The Oldest Curse

She paused for almost a minute and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she opened them, she had seemingly regained her sense of balance. She nodded, and I broke my finger and thumb apart. When she spoke, it was tentative and calm, as if she were testing her voice to make sure it still worked, "I apologize, great Lempo, Dread Lo--"

I cut her off with my hand. "Please stop with the titles. This will take all day, otherwise. Call me Po."

She mouthed the word as if trying it on her lips before she actually said it. "Po." Deciding it would suffice, she continued. "I'm sorry...Po. I didn't mean to disrespect you."

I shrugged. "What did you mean to do?"

She dropped to one knee, almost losing her purse from her shoulder as she said, "I came to beseech you Oh great Lo--uh, I mean, Po."

"Fucking hells, girl. Stand the fuck up. What is it you want?"

After rising awkwardly she added, "My fiance. He's sick. Pancreatic cancer. Terminal."

I nodded. Rough way to go. The silent killer, they call it. Then again, they say that about everything these days, from carbon monoxide to high cholesterol. In my experience, killers don't make a lot of noise when they can help. No one ever talks in awed tones about the world's loudest assassin. "Awww. Someone already put a ring on it, huh? You're breaking my heart. Nasty bit of business. Has he tried eating more antioxidants? Blueberries, I'm told, are practically bursting with the stuff." In actuality, there were no such thing as antioxidants . It was all just a grand lie propagated and spread by the Injun spirit Old Man Coyote to help sell his brand of organic trail mix--"SkinnyWalker". Shit took off like a rocket, and just when I thought Wadjet had the market cornered with her snake oils.

She ignored my teasing. Emotion crept into her voice despite her efforts to keep it out. "It's said that you can cure any illness. Save him. Please."

I was surprised. It was a rare request. While I could technically do what she asked, it wasn't a well-known part of my portfolio, and I was loath to utilize the ability. I didn't cure diseases. I inflicted them. I had a reputation to maintain. "Not really my bag, love. Did you try Apollo? You're not, by chance, a virtuoso, are you? He's always favored the willowy and musically inclined."

A little bit of fire returned to her eyes at this. "I am a Finn, of the old blood. I have nothing to offer a Mediterranean sun god. But I have something to offer you. I invoke the binding."

I shook my head. She had spirit. "Snowbird, a binding is no easy thing. Few survive. And you'd be doing acts that he likely wouldn't approve of."

"Better that I live in shame than he die in agony."

"Enough of the former and you may wish for the latter."

Refusing to back down, she said, "My name is Veera. I offer myself in exchange for the life of my fiancé. I will take the trials. I have the right."

I measured with my eyes, trying to take her in. What a brave girl. Stupid and kind (weren't the two basically the same) but brave. I motioned to the demons that surrounded us, "Alright, snowbird, even after seeing them, their true faces, you would offer me your allegiance? You would join my piru, knowing what they are? What you would become?"

"I would." There, there was the tremble.

"Most of them were born to it, you know. Animals that grew fierce and gluttonous and twisted under the dark canopy of the woods, many of them over hundreds of years. It's easier that way. More semesters to spread the change out over. Humans, you have to take the condensed version. Speed class. Most can't hack it."

"I have the right! I have brought the offering."

I sat forward again, hands on my knees. "Right! Right? There is no right. I could separate you from your spine and make a necklace with your vertebrae before you could even get it out of the bag."

She paused. I could see her swallowing. Run, run, do it now, girl. In response, she said only, "Niin metsä vastaa kuin sinne huudetaan."

What an arrogant, insufferable, little shit of a girl. I thought about lining her mouth with ulcers, of gutting her with razor-leaves, of holding her in the basement and filling her mouth with wood ants until they climbed down her throat and built their mounds in her chest. She wanted to sell her soul. For love! What a rube. I opened my mouth to tell her how much trouble I was having in deciding how to kill her, how the options were too enticing when I surprised myself by saying, "The forest will answer."

The demons buzzed with excitement. There hadn't been a new piru in decades. A binding was the equivalent of a homeroom pizza party for demons.

Even the girl seemed surprised, and her breath came out so hard at my reply that it made a whistling noise. People were often surprised at miracles, no matter how frequently they asked for them, I had found. Wish in one hand and offer your soul in another. Veera recovered quickly, however, and placed the bag on the ground where it continued to wiggle. Quickly slinging her purse from her shoulder, she dug out a Ziploc bag filled with some sort of foliage and a kitchen knife, from a set it looked like, one of those late-night cutlery deals with the resin handles and the full tang (It slices! It dices! It binds you eternally to infernal powers!), then set the bag aside.

Once she opened the plastic, I knew immediately what was in the baggie: lingonberry and buckthorn generously mixed in with pine needles. Potent and pungent, very aromatic. If Martha Stewart sold sacrifice bags, they would have been similar..

Carefully, she knelt, and spread the contents out, evening it out until it formed a small circle. Setting the knife on the wooden floor, she unrolled the crumpled and folded top of the brown bag and reached both hands inside, only to bring out a gray furred rabbit.

It twitched in that incessantly nervous manner that rabbits had. Even from my chair, I could hear the beats of its anxious heart, pounding away. There was a Finnish legend that said that one day, I whispered all of my dark plans to my sister, thinking we were alone in the forest. Unbeknownst to us, there was a rabbit hidden in the brush, and it shared the my dark agenda with the rest of its kind. Ever since, rabbits have trembled in constant fear of what is to come. Nonsense of course. Hisi could never keep quiet long enough for me to tell her all of my evil plans. I probably didn't even get out "Good morning, nice weather we're having," before she started in with her yapping. Rabbits were just spazzes. Don't blame that shit on me. Damn things would run from a silent fart. As the one being presented to me would have no doubt done if its front legs and back legs hadn't been bound with twine. Wouldn't have run very fast no matter what, however. This one was thick and swollen and obviously very, very pregnant.

She laid it lengthwise on the bed of needles and went to pick up the knife.

"Uh, uh, uh," I said, wagging a finger. "To be a piru is to be an animal, raw, unfettered by the strain of civilization. If you would come with me, you must cast off your mortal trappings, step from the path, and walk among the trees as a native." She gave me a confused look, so I extrapolated. "You have to get fucking naked."

Her cheeks reddened and she made a face that indicated that she had forgotten that part. Standing up, she averted her eyes and began to slide her dress off of one shoulder.

This wouldn't do. "Animals aren't shy. Demons don't blush. Look at me while you do it."

Veera's gaze snapped up and met mine. Jaw set, chip up, she kept her features steady and slid down first one strap, then the other. With nothing holding it up, her dress fell in a wad to the floor, leaving her in only a bra and panties. These come next, the bra peeled off slowly. The cool air on her nipples sent them spiking and she came close to reflexively closing her eyes as it touched her skin, but she remembered my instructions and flicked them wide. Her panties came off in a rush, revealing a curl of golden hair above a pair of fat pussy lips.

She was stunning, in any location, in any era. The most polite of the piru leered openly, while the less well-mannered whistled and made suggestive noises and beastial sounds. The woman stared straight at me and her mouth stayed firm, but her blush deepened. Not bad.

"This is how you will be in my presence from now on. You will wear skin and nothing more. If you disobey, you'll no longer wear skin." What a shame that would be; she had such lovely skin.

Nodding her agreement, she hastily returned to her knees and picked up the knife as she had intended before. She placed the edge against the swollen belly of the rabbit. We would see how well she knew her words. Some of the piru made there way behind her so that they could better see her and ass as she went about the ritual.

"I am human. I would be more. I would be less. I have walked in the sun and felt only the sting. I would walk in shadow and feel only the cold. Lempo, Forest Lord, block the light for me so that my eyesight might wither but my hunger may grow." Decent. She sliced into the stomach of the rabbit. It screamed, that shrill, desperate rabbit scream that would put a B-movie starlet to shame. This rabbit, at least, had been right to live its life in fear. Lempo had come.

"A piru hungers for life, raw and pure. I will take only the sweetest meats...." Setting down the knife, she picked up the rabbit, a set of legs in each hand, and held it in front of her face, slightly higher than her mouth. The rabbit continued to scream, and its belly was slashed red. Still, looking at me, she tilted the creature like a cup of flesh. The gash in its stomach opened up and the contents poured into her open mouth like water flowing out of an overturned vase.

At first, it was just blood, easy and flowing, but then, they started to fall out: rabbit embryos, pink and slick with fluid, like little grubs in her mouth. They were barely solid, and they gathered in her mouth like little bags of jelly. I counted six, but it was hard to be sure. Their heartbeats were so quiet that even I couldn't determine their number by sound. She couldn't handle the last one and it tumbled free of her lips and splattered to the floor.

It was not an easy first meal for a piru, but the trials would just get worse from here on out. If she couldn't handle some rabbit tartar, she would never make it past the later stages. She was doing quite well, hadn't gagged once. Ooh, there it was. The chewing did it. That part got a lot of people. It was hard to know what to do with the little suckers. They were kind of like oysters...but with tiny bones, and legs, and tiny partially formed organs. Every once in a while I could tell when her tongue made contact with a part she recognized by feel and I thought she might retch. She didn't, though. Had to close her eyes for a bit, but I decided to let that slide. Let no one call Lempo unreasonable.

When she was done, and the last bit had been swallowed down, her full breasts coated with blood, she laid the rabbit--which had finally stopped screaming: permanently--back on the bed of needles, opened her eyes, and completed the offering. "The rest, I leave for the Paapiru, may my feasting forever please him." Veera slumped forward, hands flat on the floor to either side of her, bracing her. She was going to need a minute.

Moose retrieved the skin and brought it to me, faithful hound that he was. I took it from him and held it between two fingers. Making a show of it, I tilted my head, lifted the carcass high above my mouth and slowly lowered it down. The piru roared at my showmanship. They were an easy crowd: the dead animal schtick always brought down the house. I devoured what was left of the rabbit in one smooth dip (Yes, boys, I'm single), then licked my teeth and gave a broad smile. I resisted the urge to rub my belly. A good deity knew when to cut the grandstanding.

"I accept your offering, mortal," I said. Then, I drug a fingernail across my palm drawing blood. Instead of pouring out, it formed into one large bead of blood, which continued to thicken and congeal until it was about the size of and density of a Tylenol liquid gel. I rolled it down to fingers and held it up to the light. "Bleed for Lempo, and he will bleed for you. Give this to your betrothed. It won't cure him, but it will help. I'll give you a dose for every trial you pass. If you make it through, he'll survive. If you fail in the middle, at worst, you will have bought him some time." With a flick of my wrist I sent it spinning into the open purse by her side.

She only nodded weakly and reached over to collect her things. With her dress bunched in one hand and her purse in the other, she stood weakly and said, "Thank you." Turning, she made for the exit, and was shocked when two of the piru moved in front of her. She looked back at me. "What?"

I made a tick sound with my mouth and raised my hand up. "Your offer has been accepted, but you still have to pass your first trial. It's sort of tradition."

Her resolve waivered visibly for the first time. "Now?"

"Now."

"What's the first trial?" I could tell she was spent from her ordeal with the rabbit. Shame. She would need her energy.

I gave her my best apologetic shrug. "Initiation."

"I'm engaged," she offered weakly.

"You bargained for life, not fidelity. All piru are married to the forest. Consider this your honeymoon."

The piru in front of her smiled, an awful toothy grin that fully revealed two cat-like fangs that protruded slightly over her bottom lip. When Veera saw it, her face fell and fatigue filled her eyes. She knew what was to come, and nodded anyway. Very brave, this one. Her fianc was fortunate to have such a woman, even if she were a fool. When I dropped my hand, signaling the piru, I almost felt guilty. The demons felt no such compulsion. Soon, she would be just like them; the trials would see to that. I frowned at the thought. I had enough devils.

Naked within seconds, they fell on her without mercy or constraint, hands groping, tongues searching. A woman with hawkish features threaded her talons in Veera's hair and forced her to her knees, pulling the human's face to her sopping cunt. The others were not so gentle.

Long ago, a piru named Gordy had run away from the forest, an unheard of occurrence at the time. He was only gone a day before I noticed. In that time, however, he found his way to a whorehouse. By the time I caught up to him all the women but one were dead. Battered to death by his affection. What's more, Gordy, had a thing for redheads. When I found him, he had the lone living whore bent over a pile of the others, all of their hair had been ripped out. He was gripping a clutch of red locks, presumably from one of the dead girls, in his fist and holding it over the one he was fucking like a wig. I stopped it, but she was already too far gone. I gave her the gift of what you know call Alzheimer's but was then known as soft mind, and she spent the remainder of her life thinking she was sixteen again with no memory of the brothel or Gordy.

Before I skinned Gordy and made a cloak out of him, which I wore for almost a century to remind the other piru of the price of disobedience, I asked him why he had run away. It turned out the other demons were bullying him for his sensitive nature.

I watched them with Veera, made sure they didn't kill her. It was a small kindness, if it was a kindness at all. Hours later when they were finished, I had Moose carry her out and take her to the hospital. I could have healed her, but trials were trials. When everyone had gone, I smelled it out. There, between the copious sexual fluids, was a dapple of her blood that had fallen from her lip when the fanged woman had kissed her roughly. I gathered it on the tip of my finger and brought it to my mouth.

It took me only an instant to sift through the vile stain of the piru. After that, it was all white light singing on my tongue.

Born in Finland. Moved to America when she was three. Grew up in Brooklyn. The old country was little more than the scent of pine and stories from her grandma to her. Still, she had a deep nostalgia for the idyllic culture she imagined she had once been a part of, and missed it often in that way that someone can miss a place that they have never been.

Her first kiss with James Kirkland in the back of his Chevy Cavalier, nervous and giggling. Warm lips, hungry tongue. He wanted more but she held firm. Finished the night with her head on his broad chest, still fully dressed.

Did her undergraduate at Vanderbilt. Came home and got her law degree from Columbia. Joined a big firm right out of school. Big paycheck, bigger accolades.

Lost her virginity to her fiancé, Erik, another attorney, before he had that title. They met at Columbia. She loved him. After he had gone to sleep that night, she had written in a diary that she'd kept since she was a teen. Her entry: "Dear younger me, all that waiting...totally worth it! Good call on James K. He had the herpe."

Quit the firm for a position as a social worker at children's hospital in Jersey, land of the less fortunate. She was overqualified and underappreciated. Half the paycheck, double the sleep.

Sitting with Erik during his chemo treatments. Watching him mainline poison and listening to him crack jokes. Eventually there was more poison and less jokes. Then there were serious-faced doctors and x-rays dark with shadows and bad news. They tried to have sex, but he rarely finished. She loved it just the same. Afterward, she would stroke his hair and as he fell asleep and think about how lucky she was to have found him, and how cursed to lose him so. She decided on one of those nights, when he had talked openingly about needing her help to end it if it ever got that bad, that she would do anything to spare them both that fate. She remembered a name from her childhood: Lempo. Then a few bits of memory--reading, researching, meeting odd people who believed strange things, had heard rumors of a club downtown.

Then sadness, sadness and genuine grief so strong and true that even I couldn't barely bear to look at it further. The images were scattered. The blood was stale, muddled from being trampled on, and had begun to lose some of its potency from time spent on the floor. It was much better to get it fresh. There were scenes of crying, frustration, anger and bitterness. Just flashes, hard to sort. The cancer, apparently, had taken its toll. It did nothing, however, to lessen the overall quality of the sample.

Not quite a virgin. Who was these days? Still....

She was worthy.

I walked to the hall, up the stairs, and headed to the roof, to my place of solace. Someone could carry my throne out later. I didn't want it at the moment.

****

This may sound odd, coming from a being that is routinely credited with the downfall of civilization, but I love people. You fuckers are fascinating. Give you lot a millenium and a pile of rocks and you'll build a pyramid, as tall and as big as a mountain. Give you a century of boredom and some pointy sticks and you'll tear the fucker down just to show that you can.

You know what they say about lemons and lemonade? Well, it's true. And I would know; I've been shoveling lemons at you for years. There is an opposite saying that seems to be equally as true, however, and that is: "If life gives you peaches, find something else to bitch about."

I don't get you. You rise to occasions but sink with monotony. If I give you plague and pain and heartbreak, you stand together in circles and sing inspirational songs and light candles and hug each other until your skin chaffs from it. But if I go easy, if I take a summer or two off, leave you laying on the beach with full bellies and stiff drinks, you can't be trusted to rub lotion on each others backs without trying to strangle one another. You look into the crystal water and reflect too much, about who has what, who doesn't, what's fair, what's not. It's like you can't stand all the fucking peace. Only a human would grow angry that his or her piece of paradise wasn't as big as someone else's, while other people in far off corners rotted from the inside.