Gutshot by Amelia Gray Page A

the object of our curses. The first was a rash made to climb up her arm like a creeping vine. She saw it when she was cleaning a breakfast dish and set down the soap to idly scratch.
    “What in the fine hell,” she said. It was a poor curse and performed in a hurry. If she had consulted the proper sources, she could have stopped it all right then. Blessedly, she is the type of woman to slap a bandage on a runny rash should it start to crack and bleed, the type to ignore a heart murmur on the occasion of her child’s birthday. She would hope to die on an Easter weekend so as to reuse the church lilies.
    The second curse happened soon after, when each fingernail on both her hands began to darken and smell of scorched plastic. She scrubbed them with acetone. Layers of nail commenced flaking off into shaved-looking piles.
    “It must be that dish soap,” she said. We nodded. At night we curled under blankets and carved incantations into our shared palm. We each had our own hand, but it was the one that joined us that made us special.
    She yelled from her room in the morning and we rushed in to find her hair gone from the top of her head. Her lovely yellow hair, which she would brush and plait each night, was clumped on the pillow like a cat beside her.
    That was enough. She told Phillip to get the car keys and drive us to the urgent care. We sure did, looking like a funny family on the Classic’s front bench, fiddling with the radio station while she sobbed, nails black as a boar, clutching her hair in a bag on her lap as evidence for the ladies in the clinic.
    We had to wait an hour and a half among the others in the waiting room. They breathed in unison and the room expanded and contracted like a lung. One man had cut himself open with a thin blade and another looked ill from drink, while a woman next to him ate a hamburger from the top down, savoring the bun’s upper half before licking the mayonnaise from its toasted bread. The tin shutters on the windows bowed inward as everyone inhaled. Mother was plumbing the depths of her bagged hair like she’d find a jewel therein. We set immediately to a spell.
    It was a nasty set of tricks to play, but truly she chose her destiny throughout. The curse we sent arrived in the form of a line of ants marching in from the swinging glass door and heading for her ankle like they smelled honey under her skin. We watched them shrink as they approached her, to pinpoints and smaller, so small that she wouldn’t feel them when they sped over sneaker and bunched sock onto her bare skin, finding individual hairs and pushing into her pores.
    She felt them soon enough. We imagined it was like sensing her blood was moving independent of bodily whim, which must have felt ticklish in an unsettling interior way. She reached over and clutched Morris so hard that we squealed. The ladies at the clinic were acquainted with dramatics but they weren’t prepared for Mother’s violent dance. One of them came around the counter and restrained her with both hands. The women looked into one another’s eyes and Mother started crying out of pure shame.
    The woman gathered her up and said, “You twinsies follow us.” It was rude of her to deny us our intricacy, and in response we caused a small blaze among the paperwork on her desk. The fire was large enough to startle the desk staff and waste a pitcher of water. We were thrilled at our new and exciting control.
    We were brought to a checkup room and the woman went back to attend to the mess on her desk. Without delay a doctor arrived and ignored Mother in favor of examining the stretched web of baby skin connecting our arms to the shared hand. “I’ve heard about you,” he said, smiling at us. This pleased us immensely and we saw to it that his dinner that night would be delicious. Morris nuzzled the doctor’s hand.
    Mother gripped the table, her blood surely writhing. We started to feel a little bad about it, but there was nothing to do but wait