WIP [Curses]

Bright secular sunshine, trees nibbled down to their essentials, forest with name unknown to us, we ambled the trail with our backs to the monastery. It was winding and sluiced us like thread through eye of a needle. Through the woods it lead us towards a large commonplace hush where something holy supposedly might be savored. Didn’t happen that way, of course. 
Immersed in the chilly cosmology of a late January afternoon, we breathed and witnessed puffs and vapor trails and we joked these were second-rate spirits leaving our bodies. Could be Mother Nature sensed there were a pair of atheists in her presence, fellow atheists, so she humored us. A mile or two into her interiors she presented us with a neat little shack. We stepped inside to find a ledger book on a rostrum, a cup filled with pens and pencils. Which to select—ink or graphite? Already we were being tested. Opting out of this dualistic trap, we abstained from writing our names, the date, a little hello note or proclamation. 
Didn’t stop us though from reading the ledger’s recent or more ancient history: a long list of people offering petitions to some hypothetical totalizing intelligence that cared about their worries and hardships. One entry was greedy, ran several pages, handwriting switching from tight cursive to LARGE BOLD BLOCK LETTERS under the grips of SOME STRONG EMOTION. The message that suffered under such penmanship was bitter, angry, generous with condemnations of various impious minorities. Per usual homosexuals were singled out as particularly deserving of damnation. In one vivid passage were described as OPEN SORES upon the FACES of ANGELS. These were weeping, but not with sorrow. With offensive putrescence, so goddamn them.
Might’ve been enough to sour the day but some joker had lightened the pages with doodles of penises. From urethras of a few were speech bubbles filled with silly comments: “LIGHTEN UP, FRANCES!”, “ME SO HOLY”. The talking penises of Gethsemane, we called them. To honor the obscurity of the moment, we each took a pen and drew one, urethra #1 upcurled into a toothy smile, phallus #2 with little arm and hand from which it blew many friendly kisses. There, done. Closing the ledger, we left the shack and afternoon to disguise these signifiant changes we had made to the universe. It was good. 

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I’m reminded here of another. This from a friend who, though he prided himself a rationalist, couldn’t sever his helpless subservience to superstition. 
A month after their wedding, he and his young wife had purchased a house. Call it a year of gifts: first the wedding, then the house. Several people from his home country gifted them twice, burying them under an embarrassment of well-wishing. An acquaintance of one of his aunts, a woman who had on two occasions cut his hair as a worker in his mother’s salon, had presented them with a large potted plant. This he placed in the corner of their new living room. Once a week either he or his wife watered it until its long spiky fronds splayed and grew. A year passed, another. Three years passed, four. In its corner the plant grew large enough to become a fifth member of the family, along with two cats that occasionally bothered it. 
One summer afternoon on a whim he and his wife felt the itch to rearrange furniture. By then their honeymoon was long past and they recognized the need for a refresh of surroundings. Paintings were moved then chairs were, the couch, the bookshelf. To make way for a floor lamp, they shimmied the plant from its corner and in the effort it toppled over, spilled wholesale—dirt, roots, and all—across the floor. 
Working to pull it back together before righting it, they noticed something odd clatter from the pot. A long rusty nail with lengths of human hair wrapped around it. 
The wife was bewildered but amused, the husband paled and mock-spat between forked fingers. 
What was that? she asked. 
Protection against The Evil Eye, he told her. 
For in his home country this was a gesture of ill will, a curse, and hidden as such could only mean the woman who’d gifted them the plant had wished harm upon them. 
But why, the wife asked. She seemed so nice, genuinely happy for us. 
Genuinely shaken, he paused again to fork the fingers of a hand, pointed to the floor before him, spat dryly between the horns. 
The woman still lived in their city, he noted, still visited his mother’s salon on occasion. 
Was it that she was not hired on as a stylist, years ago, by her mother?
It hadn’t been personal. Her mother couldn’t afford to offer a chair and styling station to just anyone? There were so many younger women with beautician certificates, who brought new clientele into the salon. 
Should they tell his mother, his wife asked. 
Never, he told her, because it’s impossible to know whose hair this is, or how it’d been obtained. 
Instead they took the hair and nail into the furthest corner of the back yard and buried it. The tree beneath which they buried it did not die. But in the following years it did not flourish much either.

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