Cursebreaker

You knew you were cursed even before that girl told you at the party. There were just too many tiny tragedies in a row: a urinary tract infection, a dropped phone, an email miscommunication which meant you had to work for ten days straight. When you scraped your knees running for the bus, and those wounds became infected, you couldn’t help but cry. After coming back from CVS with the antibiotics, you sank to the floor of your bedroom, despite the pain.  You pushed your hands into your shitty apartment carpeting, begged  to be dramatically smote by lightning. At least then you could self-destruct in an interesting way.

“Oh,” the pink-haired girl at the party said. You had just wandered out onto the porch to her burnout friends, looking to bum a lighter. “You are definitely cursed.”

You didn’t know the girl, but trusted her expertise based on the pentagram earrings and many garish rings.

“You can tell?” you asked and she nodded. 

“Your aura is all fucked up,” she said. “Someone’s messing with your luck.” 

You asked who and you asked why and you asked what to do about it but she shook her head, earrings clattering, and said that was all she could tell you. Then one of her friends started talking about their amateur taxidermy business and none of them paid you any more attention. As you walked back home, your phone tumbled out of your pocket, shattering once again.

That night, you looked up how to dispel a curse on Google, scrolling through AI-generated listicles with pictures of women holding crystals. You wrote out everyone who could be mad at you, but could only think of your former roommate, the man down the street with the Ford F150, and your old college president. You lived your life small and inoffensive—you rarely got pissed off and you doubted that you pissed other people off much. Yet here you were, with no phone and antiseptic bandages on both knees.

So you tried. You thanked the bus driver every time and you tipped 25% and you wrote a backlog of thank you letters to your great aunt. You carried around a water bottle and drank from it every fifteen minutes. You planned your outfits the night before, folded your laundry the same day you washed it, said no to going out and instead stretched in your apartment and listened to podcasts about queer community and radical vulnerability. You cut the dead ends off your hair, then threw them out immediately so they could not be collected by witches. You bought shimmering multivitamins from the internet, placed them on your tongue every morning. You made beautiful kale salads, your hands bathed in lemon juice. You cleaned the bathroom, thoroughly, without being asked.

And yet the indignities continued. All the antibiotics you had been taking gave you a yeast infection. You found a tick on your shoulder, rash-rimmed and engorged. Two days in a row, squashed birds appeared in front of your street.

The second time you found the bird, a heavily pierced figure hunched over it on the sidewalk, poking at its silver feathers.

“Good skull on this one,” they said, as you stared at them from the doorway.

“Hey,” you said. “I saw you at the party last month.”

They looked up, revealing heavy eyeliner and sharp cheekbones, and nodded.

“Do you know if that girl could tell me if I’m still cursed?”

They began to collect the bird into a plastic bag, hands covered with their sweatshirt sleeves. They squinted up at you for a second. “Oh yeah,” they said. “You definitely are.”

That night, you began your bedtime yoga routine, whispering your gratitudes from the day into your knees until you collapsed into despair. Your pussy itched so bad. You stared at the streaky white wall in front of you until you stood up and punched it, like a seventeen year old boy going through a breakup. The drywall crunched behind your fist and you did it again, creating two craters that would absolutely wreck your security deposit.

Whatever, you thought, and you laughed.

That night, you stayed up until 2am, watching video essays about the political implications of various 90s anime and drinking your roommate’s cheap wine. Then you left the house with no shoes on, wandering around the neighborhood until you stepped on glass. You woke up late for work, made yourself even later by masturbating.

You fucked boys you didn’t tell your friends about, forgot their last names, but made them tell you about their local revolutionary cells, before kicking them out at 5am

You bought candy at the corner store and organic fruits at the Whole Foods, devouring them both, messy on your bed, staining the white sheets.

You said yes to everything, parties and protests and poetry workshops, then drifted off to sleep on the T, jail support numbers blurring on your arm.

You did not make time to take walks and observe the changing seasons. Instead, you took too many edibles, watched the Simpsons, had out of body experiences.

You went out and you danced and you smeared your mascara like it was high school again. You booted and you rallied, fucked without condoms, wandered through the city late at night, vandalizing ATMs.

You gave and you took in the same unsustainable manner, staying up late for secret activist calls, joining every working group that would take you, secretly performing direct action trainings on your lunch breaks. You jerked off every day. You cried in your friends' arms and you let them love you and you bit their earlobes as they came in to hug you.

You took your sick days and you did not make nice conversation with your coworkers and you flipped off the cops when you saw them on the street. And when you ran away from them and from your friend—who was yelling to you about strategic resistance—you fell on your face, splitting your lip. And as your friend straddled you, your head in her hands, you asked if you looked hot.

“Like cool anarchist fuckable,” you said, words garbled by your bleeding lips. “Like a person who commits sexy crimes.”

“That’s such a fucked up way to think about activism,” she said and you thought about kissing her but you didn’t.

But your lip healed easy and it didn’t get infected. And as you stared at yourself in the mirror, you realized that your lifelong acne had cleared up and your hair looked cute. You were not taking any more antibiotics or vitamins, you had not broken a phone or lost a wallet in six months, your period had finally become regular. You stared at the sun from your bathroom window, let yourself become late for work.

You had ended it. You were free.

© 2025 Rose Maxewell

Rose Maxwell is  a writer of ghost stories and fairy tales. They live on occupied Massachusett land in so-called Boston, where they spend their time walking dogs, posting bail, and waiting for the bus. You can find their other work in Heartlines Spec and the Vivid Worlds anthology and you can find them online @rosemaxwell.bsky.social.