Random Short Stories

Curse

He had vespoid eyes, ever shitting panels of color that reflected my terrified face billions of times over. His vespertilian wings were black and leathery, near as big as he was. The light played over them in ripples of opalescence like light on oil. The thin purple veins that webbed his wings were visible in the meager backlighting of the streetlights. His brilliant white hair seemed a halo, aside from the dark patches made by blood. His voice was deep and smooth when he spoke.

"I don't know why you're scared of me. I can't even touch you," was what he said.

"If I've got no reason to fear you why won't you let me go," I asked.

"Silly little boy. You know nothing of this place or it's curse; soon to be your curse too. I can't let you go, because the last time someone stepped into that building and left, they decimated a town. You walked through the door, so you've got to stay with us," he said.

I was about to just walk around him when a hand pressed over my mouth, three others wrapping around my body and dragging me back towards the building I'd just left. I couldn't make any noise, so I screamed internally as loud as I could to let out my frustration. A faint voice echoed through my head, yelling at me to just shut up. I fainted after that.

I flitted between waking and sleeping like a butterfly moving between flowers. I saw something different each time, although I couldn't tell someone what it was afterwards if they asked. When I finally woke up and stayed awake, my world was black and white. It was a shock when a man walked into the door and his heart throbbed a gentle pink, visible to me through the layers of bone, muscle, and skin. His voice was as gentle as the pink light of his heart.

"This must be scary for you. I'm sorry for that but there is nothing I can do to change that. We are scary at first, until you come to know us. And even then, we are scary," the man said.

I glanced over him, and decided he definitely wasn't scary in the least. I told him so. He laughed like it was the best joke he'd ever heard.

"I don't look scary at first, but I can be. Get me in the wrong mood and you'll be facing your worst nightmare. Looks are deceiving here. Enough about that, I need to understand you; your curse more precisely. Has anything changed with any of your senses," he asked.

"Yeah. Everything is black and white, except your heart is pulsing with gentle pink light. Aside from that, I don't think anything else had changed," I said. He nodded.

"The color thing makes sense. Your eyes used to be blue correct," he asked looking at me. I nodded and he continued, "your irises are now black, except for a vibrant ring of colors around the outside of them. I'm not sure what the color means quite yet, but we will figure that out. There are often parts of our curses that are hard to understand or not immediately apparent. Like my transformation into nightmares when in foul moods. I'll take you to meet the others and we'll see if we can decipher this weakening of color and strengthening of perception." He stood up and walked out the door, prompting me to follow him.

We walked into the living room, filled with other men and women. Hearts were alight everywhere I looked, the different colors and feels hurting my head. Some were sharp and cold, others soft and bright, and just one that was bright but razor edged.

That one light was vibrant teal, as sharp as the edge of a freshly sharpened knife. The man with the bat's wings and wasp's eyes. He was black and white just as everything else was now, but I knew from before I was dragged back into this place that the light would be casting ripples of color across his wings and his eyes would be reflecting images in all the colors imaginable. He stared at me and the razor edges of his heart softened the tiniest bit, the teal coloring with the softest grey along the edges.

"Tell me what you see now," the man beside me said. I told him about all the different colors and intensities, and his eyes showed new understanding after I was finished. "Your new sight gives you insight to the hearts of others. Whether they are gentle or cruel, bright or dark, bubbly or dull. The changing of colors alludes to their feelings. Does this make sense," he asked. I nodded.

"It makes a lot of sense," I said before moving to go talk to all the people in the living room. Most of all to talk to the first one of them I'd met.

I slowly slipped into their daily routine. I came to know each of them as well as anyone could, better at times because I could see the truth in their hearts. I learned definite meanings for a few of the colors. Pink for affection, maroon for hatred, red with the slightest hint of purple for anger, turquoise for sadness, and grey...grey for love. I knew pink was for affection because of how gentle and kind affection was, the same way I knew the other colors matched with their feelings with no doubt. Grey was for love because love was for everyone, no matter who they were, and love had no boundaries. By the time we figured out that other thing I could do, I'd seen the grey for people and animals.

That other thing was my ability to revive the dead. I would see someone, dead or dying, and just...reach my hand towards their heart, and for the briefest moment everyone else could see my heart as I saw theirs, and then the light of my heart traveled in part through my body to theirs; and their heart would light again, and they would wake up again when I removed my hand from around their heart.

More people joined the house over the years. Not all of them could handle it, and not all of them stayed. Those who did became good friends, no matter their curse or how dangerous it could be.

Apparently none of us aged, because the curse that had been laid upon this house caused us to suffer the curse for eternity. Most of us could be killed, but there were a few who were cursed to suffer until all things ended, and even then they'd still be alive and well.

I was well over a hundred years old when the first mass extinction in recorded history occurred. That wiped out the majority of animal life, including well over half the human population. I turned out to be one of the undying ones. The second mass extinction killed most of the plant life, evaporated most of the oceans, and killed three quarters of what was left of the human race. That was when I had been alive for over 500 years, and grieving for over 400 years at the loss of my love in the last extinction.

The surfing animals warped over years to adapt, and the humans left couldn't adapt well enough to survive. So it was just we who would never die. We wandered continent to continent, going wherever the wind blew us.

No one else ever came to our scarred planet if they did exist. I've now been alive well over a thousand or more times the life span of humans when I was born. And I'm going to keep living, and keep trying to die, and keep observing everything around me while I envy their sweet deaths.