Monthly Fiction Short
strange, how I started talking about superheroes and this is what came out. I have had an outline for a novel of the curse of the Fears, but its been on the “maybe someday” project list. I think I just haven’t become excited about it. But this little snippet could easily tie into it.
Curse of the Fears
Being a superhero was supposed to be easy.
A crow cawed. It was the only response I knew I would get out here. The wind stirred, blowing dandelion seeds over the tombstones. I used the wind to blow the dirt off the graves, just so I didn’t have to sweep.
Everything else in my life up to now had been easy. School. Sports. Making friends. I had caught the eyes of the most eligible bachelor. The one who everyone thought was impossible to catch. I had snared his heart like a wolf’s paw in my steel jaws. That had been before I had inherited the knife. Once I had the knife, I would have to face the one with the pendant.
The curse of the Fears was passed down through a pendant. My family’s duty was passed through a knife. A little more practical, isn’t it? There is actual good than come from a knife, when it is used to make things or cut that which needs to be cut. A pendant, well, what does it do besides decoration?
But this pendant, as beautiful as it was, contained an evil that could not be destroyed. The curse of the Fears was they would be granted their greatest desire. But the price would be what they loved. No wonder they turned on each other in a family like that.
My mother had given the knife to me. Like a fool, I had taken the bone handle, swearing for my family that I would destroy the Fears and their curse before anyone else was hurt by it again, just as my family had tried to do since the Fears had come to the New World. I had thought it would be glorious, to command the wind and use the knife for good.
But I had been their undoing. Not because of how skilled I was, or how justly I had wielded the knife. But because what the latest scion of the mighty Fear family had loved, that the curse had tried so desperately to destroy, to take from him—
Was me.