Look, I appreciate that you’re a thrifty witch, scouring flea markets and second-hand stores for cheap altar supplies. You’re proud of each treasure’s unique journey , none prefabbed in a sweatshop.
But I had one request: please, for the love of Hecate, would you remember to clear their residual energies?
Not only can such clinging remnants interfere with your own spells, but you know I’m sensitive. (Easily overwhelmed by negative vibes, you once said.)
You could have simply sprayed your new rose quartz amulet with moonwater. Wrapped it in salt, smoked it with lavender. You could’ve recharged it in the sun for a fortnight. Any ritual would have sufficed.
Instead, you plonked it on your altar and peaced out, leaving it right next to my side of the bed.
Last night, the hypnagogic visions began: red string connecting conspiracies and secret cabals, DIY coffee enemas and vampire facials. I woke with violent cramps seizing my gut after dreaming of raw meat influencers shoving handfuls of bloody hamburger into their smug faces, slimy pink chicken breasts quivering on a breadboard.
Apparently, the previous owner of your new talisman had severe, late-stage internet poisoning. Its malevolence grips my brainstem until I can’t differentiate between my brain soup and their toxic feed.
I’m driven to download the Churnr app and stare in horror as a lesbian tradwife exhorts me to make my own mozzarella from scratch, spewing discount codes for her bespoke beeswax candle kit. I catch myself arranging wildflowers in vintage vases. Then I jolt awake in the produce market, my hands caressing plump heirloom tomatoes, my mouth reciting recipes. I abandon my cart and speed home, cursing you.
A package arrives in the mail, containing an apron embroidered with COTTAGECORE 4 LIFE.. A direct reference to last week, when I screamed I’m not your maid and threw your dirty socks at you—a fight I’ve tried to forget, to deny was part of an emerging pattern, but you just had to poke that bruise, didn’t you?
I storm into our bedroom, intending to sweep your altar clean and send everything back to Goodwill, but freeze when I spot its current configuration: sewing needles jammed into a pincushion heart. Barbie in a pinafore and pink hair rollers, holding a miniature frying pan. And the amulet, draped around the Hierophant tarot card.
You didn't forget to clear those energies at all. You amplified them.
The amulet tractor-beams me in, compels me to chain it around my neck. The quartz nestles into my cleavage. My uterus contracts, flooding me with the Sacred Feminine. And an insatiable craving for liver.
I am beautiful.
I am nurturing.
I am aligned with Divine Purpose.
And what I want most, at this moment, is to breastfeed a fluffy, precious little lamb.
It’s too late to toss your treasure into the trash. No. It’s time to put the apron on and take two steaks out of the freezer to thaw.
As you walk through the front door, I desperately need to tell you about my new source for unpasteurized milk—I found a contact in Amish country. And you know how I'm always talking about learning to quilt? No, for real, I’ve always wanted to. Why are you smiling?
© 2026 Joelle Killian
Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Flash Fiction Online, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and elsewhere. One of her doppelgängers is a psychologist writing about psychedelic therapy. Another was once in an undead dance troupe.