the photo on a few sites with the caption: If this looks familiar, message me.

Three months later—when she’d long since resigned herself to the post being a wash, after weeks of weeding out randos and weirdos who popped up in her messages like dandelions—she heard from another user. He sent a picture of his own. She almost deleted it, thinking of the other unsolicited pics she’d received, before it loaded.

He’d taken a photo of his hands. His skin was darker than hers, but she could still see it looked mottled, bruised—and the colors shifted as she stared. A familiar pattern.

She met him in Durham, North Carolina, at a Mediterranean grill and grocery. His name was Samuel. He was mid-thirties, by her guess, and drove a nice car. He bought her a lamb gyro heavy on the tzatziki and they ate outside, at a black picnic table.

“Thought I was the only one,” he said, scooping up a glob of hummus with a pita. He lifted his free hand and splayed it, showing her the markings. “I’ve mostly gotten used to it.”

“Mine looks like yours,” she said. She hadn’t been in Durham long enough for the chafe to start, but she could feel the promise of it weighing heavy, like the charge in the air before a storm. “It gets worse the longer I stay in one place.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How’d that happen?”

So she told him. About Bo and the hospital bed, about vanilla pudding and last words and curses.

By the time she finished, he’d set down his food and was looking at her with an intensity that reminded her of Bo. “Huh,” he said. “Well, doesn’t that beat all.”

“Is it…different? From how it happened for you?”

He shook his head. “No. Just didn’t expect it to be so similar. Mine was my mama when she died. A bad cancer.” He made a strange face, somewhere between a grimace and a rueful smile. “She was dying, and she knew it. I was right there next to her—it was the middle of the night, and I was the only one up. She put her hand on top of mine and stared right into my eyes. I could just see how much she loved me. You know?”

“It was like that with my cousin.”

“Yeah, thought so. Anyway, that’s when my mama told me—and she said this like she believed it—‘You’ll be with a nice girl. Someone who’ll give you children.’ And then she died.”

Kate’s brow furrowed. “And…that was it?”

Samuel shook his head. “You don’t get it. I’m not…I didn’t date. I don’t like women. And I don’t want kids. She knew all that and couldn’t accept it. It was a hard way to lose her, on those last words.”

Kate winced. “I’m sorry.”

“My curse always starts here,” he said, lifting his hands again. “It’s slow, but it builds, the longer I go between dates. Just keeping some profiles running on online dating sites gives me a little relief. I feel bad about leading on the women, but I try to be respectfully boring, and I always get the check when they let me.” He studied his hands again. “I know it would probably go away if I actually got married or had a kid, but I…I just can’t make myself do it.

“Anyways, I keep worrying it’s going to get worse as I age,” he added, “but so far…” He shrugged.

“How long is so far?”

“Eleven years.”

Kate’s heart thudded in her chest. There went her hopes that Bo’s curse would lose its teeth over time.

“But it’s not so bad,” Samuel said. “I mean, not like yours. Sounds like hell, staying on the road like you do. Always leaving.”

It is, she thought, and instead of saying it, shoved a too-big last bite of her gyro in her mouth and chewed. It helped, to meet Samuel, but she’d somehow hoped that this would be the end. That, instead of giving her a hot meal and camaraderie, he’d have solved his curse and taught her how to break her own.

Before she knew what he was doing, he had his wallet out. He pulled a few bills from it and held them out to her.

“Oh, no,” she said, lifting her hands. “I couldn’t.” (She was still too proud, then.)

“Look,” he said. “You’re worse off than I am. Take it.” He pulled out a business card and scribbled on the back. “And here’s my personal number. You call me if you need anything. And if you find anything. Okay?”

She hesitated, then gave in. She folded the bills around the business card and tucked the wad in her pocket. “I will. And you’ll call me?”

“Count on it. We’re birds of a feather. And of a very select flock.”

She’d been through Durham a few times since then and taken Samuel up on an offer for a spare bed to crash on. On one of those occasions, she’d noticed his curse getting particularly bad—it had crept all the way up under his sleeves.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just give in,” he admitted to her, right before she left town. He was facing Kate in his driveway, looking past her and her bike down his nice street in a nice neighborhood, and seemed not to see them at all. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

Kate and Bo liked hitting each other with sticks as kids. (This shouldn’t have engendered amity, but nevertheless did.)

They were close enough in age that their moms—sisters, born and raised in the same town they’d probably die in—often shoved them together at family gatherings to entertain themselves. Kate’s older siblings were preoccupied with their personal lives and dramas. Bo’s older brother had died of a burst appendix when Bo was four, and his parents had promptly funneled their attention from their remaining child into the fathomless well of grief.

So Kate and Bo, left to their own devices, would find good long sticks outside and pretend they were swords. They were fencers or samurai or knights, as the mood took them. They yelled, En garde! They whacked at each other with intensity. Neither one of them was a crybaby, and any earned bruises went hidden and unremarked upon by the family.

That was back in the time when they were young and didn’t yet know there was more to want. They walked past grain silos and green fields, drove thirty minutes for soccer games, and spent hours playing pretend in Kate’s living room, building forts out of sofa cushions until someone made them stop.

Samuel was the first person Kate had discovered with a curse; the second was a man up in Vancouver who’d posted a picture of his temples, where the distinctive shimmering curse-bruise followed the curve of his hairline.

This was a mere six months after Samuel. The Canadian man didn’t give her his real name—just called himself A.J. His messages were short, paranoid. He kept asking if she was real. He wouldn’t message her details about his curse but told her he’d talk if she came up to meet him.

Kate tried to explain that she couldn’t—that she didn’t have the time, documents, or permanent address she’d need to apply for a passport, much less the money for processing fees. Halfway through the message, A.J. blocked her.

Kate motored east. Body against bike, bike against road.

She hadn’t put much thought into home before the curse. She’d known most of the kids in her graduating class, like Bo, wanted out however they could manage it. They talked about town like it was fingers locked around a throat. Choking.

Kate was not a confrontational classmate. She didn’t pipe up to say that she loved the way the wheat fields swayed in a brisk breeze, like an ocean or a van Gogh painting. She didn’t defend the way the willows by the creek caught the sunlight and filtered it in a glorious green curtain. She didn’t point out that the rust on the roof of the old shack by the train tracks swirled a beautiful pattern across the corrugated metal.

(When she wasn’t out with Bo or doing homework, she traipsed around town with her camera. It was how she found these things and others, these snapshots of beauty. They were private. Hers. You didn’t notice most marvels until you had a camera in your hands.)

(And besides, it wasn’t like bringing up any of this would change anyone’s mind—not Bo’s, not her classmates. She didn’t want to be weird. She kept her mouth shut.)

The sun was at her back now. She chased her shadow east. The dividing lines on the road ticked past, a blur of yellow.

Only a few more hours before she’d meet dog_lover_vi, who claimed to know how curses worked. Who might know how to break them.

So Kate rode, and let the sound of the motor drown out her memories.

Early on, when Kate hadn’t yet understood her curse, she’d let her dad bring her to the doctor. The chafe had developed slowly, then, taking a few days after Bo’s death to get all the way up to her knees. She later attributed the speed to the fact that her family had still been traveling up and back from Spokane in the aftermath.

The family was preoccupied with arrangements for Bo, but what Kate thought was inexplicable bruising had been alarming enough that her dad had driven her to the nearest emergency room, a couple of towns away. The cab of his truck smelled faintly of tobacco, the scent sending her back to when he’d take her on a long drive once a month like he did with all her siblings. Just to talk. One-on-one time held sacrosanct.

Neither of them spoke on this drive. They sat quiet, worn-out. Listening to the engine rumble, to the thump-rattle when they hit a pothole, to the country radio station crackling slowly into static as they got farther from home.

By the time they arrived, Kate’s bruising had faded to cover just her feet, the ache subsiding into little more than a mosquito-bite itch. “Sorry, Dad,” she’d said, pulling off her shoes and propping her legs on the dashboard. “I think it went away?”

He looked at her skin, then through the windshield at the emergency room, its windows reflecting the daylight. His face was drawn, tired. “Better to notice out here,” he said finally. “Less expensive.”

When they’d driven back, the curse had picked right up where it left off, but she hadn’t told him for another day or two. She still felt the lingering sense that she shouldn’t be a bother.

She discovered the curse’s limits quick. It hurt less when she was on her feet. Started to fade when she was moving. Disappeared when she left town, though the longer she fought it the further the curse seemed to expand its effect. Early on, just walking past the train tracks bordering one end of town was enough to earn her a little relief; soon, even taking her dad’s old motorbike to the next town over didn’t do much.

She connected the dots at Bo’s wake, her legs aching under a hand-me-down black dress one of her older sisters had worn to three family funerals in a row (two grandfathers, one great-uncle). She could hear Bo’s voice, all at once, clear as day: You won’t stay, Katie. Not ever.

She left town for good the next morning. She didn’t know how to explain it to her parents—didn’t even know how to try—and she hadn’t slept well the night before, the curse wrapping her lower body in a bruising grip. She finally fell into a fitful slumber a few hours before dawn. When she woke, all she knew was that she had to leave, as primal a compulsion as the desire to eat.

Astride her father’s motorcycle, flying towards I-90, she’d finally felt the curse ebb away. The relief was so tangible she could taste it.

She hadn’t known what was in store. Hadn’t even suspected.

That was five years ago.

The third curse Kate heard of—and the second person she’d actually met—wasn’t through an online forum at all. It had been less than a year ago. She’d spent a long day at a library in Arizona shuffling through archived newspapers on a tip from a white-haired librarian.

Kate had asked in a roundabout way about the curse-bruising. The librarian had pursed her lips. “There was a story in the news about some sort of strange markings on a local woman,” she said. “I remember, because we were worried it was contamination at the time. You know, something in the water. Like Los Alamos. But all the tests came back clean.”

Kate perked up. “Do you remember when?”

The librarian shook her head. “Twenty years ago, maybe? Thirty? My memory’s not what it was. You’re welcome to dig through the records.” She directed Kate to the papers and left her with a bright, “By the way, dear, I love your glasses.”

The article in question had been published twenty-four years ago, shortly after Kate was born. There was a picture of a woman’s neck. Even in black and white, Kate thought, the markings were familiar.

The woman was named Geraldine Hewett. When Kate looked her up in Arizona’s voter registration, not expecting anything, she showed up living just a mile down the road from the library.

Geraldine’s house was a single story, as squat as a toad and roughly the same color. There was a gray Toyota Corolla parked in the driveway, its bumper spotted with rust. A sign posted in the yard announced: TRESPASS AND DIE.

Kate took her chances and mounted the porch steps.

She knocked as politely as she could, ignoring both the No Solicitors sign below the doorbell and the I MEAN IT addendum below that. She knocked again—and was just about to give up the ghost for the day—when she heard it, through the thin wooden door. A distinctive sound, one she knew from years growing up in a hunting family: a rifle being cocked.

She still had a survival instinct, but it had been worn down on the road, and now it was beaten into reckless submission by her desperation. “WHOA, HEY,” she called out, “I’M CURSED AND I THINK YOU ARE TOO.”

Then she pushed herself up against the side of the porch, trying at the very least to get out of the line of fire.

Nothing moved. The house seemed to breathe. After a lifetime, the door cracked open.

An eye peered through, set in a wrinkled face. Kate thought she glimpsed a knitted turtleneck, though it was still the warm end of autumn.

“Geraldine?”

“Prove it.”

Thank god Kate had already been in town long enough for the curse to show. She reached down to her leg, moving slowly, and tugged up her pants to bare her ankle.

Geraldine studied the evidence with a sharp eye. Her gaze flicked back up to Kate. “Explain.”

Kate did. As succinctly as she could. Her curse, in all its glory.

When she was done, Geraldine shut the door. Kate’s surprise was just transitioning to indignance when she heard the slide of a chain in a lock and Geraldine opened it again. “Come in,” she said. “And make it snappy.”

She sat Kate down on an old floral sofa and offered her a handful of prepackaged saltine crackers. Kate did not turn food down as a general rule; she munched as Geraldine spoke, trying to keep the crumbs contained.

“It was my daughter,” Geraldine said. “I won’t beat around the bush—I blame her for it. I was a schoolteacher before I had my children, two boys and a girl, but my sons had sense in them. One’s a doctor, one’s a nurse. Good boys. They’re still alive. She isn’t.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Geraldine sniffed. “She was sick most of her life. I told you I was a schoolteacher—I taught science, evolution. I never was one for organized religion. My late husband and my sons, they felt the same. But my Lucy, she found peace in the idea of a big-G God. Don’t know if it was her health that led her there, or the town she grew up in, but it certainly wasn’t me. She got married to an evangelist. They had the ceremony in a big church. Stained-glass windows, the works.”

Geraldine paused to shove another handful of crackers at Kate. “All the doctors told her not to try for a baby. It’d kill her. She shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant, but she did, and for Pete’s sake, she decided to keep it. Said she had faith.”

The wrinkle lines around Geraldine’s lips tightened. She smoothed her hands against her skirt, and for a breath or two there was nothing but the sound of skin against cotton and the clock on the wall ticking away the afternoon. Then she knotted her hands in the fabric and straightened, shrugging off the moment like a shawl.

“I watched my Lucy die with a grandbaby inside her,” Geraldine said evenly. “And the last thing she said to me was something about church. You’ll find God, mama, she told me—and she was looking right at me, eyes shining like they always did when she got preachy. I don’t doubt she meant well. She had a kind heart, my Lucy. She loved me more’n anything. But that’s when it started.”

Kate swallowed. “I…I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry’s not worth the time it takes to say it,” Geraldine said. “I go to church now, every Sunday and sometimes during the week, else this gets too bad.” She tugged down her turtleneck just enough to show Kate the telltale sign of the curse, curling beneath her chin. “I bring my knitting. Helps pass the time.”

“I…I see.” Kate crumpled her plastic cracker wrappers in a fist. “Look, I’m trying to figure out how to beat mine, somehow—”

“You can’t,” Geraldine said, curt. “It’s a lost cause.”

“But we have to try. Don’t we?”

“It’s been two decades,” Geraldine said. “I’ve made my peace. You haven’t. That’s why I let you in here, so I can tell you it’s not worth fighting. If you’re not going to listen, then…then get out.”

It was the first time her voice had quavered. Kate saw a flash of a deep sadness in her eyes—gone as quickly as it had appeared.

“Are you sure—”

“Leave,” Geraldine said, gaze hardening, “or I really will shoot you. Put you out of your misery.”

Kate left.

She was used to that.

Kate had been on a rotation between her siblings’ places—minus her eldest brother Danny, who considered her a “no-good do-nothing tramp” (his words) and wouldn’t let her couch-surf, not even for a night—but she hadn’t gone home since Bo died. If she even got close to eastern Washington, the chafe would start up again, a warning. Don’t even think about it.

Kate had considered telling her parents, her siblings, about the curse. But it sounded crazy, and she knew it sounded crazy, and when people thought you were crazy they locked you up somewhere and didn’t let you out.

Kate didn’t know what would happen if she couldn’t get out. If she was forced to stay.

She had nightmares about it. The bruise-colors climbing her chest, her shoulders, her neck, until they choked her face. Aches and pains radiating out across her skin as she pounded against padded walls, begging disbelieving doctors to let her get back on the road. They’d never believe that leaving was what would save her; they’d keep her until the curse crawled inside her, too, gnarling in her lungs. Stopping her heart.

They’d be baffled in the autopsy. She’d be unrecognizable. They’d have her funeral and call it a medical mystery, a hometown girl gone off the rails. The truth tucked side by side with Kate in her coffin.

That’s how the dreams always ended: Kate, unmoving at last, buried three plots down from Bo.

So she dreamed of the curse killing her. Less frequently—more strangely—she dreamed of the moth. Half a dream, half a memory.

Kate was seven. The moth had gotten in through a hole in the screen door, and now it battered against the flickering bulb above the kitchen sink. She dragged a chair over and, after a few aborted attempts, trapped the moth against a cupboard.

She felt it fluttering helplessly against her hands, the soft touch of its panic. Carefully, she cupped it between her palms and trotted to the back door.

When she told Bo what she’d done, he said, in the definitive way of one older and wiser, “It probably died, you know.”

“What?”

“You can’t touch moths,” he said. “It hurts the scales on their wings or something.”

“But I just wanted to help.” She felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. “I wanted to save it.”

He looked almost guilty, then. Self-aware enough to realize he’d gone a little too far, that Kate was a little too young. “I know,” he said, patting her awkwardly on the head. “I know you did.”

Kate met dog_lover_vi in a neighborhood just outside of Oregon, Wisconsin.

The door opened as soon as she threw her bike on its kickstand. A middle-aged woman exited, tall and smiling, two leashes looped around her wrist. She waved. “Hey, there,” she called. “I’m Violet. You must be Kate. Mind if we talk while we walk?”

The dogs milling around her feet were dachshunds: canine sausages with russet coats that shimmered as they waddled about. Violet handed Kate a leash and turned down the driveway.

Kate was grateful for the walk, her legs sore after a day on the road. They meandered for a while in silence. Violet had an easy gait; relaxed shoulders; and, Kate noticed, splotches of paint on her hands.

“So,” Violet said, “I got cursed. Any guesses how?”

Kate thought of Samuel’s mother, Geraldine’s daughter. She thought about Bo. “Someone’s last words,” she said.

Violet raised an eyebrow. “Good. Very good. You’ve met more of us, then?”

“Two.”

“Thought so. Hard to notice the trend, otherwise.” Violet tugged at one of the leashes. “No, Ruffy, get out of there.” (The dogs were determined to enter the many culverts dispersed throughout the neighborhood, and Violet was equally determined not to let them.)

“Have you met more of us?”

Violet nodded. “A few, spread across the world. I was…I was quite desperate, in the early years, to break mine. And I had the resources to pursue that goal.” She paused while one of the dogs sniffed at a bush. “I couldn’t do it—break mine, I mean—until I understood how they worked.”

“How do they work?” Kate could see the puzzle pieces, waiting to be put together, but she wasn’t quite there yet. That was why she’d come, wasn’t it? To get her answer. An answer in someone else’s voice; an answer that meant she didn’t have to go back to that last moment with Bo.

Violet looked at her. Her eyes were dark, her expression solemn. “I think you already know,” she said. “I think you might’ve known as soon as you were cursed.”

Kate swallowed.

Violet said: “Tell me.”

This was what had happened when Bo had placed the curse:

Kate had been sitting on the end of his hospital bed. She’d been crying so much over the week prior that she felt as wrung out as a ratty old rag. He’d been touch-and-go in the first few days, but they said he was recovering well. Something wrong with his heart. Congenital.

It was quiet in the room, though the nurses sometimes chattered as they walked past his open doorway. Bo’s mom, Kate’s aunt, had made a foray downstairs to the hospital cafeteria, not wanting to touch the dinner a nurse had brought him—a bowl of tomato soup, an egg salad sandwich, and small containers of fruit, apple juice, and vanilla pudding.

Even laid up in bed, Bo kept pushing Kate to eat. “Come on, Katie-Kat,” he’d said, his voice weak. “You know I won’t be able to keep it all down. Have half the sandwich, at least. Or the pudding. If you eat a spoonful with some of the fruit, it’s basically a salad.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

He reached towards his tray with a quivering hand, lifting the plastic knife. It took her a moment to realize he was brandishing it at her. “Then at least humor me,” he said, a sparkle in his eye. “En garde.”

He was trying to make her laugh, trying to lighten her mood. And he was the one in the hospital gown. She managed a half-smile.

That, she thought, was when something went wrong. He lost his hold on the knife; it fell to his blanket quietly, almost anticlimactic. The expression on his face cleared, and then he looked scared. Terrified.

There was no warning. He reached for her, and her hand found his. “You can’t stay, Katie-Kat,” he’d said, a reverberation in his voice that sank into her like an earthquake tremor, all the way down to her toes. “You’re not going to get stuck in that town. Not like me. You’re not going to get stuck anywhere. You won’t stay, Katie. Not ever.”

And then his eyes had rolled up back in his head, the whites showing, and she’d cried out as the hand she held went limp.

There’d been noise, and machines beeping, and doctors, but she’d processed it all at a remove, like there was a thin film between her and the world. Like she was looking from behind a camera.

Stroke, they said later. Caused by a blood clot in Bo’s brain. Tragic, for someone so young.

He’d left her without her best friend.

He’d left her with just those words. You won’t stay, Katie. Not ever.

Not like me.

Bo. Samuel’s mother. Geraldine’s daughter.

“Our curses hurt us,” Kate said slowly, “but the people who laid them didn’t do it out of hate.”

There was a massive tree to the left of the road they walked; Kate watched a squirrel scamper up its trunk, watched the tree’s leaves shudder in the breeze. “I…I think I understand,” she said. “It’s people who love us who curse us. A curse is just a blessing you can’t leave.”

“Mmm,” Violet said. “That’s a good way of putting it. It’s rare to be cursed out of hatred. People just don’t hate hard enough.”

“But they love hard enough.”

“Yes.” Violet sounded a little sad. “They love hard enough to hurt. It’s beautiful, in its way. Painful, too. You loved your cousin?”

There was a lump in Kate’s throat. She thought of impromptu stick sword fights, dolls made of grass, senior pictures on the baseball field. Sneaking out at midnight to listen for owls and watch for meteors. Cramming cans of soda in their pockets while they climbed a tree and swinging their legs ten feet off the ground as they drank, the taste fizzy and cold and sweet. Bo’s smile as he ruffled her hair; his voice as he called her Katie-Kat, treating her like a kid sister more than a cousin. “Very much,” she said. “I still do.”

Violet nodded. “That’s why his curse still has a hold on you,” she said. “Because you still love him. You care what he’d think of you. You let him have that hold. You’ve got to get over it, darling, however you can. He tried to give you a gift, when he died; but you don’t have to keep it.”

The chafe started when Kate crossed the Idaho–Washington border, a warning flash of heat at her soles. She gritted her teeth and clutched her handlebars tighter.

The curse knew she was headed home.

She motored into town within the hour. Past the grain silos and the train tracks; past a few empty buildings and the tall muraled brick wall of the library; past the road that she could turn down to get to her house, where her parents still lived, or to the cemetery, just a little further. First, there was someplace she needed to be.

She puttered to a stop by the baseball field.

It looked just the way it had when she’d left, overgrown grass and worn-down infield and all. She could see Bo as if he was standing there against the chain-link fence. His dreams not yet bottled up to fester and curl. His smile in his senior picture, the fire in him. (They’d used that picture for his funeral. Kate hadn’t picked up a camera since he’d died.)

She walked across the baseball field and sat, her back up against the fence. She propped her elbows on her knees. She could feel the curse coming with a vengeance; nothing stopping it. It was already up to her stomach, and she’d only been back for twenty minutes, tops.

Before she’d left Wisconsin, Kate had called Samuel on Violet’s phone. She’d left Violet with Geraldine’s name, too, in case Violet wanted to try her luck—even tried to find the account of that Canadian, A.J., though it seemed he’d deleted it. Violet thought Kate’s nightmares were a protective mechanism of the curse, a way to keep her from breaking it, but if Violet was wrong, Kate didn’t want to leave Samuel wondering.

Kate was never going to stop loving Bo. But she could assert herself against the echo of him. She could sit right here and gamble on that haunting idea: The only way out is through.

It was a beautiful day. Blue skies, sun, the rustle of a gentle breeze across Kate’s shoulders. The kind of day she remembered as a kid. Running through these fields with Bo, laughing so hard her ribs hurt. They hurt now. The curse had already reached them.

It was moving fast, faster than it ever had. She studied her bare hands: the thin blue veins, the tendons, the knuckles. Imagined them all subsumed by the curse. It didn’t summon the same panic it once had. If she didn’t move, didn’t leave now, the curse would consume her, as hungry as a flame.

She let her head fall back against the fence, sending a ripple through the chain link, and closed her eyes. The curse crawled up her chest. She was a moth, cupped in a child’s hands.

She wasn’t angry anymore. Not at Bo. Not at herself.

She saw a burial plot, dirt fresh-turned. A phoenix, spreading new wings.

Either way, freedom.

En garde, Bo, Kate thought, and stayed.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Leavetaking” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 71A.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© 2026 Tia Tashiro