“And you? Take this seriously, do you?”
Cleo felt heat prickling her cheeks under that careful gaze. Opal was an old hippie, sure, but apparently she was a smart old hippie. Her eyes saw entirely too much, and Cleo kind of hated it.
“Yeah,” Cleo muttered. “I suppose I do.”
The silence stretched a beat too long.
“Then I’m going to suggest that you listen to a fellow business owner. I don’t suppose you’ve had a lot of them to chat with?” Cleo shook her head no.
Opal touched Cleo’s shoulder gently. “Know your worth. If what you’re doing is important, then it has worth. I don’t care if you barter or whore yourself to the capitalist system,” Cleo’s head snapped up at that one. Opal continued, “But know your worth. And what’s worth it to you.”
Cleo thought for a moment, unsure of how to respond. She laughed awkwardly. “This has been the most interesting bathroom stop I’ve ever had,” she tried.
Opal took pity on the emotionally stunted terrible business woman (at least, that’s what Cleo thought Opal was thinking), because Opal patted Cleo on the shoulder gently one last time.
“I bet. Feel free to browse. Call me if you have questions.”
Shoring up her flagging determination, Cleo stood straight. “Would you like for me to take a look at anything? You know, anything that feels...off?”
Opal couldn’t hide her delighted surprise - her eyebrows really were the best. “Come to the back with me,” though, was all she said.
Cleo had anticipated a back room, but what she got was a warehouse separated by an innocuous-looking door with the generic ‘Employees Only’ sign. It was huge back here and Cleo’s sense of unease skyrocketed. There was something menacing here. Cleo just needed to see what it was.
If the public-facing side was well-edited and thoughtful, ‘the back’... wasn’t. There were piles of wood all over; some were high piles of chairs with the legs tangled together indecently, others were heaps of frames all jostling for attention. It was tidy in an overwhelming sort of way. There was a small couch army near the middle of the room with an overstuffed regiment looking like it was poised to move into the store at any time. There were bookshelves full of staring baby dolls, most with hair, but some shiny and blank.
Cleo had stopped following Opal as her feet slowed. “Oh,” Cleo said faintly. “That’s the problem, right?”
The bookshelf in the corner was populated entirely of broken marionettes. Slumped dirty-white clowns missing jaws, fallen-over animals without limbs, a baby-doll with lurid red lips. Every single one of them emanated a sense of wrongness. Twisted and knotted dangling cords dripped off the shelves and rested against the shelf below.
Opal stopped too, looking at the bookshelf in surprise, as though it was the first time she’d seen it.
“No, those are great. Those are my special babies,” Opal said. “Those are the ones I’m planning on fixing up.”
“Right,” Cleo said thinly, with a strangled laugh threatening to be released in the back of her throat.
Opal shot her a dark look. “I know it’s weird,” she started irritably, then stopped herself. She turned towards a little nook in the room where the ceiling dropped down lower. The space was in shadow. The light seemed to hang weirdly over the space, heavier than it should. Cleo’s instinct was to run.
“This is the problem,” Opal said and pointed to an object on a random dining room table.
It was a pretty gold mirror, green in some spots from time. The back of the mirror had an old-fashioned country girl with pale skin in a wide-brimmed hat painted on it, her blue shawl dripping towards her feet. Cleo couldn’t immediately find any wyrd resonance in it (‘wyrd,’ ugh). It looked like a mirror you’d find on any grandma’s vanity.
Cleo through the shadow to that sweet little mirror, picked it up, and turned the mirror towards herself. Gods above and below, her wrinkles were getting bad, and she wasn’t even thirty yet. Her nose looked weird, and the blackheads were ridiculous. Her coloring, Great Goddess, should she get some creams to even out her skin tone? She was good about sunscreen, but that didn’t do anything for the heavy creases under her eyes. Cleo was fucking hideous. Who would ever love someone so hideous? Who would want to be friends with a face like this? No wonder she was freaking cursed. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
She was the worst. Cleo would never amount to anything. She heard the echoes of her mother’s voice, the children who taunted her at school, her own private fears and hopes and despair, Great Goddess, the despair of being this hideous. Why even try anymore? Who was she fooling, that she could have a normal life?
Cleo slammed the mirror down.
“See what I mean?” Opal said knowingly.
Every negative thought that had ever passed through Cleo’s mind had crowded together to shout about her monstrosity. The echoes lingered in her mind and made her slightly queasy.
No wonder Cleo had always avoided this store, and that business had been down for Opal. A curse like that, permeating the store would cast a shadow on everything
“I see,” Cleo said. “How long has this been here?”
Opal considered it. “Hard to say. Some of the smaller things we don’t inventory until they hit the sale floor. There’s just too much for me and my business partner to do. Maybe it’s been here for a few months? I really can’t specify.”
That was bad. A few months was very bad.
Removing most curses wasn’t exactly rocket science. To Cleo’s eye, curses looked like an invasive weed in the middle of a neatly tended garden. Curses, like invasive species, had the disturbing tendency to spread. It required patience to completely pull out all of the roots, from the main veins to the tiny offshoots. Both curses and invasive weeds rarely stayed in one place. One cursed object spread to other people it came in contact with. People, or
