Spare Change
by Ziggy Schutz
There’s a woman on the corner who sells curses, if you know how to ask.
People call her Cinnamon, though it is not her first name. She buried that decades ago, the same year she bought her first dress and started to let her hair grow long.
She sits on an upturned bucket, clever fingers tapping away half-finished beats and forgotten hymns. Then, as the sun starts to set, she raises her bandaged fingers, catching the last rays on them as easy as another might grab at a passing fancy. Between her experienced hands, she spins sunlight like taffy, performing small miracles for pocket change.
The rays are woven into charms and rumours, and she parts with them easily, for a bit of change or some particularly good gossip.
Curses take a bit more time, but Cinnamon will do them all the same, pull you close and ask in a singsong voice what kind of teeth you want the curse to have. Her hands will grow sharp, nails giving way to claws, and you will wonder if there is any truth to the stories that say she lived in a house with chicken legs, once upon a time.
Wherever she came from, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the curses work, and they cost enough to reflect that fact.
For curses, she pulls out a little notebook, bound in something with too many eyes, and has you write your full name on a new page, and the exact wording of what you’re asking for. People agonize over this part, like they can avoid the consequences of casting curses if they just find the perfect way to phrase it. Like it’s the paper that holds the power here.
But that’s not how curses work, and the book isn’t the thing they should worry over. No, that’s the pen, with ink as red as the dying sun. It tends to stain skin with pinpricks of its own feeding.
That’s the thing about magic. It is always so damn hungry.
For payment for the smaller spells, she takes cash and change, secrets and poetry. Curses take a bit more, although they do love the occasional flowery turn of phrase. She once had a whirlwind romance with another wandering witch, until one too many love letters took root in the apartment they shared.
When curses aren’t paid for properly, what was used to undervalue them becomes part of that curse. Terrible grounds for a relationship, and the whole building is condemned now – overgrown with plants that follow you as you walk past them, whispering all of the truths you’re not ready to hear.
Cinnamon still lives there, rental agreements giving way to squatter’s rights, and none would dare call it a Court’s stronghold, but it follows the laws of one just the same. Lies burst into flash flame inside those cracked walls, and the residents that have made it their home don’t bother to hide their extra limbs and shattered glass wings.
Any who enter with grand ideas of gentrification or profit always leave with bad luck stuck to them like burrs. No one makes the mistake of trying for a takeover twice.
Cinnamon sits on her upturned cauldron, wearing just enough flash to catch the right people’s attention. Her earrings catch the light and grow heavy with the buzz of the streets around her. as she weaves destruction into pretty, consumable trinkets. The patterns for ruination and desolation are only a few knots away from the weaves for an evil eye or a petty revenge, the only difference being how deep the sunlight bites into her fingers, how much blood the curse costs.
The bandaged fingers make more sense once you’ve seen her work.
A skittish young man approaches her, asks for some heinous thing with the shyness of a schoolboy. She smiles, traces the shape of his jaw with one claw, and makes him a curse that will eat him away before it ever gets the chance to latch onto the girl that spurned him.
Cinnamon sells curses, but there’s no promise that they will find her customers’ intended targets. Not because she makes mistakes—no, her mistakes would have much more disastrous results than a simple misfire—but because she hates a coward, because her set of laws are strict, but they are not the same as the world around her. No, her rules are far older, passed down mother to daughter to wretched abandoned girls with dreams of revenge and teeth sharp enough to tear.
She follows them perfectly. It’s not her fault if people are unprepared for getting what they want.
So few people can handle it. Getting what they want.
Her folk may be Fair, but it has never been a human fairness.
Nearby, a child is crying. She’s lost her mother, or perhaps her mother has purposefully lost her. Cinnamon approaches, offers the girl a trinket and a treat. The mother gets a day to come and collect her. Otherwise, she will be whisked away to the apartment building, and the creature that walks out years later will be unrecognizable, a clever young man whose eyes were always too big to take in just one layer of this world.
His own mother won’t recognize him, and he will tip his hat to her all the same, on his way to reshape himself in his new world’s image. Cinnamon will send him a charm for his birthday every year, more patron than parent but still the best of either the boy ever had.
Her capacity for kindness is what makes her all the more dangerous, because when she is cruel there is no mistaking it, no waving it away as accidental. Her edges have been left intentionally sharp, and she will smile and let strangers and friends alike dash themselves against the rocks of her heart with not a hint of regret.
Cinnamon sits on her corner, drumming out a little tune that you feel like you should know. You haven’t approached her yet, but you know you will, as sure as you know your own name.
And she will make you a deal, ask for something that is far too big a piece of you for you to give up, and you will do it anyway. Pass over payment and be surprised at how light the curse she hands you in return is.
How easy it is, to wreck a life.
What scares you the most is how inevitable it feels. How good it feels, like this was always meant to be the way your story went.
Cinnamon smiles, pockets your soul like so much spare change, and sends you on your way.
Ziggy Schutz (she/him/he/her) is a queer, disabled writer who is at all times looking for ways to make his favourite fairytales and horror stories reflect people who look a little more like her. You can find more about his writing at linktr.ee/ziggyschutz.