Yooo if I’m not too late, here’s one for your ficlet prompt request:
Agatha has an Etsy shop and gets a request to curse an anonymous customer’s “bitch of an ex-wife” and unknowingly curses herself
Also.. NOVEL?! Hell fucking yeah 🙌😎
you are certainly not too late and apologies that it took me a month to write this, this prompt is super fun! we're going with a vague modern au where the gals are all (semi) normal women with some witchy abilities!
Agatha’s about to blend the fuck out of her morning smoothie – strawberries, raspberries, and bananas over a yogurt base – when her work email pings with a new request:
Make my bitch of an ex-wife fall hard.
Agatha pauses with her finger over her blender’s highest fuck shit up button, frowning. The request’s energy is top-tier; its vagueness, not so much.
Fall hard…for you? she writes back to her potential client, whose Etsy username is green_monster69. (A fellow Red Sox fan, maybe. Thanks to Boston's large presence of annoying young Wiccan wannabes, she gets a lot of local customers.) You bought a revenge spell, honey. The love spells are further down.
After a moment of pensively wiggling her hands over her keyboard, Agatha tacks on an addendum before whooshing her response off into the ether: Please note the ‘no refunds’ policy :)
Boom; sent. Sweeping her smoothie’s debris (strawberry stems, banana peel, empty yogurt container) onto the floor for the maid to deal with later, Agatha commences her blending. The appliance, only a handful of years old, sounds like it’s revving up to compete in the Indy 500. Piece of shit. Rio’s the one who’d slapped it on their registry, insisting that they wouldn’t find such a perfect shade of lavender anywhere else. It goes with all your other ugly gay-ass bullshit, she’d said, gesturing to Agatha’s set of purple spatulas, her azalea-patterned spoon rest. Don’t pretend you don’t love it.
Her phone buzzes with a Ring alert – there’s someone at her front door. Grabbing a wooden spoon as a makeshift weapon, Agatha turns the blender off, flipping through the myriad other cameras she’s got stashed around the luxury apartment. Living room, bedroom, fire escape. The paranoia’s plenty justified; since the divorce, Rio’s already broken in twice, taping lipstick-stained threats to the fridge. ‘I’m gonna make you wish you were dead,’ ‘Keep an eye on your Achilles tendons.’ Yadda, yadda, yadda. Nothing Agatha hadn’t heard in bed during their short-lived marriage.
“Agatha,” calls a grating voice from the other side of the front door. Her least favorite neighbor. Agatha relaxes her grip on the spoon. “Come on. I just got the twins to sleep.”
“You’re coddling those boys, Wanda,” she calls back. “Got ‘em in their own little fantasy world where everyone bends to your precious family’s whims. We all need to grow up eventually.”
On Agatha’s grainy video feed, Wanda presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “They’re two.”
“Exactly. ‘Two’ old to be acting like babies.”
Leaving Wanda to her sputtering, Agatha returns to her cute blender. God forbid that some people want to kick off the morning with a healthy smoothie! (And God forbid that, for Etsy’s most entrepreneurial witch-for-hire, the morning happens to start at four a.m.!)
Another interruption: green_monster69’s reply. Just do the spell exactly as written. I picked the revenge one on purpose.
Falling for you is a punishment, huh? Agatha writes. She’s not a fan of green_monster69’s tone. The sacred craft requires specificity. If I don’t know what your intentions are, you’re gonna pay for bupkis.
Do I need to take my business elsewhere?
Agatha scoffs, leaning her elbows on the counter as she fires off her reply. Be my guest! Might I suggest Kale’s Konjurations? Bargain-bin prices for bargain-bin service. Sounds right up your alley!
Placing her phone face-down, Agatha finishes blending her smoothie, pouring it into the fancy glass that Rio had stolen from the breakfast spot that they’d patronized every day of their honeymoon. Next door, Billy and Tommy start wailing. Poor things! With the rapid brain development that happens at their tender age, they must be wising up to their parents’ incurable loserdom. Stuck in their position, Agatha would wail, too.
Two sips into her smoothie, her phone pings again. You’re up early, green_monster69 says.
A flicker of suspicion licks up Agatha’s spine. She checks the cameras; all clear.
A second ping. Can’t sleep?
Agatha chews her straw to a pulp, thinking about her empty bed. Unbearably empty. Some nights, she doesn’t even bother trudging down the hall – she curls up on the couch that they’d picked out together, listening to the sound of Wanda’s stupid sitcoms bleed through the wall.
Me neither, says green_monster69. I don’t think I’ve slept through the night in months.
After hastily dabbing at her eyes, Agatha adds a paper towel to the trash pile on the floor. If you’re fishing for a sympathy refund, you’ve come to the wrong pond.
The response is almost instantaneous. I don’t want a refund, Agatha. I want you to cast the spell. Please.
Letting out a shaky sigh, Agatha upends her herb drawers. Before her coffee-less brain has time to realize what a horrible idea this is, she tosses the requisite ingredients into her mortar; brings the pestle down with gusto.
“Make this dyke’s bitch of an ex-wife fall hard,” she says aloud, tossing a sprinkle of her crushed herbs into the air.
For a long, idiotic second, Agatha waits for a miraculous change of heart. Luckily, even while coffee-deprived, her brain catches up quick. Shaking her head, she turns to grab her smoothie –
And steps directly on the discarded banana peel, landing on her back with a thud that’s sure to get the downstairs neighbor’s panties in a twist.
In other words: falling. Hard.
LMAO, comes the dispatch from green_monster69.
Groaning, Agatha frantically flicks through the camera feeds on her Ring app. Apart from her own disheveled form on the kitchen camera, the apartment’s completely empty. So how is Rio –
Ah.
The Ring app. Connected to Agatha’s Amazon account. Which, despite Agatha’s best efforts, Rio keeps finding a way to log into.
Money well spent 😘🖤, green_monster69 says as Agatha flips off the nearest camera. You look kinda cozy down there. Sweet dreams, asshole.
“Sweet dreams, stalker,” Agatha mutters, letting her head fall back onto the trash pile. By the fridge, the camera blinks rhythmically, a steadily winking eye. Weirdly comforting.
Five hours later, Agatha awakes from the most refreshing nap she's experienced in recent memory. Wiping a string of drool from her mouth, she fumbles to check her phone for green_monster69's latest creepy update.
There's nada. Suppressing an embarrassing twinge of disappointment, Agatha dismisses her sole notification: her shop's latest – entirely wordless –five-star review.
