NightCurse

I smothered my arms with cocoa butter to hide the scarred gashes my shaving razor had created on my skin a few months ago then dressed in some clothes my new mother had put out for me. Today, I was going to the grocery store with my new mother, and then we were going to dig out her old sewing machine in the basement to make a quilt for Gerard for Christmas, even though Christmas was still 2 ½ months away. Well, I guess it was better to start early. I really missed the guys and could hardly wait to see them again for Christmas.

As I stepped out of the house to board the car, I noticed how fall had now created a kaleidoscope of color on the front lawn. Autumn was so gorgeous when it came. I especially loved the delectable pies I ate on Thanksgiving. The scent of the leaves reminded me of when I was a little kid how I’d rake up a pile of leaves and frog-leap into them. I surely did miss those days! Every step I took back then seemed so carefree and innocent. The sandbox fights my friends and I always used to have always resulted in someone getting play sand in their eye and the grounding of most of the group. I haven’t seen any of my friends at all from back then. When I was ten, I moved from my old elementary school all the way in L.A. to the east coast. The climate was vastly different. I sure missed out on the snow back then! I LOVED the winter when I was ten years old. However, a few years later, I adjusted to it and started to abhor it with its negative temperatures. I much preferred the sunny climate of CA! I miss it, but I’d rather be wonderful friends, actually family, with the best band in the world!

“Cheyenne, come ON!” my new mom shouted at me. I then suddenly realized I’d been staring at the leaves the whole time and rushed into the passenger seat of the car.

We soon arrived at Wal-Mart, where we’d be doing most of our shopping. She handed me $50 and told me to go pick out some food. That was quite generous of her! She usually did the grocery shopping, but she wanted to spend some time with me today. She then told me to meet her by the carts at 1:30, so we can go catch a movie at the local theatre when I was done. I had an entire hour to shop. What would I do with so much money and time? After that, she handed me a gigantic grocery list that had obviously been torn in half. She held the other half in her own hands. Now I knew why she had given me $50 and so much time. I wondered if $50 would even be enough for this lengthy list How upset would she be if I couldn’t buy everything on it? I stuffed the $50 into my picket hastily and then set off…

Pretty soon I had three quarters of the list finished and $10 left to spend, according to my calculations. I still had eggs, margarine, flavored water, lettuce, mayonnaise, and tissues to pick up. How could I only spend $10 on all of that? I nearly passed off the eggs while considering the few options I had before even reaching the eggs. I could’ve either gotten cage-free, which were way more humane than the regular eggs but much more expensive and mightn’t even be affordable for this tight budget, or there were Wal-Mart’s brand of cheap eggs, which were produced in torturously cramped cages. I found a few extra dollars in my pocket and decided to buy the cage-free eggs, even though I’d rather buy none at all. My new mom had been ignorant to the fact that egg-laying hens were treated so poorly. Vivid images flashed through my head of the video I’d recently seen of how factory farms are treated. I tried to distract myself by concentrating on the next item on the list, which was bread, a pretty easy item to pick out.

The cash register lines were horrifically long, so I feared I’d be late! I had fifteen minutes to meet my mom, and the lines had a minimum of seven people in them! Most of the people’s carts were over-flowing with items from video games to cat food. I decided to dash over to the four cash registers in the back to see if they were any smaller. I guess luck was on my side that day, because there were only three people in the longest line there. When it was my turn, I began to hastily place my groceries on to the tiny cash register counter and snatched up the $50 bill from my scratchy pants pocket. When the cashier rang up the entire order, it totaled to $80. I had only packed $15 extra, so I pulled out the emergency credit card Gerard had given me. This wasn’t exactly what he meant by emergency, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind much. I’d pay him back some way or another. When I pulled the eggplant-colored card from my purse, the shimmery glitters inside of it created mini-rainbows of themselves if you peeked closely at them. I swiped it through the card-reader on the cash register, followed all of the instructions, and slid it back into the wallet of my purse. I glanced into the mirror inside of my purse. I surely wasn’t worried about looking ugly when I looked that beautiful! Not even a single strand of my hair was out of place! I then pushed my cart to where I would meet my mom in a few more minutes…

The basement, which held all of my mom’s quilt-making equipment, was damp, gaunt, and smelled like it could seriously use a cleaning. Three gigantic niches spider webbed down the wall in front of me as I crawled down the wooden, creaky stairs of the basement. It felt like a scene in a movie where the big, bad monster would brutally stab you to death or something. That’s when I saw a gigantic spider web in the right corner of the wall with the niches. The temperature was freezing and made shivers shoot through my entire body. My new mom pulled the string on the first light to turn it on, and it sparked a tiny bit before turning completely on. It was the only light in the entire basement, so she had prepared with two flashlights in her hand. The bulb certainly was quite dim, even for a bulb that hadn’t been replaced for as long as that one had been sitting there in its metal socket. I noticed a gigantic heap huddled to the far left of me. It had a plethora of items from wrenches to old telephones from the 70’s or something.

The first item she pulled out of the mammoth heap of both junk and treasures was an aged ouja board with a minuscule crack going across from the left side in the middle. Age had faded the letters of it quite considerably, and it now had a color of the same yellow as I’d imagine the Declaration of Independence held. “I remember when the boys and I used to use this thing when Mikey was like ten or something. That was a few decades ago! I guess you could keep it, since I no longer really have a use for it. This crack, however, may or may not prevent it from working correctly. Guess there’s no harm in trying.” She then heaved it out of the pile as well as some odd white thing with a weird plastic lens or something on the top. I had honestly not even seen one of these things never mind used one! Perhaps Gerard could show me how to work it on vacation or something. I placed it at the top of the stairs, so it wouldn’t get soaked from the water sitting on the basement’s floor. I then continued to search for my mom’s quilting accessories.

The dim light began to flicker as she pulled out some polyester stuffing bags from the heap. It soon recessed from flickering, however, permitting us to look further into the pile. We found a plethora of packages of never-opened dominoes, a beautiful glass chess set, also never opened, a few comic books that were left behind by Gerard, a dog bed, a gardening hose, about ten packs of playing cards, some old video game system (Atari, maybe?) some old CD’s, and abandoned TV remote, an ancient camera, and all of the quilting things a quilter could ever wish for in his or her entire life. My new mom let me have whatever I wanted from the pile, besides her new quilting accessories. I took everything except for the playing cards and the old TV remote, which appeared to be from the late 70’s, the garden hose, and the dog bed. I’d surely be entertained for hours with this old