July 2026

Marisol Karcs, Curses

I would like to claim that I enjoy being a writer, but that would be a lie. I cannot enjoy writing, not now, not while I am beset by evil.

Evil came in the form of Louise Sloane. Her last name is a first name. She is a retired professor of creative writing. She has been awarded several honorary degrees by prestigious universities. She has published twenty books, her first, Live a Little, being her most well-known. She is practically a deity in writing circles, and especially in this part of the country, where she was born.

Two years ago, she came to the University of the Midwest to give a lecture on creative writing. Her talk was standing room only and was met with a standing ovation. After that talk, I met Louise in person at a small gathering hosted by my professor. And it was then, after that tragic night, that she killed my writing spirit.  

“We are all creative creatures,” she said. “The trick is, how do you tap that innermost, most subconscious, most creative part of yourself? When you were a child, you could access it easily. Now? Not so much.”

That’s how she began her talk. I was immediately struck by her breadth of knowledge, wider and deeper than I thought we, as temporary beings on this earth, could ever acquire; she quoted Napoleon, referenced metaphysical philosophers offhandedly, rattled off a list of Latin American authors whom she admired, then spoke at length about Lacan.

I also agreed with her premise: I had long ago believed that there was some essential core of creativity that I could tap into, some channel of pure Creative Essence, if only I knew where to connect the wires. I wanted to be a writer so badly. I wanted to be a writer of beautiful, meaningful stories that lit people up from the inside and made people cry, phone up their moms, then take a walk around the block, admiring the world anew: The sun seeping into the birch leaves, the smell of roasted coffee on the air, the sound of a dog pissing on their lawn, the sight of a horny loner admiring them from afar. All of it was beautiful because that was life. 

Louise Sloane was affable. She was an older woman with wispy white hair and crinkly features. She radiated with vitality, and yet she clearly didn’t do anything like Botox. She wore a wooden necklace and wooden earrings. She had on a flowy dress and an orange scarf. By the end of the talk, I believed she could be my mentor, a guide who could introduce me to the secrets of writing. I knew enough to know that writing was a sacred art, and that I required a wise hand to lead me through the treacherous dangers of amateurism: The false aspirations, the foolhardy belief in my own originality, the spotty writing habits.

I was eager to glean that mentorship at my professor’s home, where he had invited me and a few other graduate students to a small, informal dinner with the bestselling author. 

“So, you’re the literature student.” Louise looked my way as we ate dessert, a brioche bread pudding prepared by my professor. I was the only literature student that was invited; the rest were creative writing students, bedecked in black turtlenecks and silver snake rings, chainmail contraptions hanging off belt hoops and asymmetrical earrings glinting in the chandelier’s light. 

I nodded enthusiastically. 

“Your professor shared a story of yours with me,” she continued. “You have a lot of promise.”

I blushed.

Who is your favorite writer?” Louise pressed. 

“My wife,” I said without hesitation. Tanya is a writer for the Midwest Journal.

“Good answer,” Louise remarked while a few others laughed.

I smiled into my dessert. I had impressed Louise. I’d been unsure of myself when I got to my professor’s low-ceilinged home. I was wary to meet a writer who I’d so admired, fearful that the tenderness that I held for her work would wither if she looked at me askance or admitted she was horribly prejudiced against something as dear to my heart as Dracula, for example.

But Louise was just as lovely, just as wise and humble as I hoped. She laughed kindly at my professor’s cheesy jokes; she asked us students questions about our writing and gave encouraging remarks. The edges of her long, gray hair and baggy dress seemed to radiate. She was a saint of a writer.

Toward the end of our second round of wine, long after the bread pudding and vanilla ice cream had been brought back into the kitchen, we guests relaxed around Louise.

“What is your writing routine like?” Joe, one of the creative writers, asked. 

Louise leaned back in her chair and smiled wistfully, cradling the wine glass in two hands. She held the wine by the cup and not the stem.

“I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell a soul.” She looked around to each of us and held our gazes sternly. We all nodded—even our professor did. Someone giggled. The whole table had hushed; side conversations were extinguished. All attention was on Louise. 

“I curse a new person every time I write. Sometimes I curse a critic who gave me a bad review. Sometimes I curse a politician or a celebrity. Sometimes I curse students who made my life hell, or a waitress who made me wait too long to pay for my meal. The cursing gives me strength. I take their creative spirit and add it to my own arsenal. That’s what I’m doing.” 

The room was quiet. One of the creative writers went, “Shit.” 

Louise cackled delightedly. 

“When you say curse, like, how?” another creative writer asked. 

“Oh, it’s simple. I add some Dijon mustard to a bowl with some vinegar, then the juice of a whole lemon. All acidic things. Then I rub it on a piece of bread and say their name, or I simply imagine them. And that acidity is as if I had invited a metaphorical sting on the person. It works very well.”

At that, the room sounded with astonished laughter. It seemed a strange thing to admit; you could see the remnants of shock or discomfort on everyone’s slightly tipsy faces. But ultimately, it was just a harmless ritual performed by a kooky woman. It had matured from dangerous to funny.

I didn’t think any more of it as, soon after, everyone stood and wandered the professor’s home. It had the wood-paneled, carpeted look of the ‘70s without feeling too claustrophobic. It was covered in large abstract paintings, lots of blues and grays, a shock of red splattered on the canvas. Books were piled all along the floor of the study. 

I got to talking with Gloria, a creative writer with whom I shared an office on campus. We swished wine around in our glasses as we stood in the professor’s study while most of the others congregated around Louise in the living room.

“So, what do you think of Louise’s books?” Gloria asked me. 

“I love them,” I said. “Does a Mouse See the Cage? is my favorite. What about you?” I asked. 

“It’s all very ambitious.” Gloria waved her free hand. 

Her eyes wandered around the room. I could tell she wasn’t interested in talking to me anymore. I was beginning to learn that in the writing world, “ambitious” meant that, despite your best efforts, you had nosedived straight into dogshit. I knew I would have to prove myself as a woman with a writerly mind, and a knack for critique.

“Live a Little was not for me,” I said. “Itsags in the middle. It was hard to get through a paragraph in less than half an hour.”

I felt proud of my criticism. But when I looked into Gloria’s eyes, expecting an impressed nod, or an invitation into the secret club of writers, I saw instead that she was looking past my shoulder. 

I turned around. Just behind me, walking into the study, was Louise. She was unreadable as she stopped suddenly in her tracks. Then, she turned around and walked out. We heard her stomp all the way to the front door and slam it shut in her wake.

The entire party quieted. 

“What happened?” someone said in the living room. 

“Oh, no,” I said. Because I knew this would not end well for me. 

~

The next day, I woke up feeling like I had run ten miles up a jagged hill. I told Tanya that I thought I had a hangover, even though I’d only had two glasses of wine and that wasn’t typically enough to give me a pounding headache, which started just behind my left eye as soon as I stood up from bed. Stranger still, when I looked in the mirror, my left eye was bright red, and the eyelid stung to the touch.

Tanya told me I should make an appointment at the university clinic, but I didn’t want to waste my writing time. I took a couple painkillers and sat down at my kitchen desk, my tradition each morning since I decided I would embark on the task of becoming a writer, of making people cry and laugh as I dictated, with just the stroke of my keys on virtual paper.

But I found that nothing would come out of my fingers and onto the keyboard. My index finger trembled as I held it over the “I” key. And when I stabbed my finger downward, it veered to the right and off the keyboard, jerking me to the side.

Try as I might, I could not bring myself to write. Louise had sucked the creative spirit straight out of me.

~

            My misery was quick, and my depression clung to me like a shirt drenched in back sweat. I could not write, I could not write. I could not write! Not even an email. Not even a Post-It on the fridge, warning Tanya that we were out of eggs. Not even a text to remind her to buy eggs.

When I touched a pen or pencil, my shoulders shook with a powerful shiver. The spasm caused the writing tool to fall from my hand and onto the ground. It was a miracle that I hadn’t been kicked out of my program yet; I begged Tanya to type up essays that I dictated to her, or else I frantically paid strangers on the internet to write up an essay about Carmilla, and I swallowed the poor grades I received. I gave promise after promise to my professor that he would receive a copy of my first chapter soon.

I knew that if nothing changed, I would have to quit school entirely, destitute by way of creative spirit, forced to steal it from others. I would have to become a politician, for example. Or a law enforcement officer.

            And the doctors at the university had no idea why my eye was swollen and pink like cotton candy. They referred me to an ophthalmologist, but the appointment would cost me three months’ rent, and besides, I knew what was stinging my eye: It was Louise’s Dijon mustard, which I smelled faintly as I washed my face each morning, mixed with lemon and a dash of vinegar. When I took showers, the steam worsened it. When I ran, the air blew into my eye and aggravated it. When I looked at my computer too long, my eye would twitch and close. There was nothing I could do that would not set it off, that would not keep my poor eye from tearing up and becoming pinker, more inflamed.

            I graded papers for my students for the next three months through my reddened, blurry eye. The class I had been assigned to teach was called “Communication is Key,” and claimed to teach my group of eighteen-year-olds essential essay-writing skills. But greater than the pain of their essays, infested with Artificial Intelligence, was the pain in my soul as I searched in vain for my creative spirit and found nothing.

I decided that I must seek Louise out. I would find her and beg her to reverse this blight she had laid upon me. I must apologize, repeatedly, maybe even on my knees, with hands clasped before me—just to make sure she’d give me my one true talent, my path to notoriety: My creative spark.

By the time I discovered that Louise would be back in the Midwest in a week, speaking at a community center in a nearby town, I had purchased an eyepatch to obscure the offending eyeball, told my professor that I would be late in turning in my thesis chapter for a third time, and Tanya and I had separated; she had told me she wanted to “take a pause,” moving out the very next day to live with her sister, citing my relentless talking in my sleep (I would cry out “Louise!” almost every night) as well as my inflamed eyeball, which would weep uncontrollably as we made love, dripping disconcertingly on her breasts, thighs, pubis. 

I was a mess. I had nothing else to do except get in my broken-down car and drive the ninety miles to see Louise, the woman who had ruined my life.

Louise sat in the center of a long table, populated by other women, who were there to discuss a panel titled, “The Magic of Ageing: Keeping the Creative Energy Flowing.” The audience was mostly older women, with a few husbands mixed in. I stood out sorely, especially with my black eyepatch and mussed-up hair; I wasn’t sleeping well ever since the curse, but especially since Tanya had left. I wondered how long of a pause would satisfy her before we could be reunited. A month? A year?

I could hardly pay attention to the talk as different panel members introduced their books and various women walked up to the microphone in the center of the aisle, asking mundane questions like, “How do you stay so active?” I didn’t care about the perils of old age; I was suffering many perils of my own, and I was still young!

But my ears pricked up as Louise answered the woman’s question:

“You have to take energy if your own doesn’t suffice,” she began.

When the audience member asked what she meant, Louise continued.

“It’s long been my opinion that we can’t let young people have all the fun. If you want to be as active as a young person, then, well, figure out how you can steal some of their vitality.”

“You mean, copy them?” another panel member supplied.

“Sure.” Louise smiled her devil-may-care smile, the one I recognized from the dinner party. “Steal, borrow, copy, who cares? Just take the energy and use it.”

I could have spoken to Louise after the talk. I could have waited in line until it was my turn to get my book signed (her newest release was Ground Things), and as she signed it, I could have begged her, with clasped hands, to stop stealing my energy, my vitality that should have gone towards working to be a great novelist like she was.

But instead, I turned out of the community center and got in my car to drive home.

There was no begging a woman like that, I knew. She had cursed me not out of anger, though that might have been the impetus; she cursed me because that was her ethos. That was the way she cultivated her creative spirit.

No, a woman like that would not loosen her grip on me that easily. Defeating her required playing by her own rules.

~

            I dedicated every day to cursing Louise Sloane from that point on. For roughly a year, from the living room of my basement apartment—where I relocated after the separation with Tanya was official and I could no longer afford our two-bedroom rental home in the center of town—a permanent bowl sat on the carpet, ready to accept my offerings. Each morning, before eating a rice cake for breakfast, I’d pull out my Dijon mustard, a halved lemon, and a bottle of white vinegar, and drag them all to the living room, where the ritual would take place. First, I’d dollop a spoonful of Dijon into the bowl. As it settled, I would squeeze the lemon halves in both hands, ignoring the seeds as they plopped in along with the juice. And finally, because order was important, the white vinegar finished the ritual off. Only a splash of vinegar was needed; too much would coat the inside of your nostrils and refuse to leave.

            The last step was my favorite: I brought out a printed picture of Louise’s face, of which I had hundreds of copies, and added it to the bowl. The ritual wasn’t finished until the entire paper had absorbed the lemon and vinegar and was coated on all sides by the Dijon. After that, I’d leave the sickly dish to marinate for the day as I went to school.

            Ever since I began this messy morning activity, I had regained my writing abilities—but only the little things: I could write a verbose email to my professor (“Thank you kindly in advance for your assistance”). I could grade my students’ papers (“Every word in this sentence does not need to be capitalized, Mason”). but I still could not write one creative word of my own.

            My professor finally demanded the first chapter of my thesis, and I knew there was no room for quibbling, for requesting the weekend, nothing. I resigned to sending him ten pages of bullet points and notes to myself, like “ADD PROOF HERE,” or “This is where I will add in quotes.” It took him a week to reply, by which time I had imagined myself being escorted out of my office and straight into the trash, then convinced myself of my genius, then thought I’d be scolded, so many times that I no longer knew what to think. I opened the email to read a brief, unsurprising note:

            Carmie,

I cannot call this anything but a collection of disparate and hard-to-follow thoughts. If you want to continue pursuing a masters in literature, please meet me this week to discuss a plan for going forward.

                                                                                                                                    -P

            The message was almost relieving, if only because it released me from the prison of my own imagination, which could craft situations much more daunting than reality. But it also meant that I was fucked. 

            I found myself not caring overly much. What was a master’s anyway, except for a flimsy piece of paper with some scribbles on it? Paper, I knew, could dissolve so easily. I much preferred my morning meditation—the lemon, the Dijon, the black and white picture. The splash of vinegar. I was making real things on my living room carpet. On my laptop, I only found circuitous routes to the same point of defeat.

            I was interested in only one thing now: I wanted to find the fount of creativity that Louise was tapping, and I wanted to take it for myself.

~

            Louise Sloane returned to my Midwest town. By this time, though, it was clear that the time had caught up to her seemingly boundless energy. Her Instagram page hinted that she favored comfort over style these days; you wouldn’t catch her dead in those insoles the last time she came around. I didn’t judge her for it—it’s the journey we all take, if we’re lucky. But I will admit I took pleasure in seeing her diminishing frame. I wondered if my curses had anything to do with it.

I couldn’t catch her eye in the crowded bookstore. She was here to read a portion of her new book, titled The Blunt Swiss Knife. Afterward, she would sign her book. 

The bookstore had two stories. It was much beloved by the town; a little too hipster, maybe, with its velvet couches and LED signs, and with the bookstore employees who coordinated matching outfits each week. It was a place where I had visited often to work on my thesis—that is, back when I could stomach it.

On the second story, which held the used books and a few armchairs, a group of latecomers leaned over the balcony to watch the event. On the ground floor was a sea of metal chairs. Behind the chairs and hiding throughout the bookshelves were more spectators. Louise sat behind a plastic table covered in a moss-green tablecloth, stacks of her book placed before her. The book cover was a satisfying orange, like a creamsicle. Swirls of heavenly white clouds could be seen behind the title.

            The book was about a Swiss Army knife. It begins its journey in a factory in 1950 before making its way into the pocket of an American soldier until he drops it in the streets of Chicago, where it ends up in the hands of a girl before being thrown into a garden and buried underground for twenty years, until it ultimately finds its way into the home of a middle-aged woman.

It was markedly different from Louise’s earlier work, which usually centered on one main character’s journey through their ruminative and idiosyncratic thoughts. Live a Little, for example—one of her most well-known novels—dealt with a schoolteacher in 1936 who discovers that her wealthy uncle is dying. She spends the majority of the book contemplating her complicated relationship with the man (the uncle financed her education but thwarted her marriage with a fellow teacher). She ponders whether she should reveal to her uncle that his only child is morally depraved (Cousin Polly is a dancer). When she finally reveals this to her uncle, he accuses her of lying and cuts her out of the will.

            I was sitting in the front row. I had gotten there an hour early to secure my seat.

            “Good evening, folks,” the emcee began. “I have the pleasure of introducing one of the best modern writers of our time. The New York Times has called her ‘a word magician’ and ‘a devilish schemer,’ and that was in the same book review.”

Laughter. Finally, Louise was handed the microphone. From her seat behind the green table, she read a passage from her book, which was propped open with a wooden contraption.

            Her voice scraping, she read,

“The soil in the backyard was primarily clay. The clay stuck to the tool like putty, seeped into the gaps between the knife and its cubby, clung to the rounded edges of the exposed side of the corkscrew, darkened the plastic scales. The insignia was no longer visible by the time Victoria dug it out of the small depression with her bare hands, but the stainless steel still shone in the rising sun.

            “She brought it to the kitchen and ran it under the sink faucet, rubbing her thumbs along the small object. The dirt fell from the knife and into the basin, clumps of clay collecting on the porcelain. Victoria glanced out the window into the garden as the water ran over the object. It seemed as if this thing had called her over, had known she would come and find it.

“Finally, she looked down and saw the red plastic, brighter now, with scuffs along the rounded ends of it, and one notable, large scratch down its middle, as if someone had been trying to rend it in two. On the other side, the plastic was less scarred and displayed the metal outline of a shield. Within the shield was the image of a crossbow, and partially covering the crossbow, the word ‘Suisse,’ in uppercase. 

“With the outside finally cleaned, it was necessary now to open each compartment and wash out the dirt that hid in the crevices. First was the blade—she winced as it nicked her fingertip. She noticed, as she extended the blade fully, the word ‘Wenger’ stamped on the base, and below that, ‘Switzerland.’ On the other side of the blade was inscribed ‘Wengerinox,’ with another crossbow behind it.

“Next, she opened the smaller blade, then the wood saw, taking care not to touch any of the serrated points. These blades seemed just as sharp as the first. After running her finger under water (the spot was bleeding ever so slightly), she moved on to the corkscrew, then the scissors, the awl, and something that looked like a blunt blade with a chunk bitten out of it, in almost the shape of an uppercase ‘G.’

“When all visible signs of dirt were removed, the tool was an impressive sight. Victoria placed it on a folded kitchen towel to dry, and the morning light gave it an ethereal shimmer. The red plastic was splendid; the stainless-steel sparkling.”

Louise stopped there. I joined in the applause, my eyes narrowed as I bit my lip and shook my head. 

It was time for the book signing. Being in the front row, it was easy to jostle to the head of the line. I was the second person to greet Louise at her seat behind a mountain of her own books.

Louise looked at me with a faint smile as she opened her book to the front matter. She asked me for my name, and I told her. 

            “I’m an MA student in literature, at UMW,” I said, to jog her memory.

            Louise smiled politely.

“What is your thesis about?” she asked.

I hadn’t considered the fact that she would forget about me. Perhaps it was that she had cursed so many in her lifetime that I barely made the top 100. Still, I found myself responding to her question.

            “I’m writing about Dracula’s sex appeal.”

            Finally, Louise opened her mouth in recognition. She leaned away from me. I couldn’t wait to hear her apology. I couldn’t wait to hear, from my lips, my rejection of her apology. 

            But Louise, creative as ever, surprised me with her reply. 

“I remember you,” she said. Her eyes roamed my eyepatch.  “You look remarkably well.”

I laughed a short, hard bark. I regretted it, though; I saw one of the organizers in the corner of the room, who had been fiddling with taking down the PA system, stand up to check on the signing table. I didn’t have a lot of time. 

“You’re a bad liar,” I said. 

“I’m not lying.”

I flicked my eyes to the side; the bookstore woman had her eyes trained on me and was getting closer. There was no time for this cat and mouse game. I leapt right in.

“You stole my creative spirit. In retribution, I have cursed you every day for the last year.”

Louise was quiet for a bit. She shook her head silently. She propped her head in her hands, her elbows on the signing table. I grinned.

“Is everything all right, Louise?” The bookstore employee eyed me suspiciously. “If she signed your book, I think it’s time to move on.”

“Let me teach you something about the Creative Spirit, girl,” Louise said suddenly, removing her hands from her face. Her eyes were hard.

My grin faltered. From her gaze, I understood that there was no apology incoming.

“The essence of creativity is control. Just like a ship controls the waters, a writer controls her mind. You will never be a writer because you hold your creativity in such a loose grip. Like a child who ties weak knots on her shoes.”

“Stop using similes against me!” I cried out. (It had been some time since I was able to use a simile).

The bookstore clerk looked between us, confused.

“I did not curse you because there was nothing to gain from it,” she continued, ignoring me. “You, my dear, are positively bereft of creativity.”

            “Stop! Stop it!” I yelled, placing my hands on my temples. She was giving me a headache with only her words. She might have been cursing me now, no acidic ingredients necessary; she was likely strong enough. 

            “Move out of the way!” someone said from behind me.

Louise handed me her book, smiling thinly. I could hear the bookstore clerk saying something about wishing there was security here. But that wasn’t necessary—I threw myself out of the store. 

~

My vision spun. I wandered the streets of my small town in a daze. As much as I wanted to believe that the woman was lying, that she knew nothing about the Creative Spirit and the Essence of Creativity, I knew that she was too experienced in the literary arts to be wrong.

And yet, I could not believe that she hadn’t cursed me. Why else had I stopped writing so suddenly, and not been able to begin again, despite my efforts? Why else had I given up on my thesis? Or lost my wife? Or gained an inflamed eye? It seemed clear that these were punishments, and punishments didn’t come about on their own; they must be inflicted. I was baffled.

            Gradually, it became clear to me that what Louise Sloane had said was nothing more than a clumsy ruse. She was surprised to see me—unprepared—and had done what she could to throw me off the scent of her wickedness, so to speak. I would not be fooled, however. I was perhaps a novice in the world of curses, but I had learned much from the past year. I knew what curses felt like. And I had an inkling of an idea about how to make curses stronger.

            I returned home as quickly as I could, emboldened by my idea. The apartment was just barely lit by the orange sunset as I rushed into the kitchen and flung open the refrigerator door, pulling out the Dijon mustard. I turned to the counter and found four lemons remaining from the mesh bag; I halved them. I pulled down a salad bowl from above the cabinet and scooped all the contents of the glass jar of Dijon into the bowl with a spoon, then rapped the spoon against the bowl’s edge. I turned to the lemons, squeezed them all into the bowl. Finally, I grabbed each type of vinegar from my cupboard—white, white wine, red wine, Balsamic, rice, and Apple Cider—and poured liberal amounts into the plastic bowl. The contents added up to about half of the bowl, and the color, after it was completely mixed, was a dull yellow, like piss. I coughed into my elbow.

            Perhaps I was no writer. But I felt the beginnings of a power I had never experienced—a power to control the currents of fate, or at least to divert its stream and open it elsewhere. This was more enlivening than sitting in front of a computer. This was reality.

            A final ingredient was required. I pulled my signed copy of The Blunt Swiss Knife out of my bag. I flipped through its thick contents. It is a pity to destroy a book, it always is. Whoever in this world destroyed a book could be safely assumed to be on the wrong side of history; take Fahrenheit 451, or the Nazis writ large. But my intentions were purer than the firemen, more benevolent than racial cleansing. I intended to neutralize a hostile and evil force. I intended to save future writers from my fate.

It occurred to me I hadn’t seen what Louise wrote in the front matter of my book. I turned back the pages. Below the title page, Louise had written: You cannot learn talent.

            I clenched my teeth. In one swift motion, I plunged the book into the bowl and held it under the liquid, until each page was waterlogged, and the book was heavy with all it had absorbed. I could have sworn that bubbles rippled up from the pages, as if its last breath of air was fizzling out of its nonexistent mouth. I stared at it for a long while, my breath heaving. Finally, I went to bed.

~

            When I read the obituary online in The New York Times, I was not surprised; my curse had been potent. What did surprise me, however, was my reticence to return to the glowing laptop screen, to the fluorescent halls of my university. I thought that, with Louise Sloane gone, my love for writing would return.

            It was not so. My eyepatch remained to obscure my still-swollen eyelid. And I remained in my apartment, on the carpeted floor, with my wooden bowl and other materials, eager to begin again, to cast out and find a new subject to train my eye on, to siphon and destroy.

Author biography:

Marisol Karcs is a writer originally from the Bay Area, California. She recently graduated from Iowa State with an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her work has been published in Sans. PRESS, Ireland.