An Ancient Curse (Originally Written May 2023) – r.e. ender

November 28, 2024

Turners falls is a small new england town full of libertarians & aging hippie craftspeople too strung out or lacking the inheritance to live across the river in greenfield. Addiction and intoxicating natural beauty compose & harmonize in the decaying former milltown. Countless moments more beatific, fluttering & poetic than any suburb; countless stories of joblessness and overdoses and self-inflicted psychic wounds by occasionally genius artists without a pebble of recognition or trophy to their existence. A main street owned by the grandchildren of a seventies cult leader, a laundromat with local shakespeare productions, a shuttering bridge over a gushing river, & a massacre of native americans by the town’s namesake are its most known cultural affordances. Three hundred years prior the remaining native leaders put a forever curse on its european inhabitants in vengeance of their murdered children; a fact proven with time and without remedy. Still the pastel purple gray fog & ferns unfurling & the magenta autumn leaves provide providence from my suicidal ideations with a psalmlike grandmotherly friendship. Maybe they sensed the martyred polish hebrew children left in bloody piles two generations prior to my birth, or maybe I was being lured into a siren’s song to soon find myself awakened drowning in the river. My other half are bloated & hellish midwestern monuments to complacent hatred & in my quietest moments I hear both a gurgling devil from hell & the chants and prayers of angelic toddlers mournfully at peace with their fate finally so long as I keep it real. Marcus had never listened to these verses, neither the spirits nor the elements. His comically aggressive abuse of adderall did nothing if not terminate his prescription to natures whispers & just last year his atheist-american & dementialess grandfather had committed suicide via shot gun blast to the temple with bizarre ancestral indifference.
        Twelfth street was the precipice between autumnal postcards & limping veterans endlessly knocking on doors, lurking on back porches, and glancing into idling cars. Either that or their aesthetically wartorn clipped cigarette and face tattooed youthful counterparts; both generations straddling the line between thievery and victimhood, self righteous caucasian psychosis and multigenerational self hatred- all the while their dealers sitting inside, televisions turned up to maximum volume. Marcus lived at the dead-end end of the street on the top floor unit of a three story apartment complex seemingly constructed from paper mache, drywall, and unfinished two by fours. An outsider from twenty miles down 91 south, he was quickly assimilating into the lifestyle of his neighbors, albeit with mania for now occupying the space that opioids held in their daily routines and more so visual presentation. He’d spent the first half of the pandemic working at a detox center & involved in a codependent love affair with a thirty something republican trapped in a loveless marriage & encumbered by her unwanted child. It was his first romance in years and he proudly wore the sweaters she bought him with the massive disposable income she earned in a settlement regarding a relative’s death on 9/11. At her request they engaged in a sort of full spectrum master-slave dynamic in which he told her what to eat and could fuck her without warning. This was an emotional responsibility any creature with even the most basic perceptual abilities could see Marcus was clearly not fit for, although they professed to be in love with one another and she tormented him psychologically in return. Despite the depth of his mental illness, Marcus could go many months, sometimes even a year, passing as a charming, handsome, & upstanding citizen of above average intellect until plunging into paranoia, drug abuse, and extreme levels of inaction. As the months of covid lockdown went on he was fired, rehired and fired again from the detox center because his obvious drug use was beginning to surpass that of many of their patients as well as a somewhat thin accusation of sexual harassment he claimed was a misunderstanding. As his employment concluded so did his relationship, as all his relationships had before, with his lover’s realization that although beautiful and well intentioned in nature, he was a complete lunatic. Since then he’d spent his time either fully reclined in a lazy boy armchair smoking weed, swallowing pills, and injecting ketamine into his legs or swept up into acute & prolonged manic episodes, possessed to engage in more intricately self destructive and anti social activities. More than once in this time period I’d come over unannounced after days of being unable to contact him, presuming him dead or dying, to find him asleep, his uncharged cell phone beside him and the squalor of his apartment ever worsening. I’d let him sleep and smoke a cigarette on his porch, pondering curses & watching the river rush by like an olde country song.