last night i has a dream that i was a child who wasn't supposed to be born. my mother was part of some kind of... community? cult? weird town? and for whatever reason, my mother was Cursed With Child. and by that i mean that I was a cursed child, i suppose.
my mother hid the pregnancy and had me anyway. I had some kind of birthmark on my cheek, a little swooping like a chunky letter J but with a couple of lines through it? in the dream, there was a scene of my mother going to the infirmary for supplies while heavily pregnant. probably due any day. she had already decided to hide us.
lore said that a cursed child always needed a companion. i think it was something about teaching the cursed child to love humanity or something but I can't be sure. maybe it was a sacrifice
there was a little kid crying in the other room. maybe two years old? i don't know what would have happened if he hadn't been there that day. it was a crime of opportunity.
that's how simon ended up in the basement with us
it was a pretty big basement. my mother's family must have been decently wealthy
i was a little girl with long dark hair, and simon was always the braver and bolder of the two of us, with lighter curly hair. we were taught to never ascend the basement stairs under any costs
so, of course, one day we climbed them
we had a good reason! i was probably around 10 years old at that point, and Simon 12. there must have been some kind of terrible terrible storm. or maybe a bathroom was flooding, who knows. but what i do know is that the ceiling started raining one day when my mother wasn't in the basement with us. she would sometimes leave us for days at a time now we were a bit older. she'd been gone for a few days when the water came. we didn't know what to do. I was hesitant, but Simon convinced me that we had to leave the basement
so yeah. you can imagine the hullabaloo when a missing child shows up with a cursed child of all things
we never saw my mother again. maybe she heard we had been found and ran for it. maybe something happened to her. i don't know. i don't think the mothers of cursed children survived very long
they didn't kill me, which is nice. i think they probably would have if i was a baby with no understanding of the world. but i was a child, and i didn't know where my mother was, and i was afraid. they talked about it though, in a town hall-esque meeting where I sat curled up and silent in the hallway as their muffled voices debated my fate. maybe i could have moved closer, eavesdropped properly to hear what they discussed. but i was never a particularly brave child, so i stayed curled up in the hallway.
i think it was simon's uncle that took me in. he looked like an older version of simon. he was... unsafe. i don't think he ever did anything per se, but he had this energy about him. to be fair, simon could have the same feverish charisma, the same dogged insistence that bulldozed over any quiet concerns that i had. but i at least knew simon cared about me. his uncle... i don't know. i never trusted him, that i do know
at the end of the dream i was older. still sectioned off from most of society, but at least I got to see the sun from the windows of simon's uncle's industrial apartment. i didn't really go out, though. people were scared of me, of my face
simon started visiting less and less as we got older
he wasn't there anymore to take my hand and coax me up the basement steps. I remember thinking i would have to escape this cage myself this time
i never did find out what being a cursed child even meant
