curses - Stories

John, Hutch, and Putter are the kind of frat bros who use a girl in the middle so they don’t have to name what they’re doing together.

On Halloween there's no girl, but there is a campus legend every freshman has already dared: the grave of Midnight Malcolm, the sodomite witch hanged in 1693.

Call him three times and he comes back to claim what’s his.

Athanasios was once cursed by Aphrodite to never enter Hades until he experienced true heartbreak. For millennia, the satyr has served at the goddess' whims, a pawn given to mortals who invoke her name.
Can a jaded soul find love? Or will Sakis be doomed to forever wander the Necropolis?

A note on this story: it is written in the dense, melancholy register of 19th-century Gothic fiction, and does not shy from grief, loneliness, or loss along its way to its ending.

For a hundred and fifty years, Jack has walked a county that has forgotten him, a farm boy who bartered his soul at a crossroads and paid twice over for it. Refused by Heaven, unclaimed by Hell, he has only a stolen coal to light his way, and windows he can watch but never touch.

Then he finds Julian's: nineteen, ill, certain no one would notice if he stopped waking. As October nears Halloween, the veil thins, and an old bargain comes due.

A Wednesday Brief Holiday Short Story