Curse and Blessing

I lost my mom in a car crash last year when I was just twelve, and I’ve been living with my grandma ever since. The last thing I remembered was laughing at one of Mom’s jokes before our car veered off the road; that was before I woke up at Grandma’s house a week later. She said I was briefly conscious before being discharged from the hospital, but I couldn’t remember anything in between.

I wished I could’ve said Grandma’s house had seen better days, but even when I was six, I remember the place needing more care. She was in her late seventies and barely had the energy to move around, let alone clean. I never knew why Mom and I never lived with Grandma, given that we were all she had. It was a topic that was avoided a couple of times when I brought it up. I didn’t even feel a year pass after the accident. Grandma made sure I had everything I needed, and for some reason, I always felt like Mom was also with us, as if she never really left.

Meanwhile, school was always tough. I found it difficult to make friends at first, but I was lucky to meet two newcomers to my class; we became close friends in weeks. My new friends, El and Sam, had come across rumours of a haunted house on the outskirts of the town and wanted me to join them to visit the place after ten. I said I couldn’t go with them because Grandma didn’t want me leaving the house after eight. She also made it a hard rule for me to go to bed by ten.

El and Sam were disheartened, but they understood. Grandma was in no condition to go looking for me in the middle of the night if she were to notice me missing, and I didn’t want to stress her out at her age, especially after the loss we both faced just a year before. However, that same night, I heard one of our windows shatter. I grabbed my phone and ran to my bedroom door, opening it slowly to see how many people were breaking into the house, preparing myself to call the police. 

To my surprise, the assailants were El and Sam. I rushed downstairs to ask them why they were breaking into my house; they were astonished to learn that it was where I lived. The haunted house they had heard rumours about was actually my house. I assumed it was because it hadn’t been renovated in such a long time, but then we all witnessed something I had never seen before: Grandma suddenly descended from upstairs, but she was nothing more than an ethereal figure.

El and Sam screamed and rushed out the front door, while I remained where I stood, perplexed. Before I could say anything, Grandma told me I needn’t worry. She said she died before I was born, and that it was the reason Mom and I never lived at her place. Grandma was a witch who had been cursed in the past to be tethered to her home even after death—trapped in her aged form during the day and back to her spirit form after midnight. She said the curse also extended to future generations, although the effects differed. It was then that I saw Mom walk down the staircase. The feeling of her never really being gone were true all along…

I felt tears flood my eyes that night as I learned the truth about my family. Mom and Grandma wanted to wait until I was older to reveal the truth, but I was glad I found out when I did. I dropped out of school that same week; El and Sam looked at me like I was a freak, and rumours spread throughout the school that I was a witch. Mom and Grandma homeschooled me from that day onward.