Eighty Cursed Dolls
Calathea Dottie
While I’m not a huge fan of using poppets in magic, I do spend the cold winters sewing and stuffing a few to have on hand. Why don’t I like them? They’re dull. Tired. Too easy. Stuff some hair or nail clippings into the doll, say a little spell and poof, anything I do to it happens to its live counterpart. Where’s the challenge? Some customers, namely the really sadistic and unimaginative ones, like them, so I do make them, but I only use them when a customer insists on having one and won’t be dissuaded. And of course, they always ignore the “think before you torture” warning. Hot tip, you can still get arrested when the person closest to you dies suspiciously and you collect a huge life insurance pay out, even if the cops aren’t sure exactly how you did it.
Cursed plants, on the other hand, are more my style. No one suspects them because normies have no imagination, and they look more and more beautiful the worse the target’s life gets. It’s much more nuanced magic. It’s not just a broken leg or mysterious bruises showing up out of nowhere, it’s losing your keys, the refrigerator breaking down, the bank somehow not processing your mortgage payment, a persistent stomach ache, the sound of a dog barking incessantly somewhere but you can’t figure out where. It’s a maddening cacophony of little things that pile on and drive a person insane. And all the while, they don’t know it’s the plant quietly growing and flourishing in a corner. The one thing going right, is the one thing causing all the suffering. Some people will keep the plant for decades! They even will these curses to family members when they die. Show me a poppet with that kind of staying power. You can’t. And different plants will have different curse flavors, like brining only financial woes, or perhaps you’ll consistently forget the names of people around you, maybe you’ll have trouble with your feet all your life, could be kidney trouble, or you might develop an unhealthy obsession with balloon animals that ruins your life. It’s really a much more intricate and delicate method of torture. Nothing like the crude cudgel of a poppet.
As coincidence would have it, I was begrudgingly sewing poppets by the fire the day this client appeared with a particularly cursed and apropos request. She came trudging up the steps around midday, casting so benign a merry spinster aura that the dogs didn’t even stir from their naps. She wore season appropriate clothing, which is usually a good sign, but not always, and carried a backpack on her back. I could sense no intention drifting up the hill, instead, there was a subtle chorus of whispers that could have been wind through leaves were it not the dead of winter. I listened and could discern three distinct voices.
A troubling colloquy. But it did remind me to get the defrost tea brewing. I set her cup on the table just as she knocked. I opened the door to a cheery, cherry-cheeked smile and perfectly followed instructions for divesting of outerwear.1 It should have been a refreshing change of pace but horrors lurk in the hearts of the outwardly merry, believe me.