“Do you have any idea what mothballs cost these days? Support Pepper Legs and I'll quiet down. Temporarily.”
The Story of Pepper Legs
I am Pepper Legs. I have shuffled through this village since before your bloodline learned to fear the dark, and I will be haunting its cobbles long after the last of you has had the decency to die.
I was born in an age without a name. The Stone Age, the Dark Age — what does it matter? They were all ages, and they were all ages ago. My mother scrubbed floors that were never clean. My father broke his back for bread that was never sweet. We were poor in the way only the truly poor understand: poor enough that the poverty itself became a relative — the one who never left.
I married a man named Tortilla Legs. Don't you look at me like that. Names were different then. He was poor too, which is to say he was honest, which is to say the world would one day take him from me.
And it did.
Rapscallions. That is the word. They came with their shenanigans — loud, smug, lubricated by a confidence they had done nothing to earn. They tore him from me. Not with swords. With small, casual cruelties. The kind that leave no mark a magistrate would recognize, but that hollow a woman out just the same.
I could not bring him back. So I did the only thing left to a woman of my particular temperament. I learned to meddle.
My curses are not the fire-and-brimstone sort. I have no interest in turning anyone into a newt. A newt is too dignified. No. I deal in inconveniences. A rapscallion's shoes wear out a week too soon. His porridge arrives unspeakably hot, every time, without fail. His left sock goes damp at precisely the wrong hour. Small things. Petty things. The sort of misfortune a man would never trace back to the old woman in the hood — because who would believe her capable of anything but dying slowly?
They never noticed. That was the beauty of it. I noticed. I noticed every single time, and it sustained me through the long grey years the way your coffee sustains you through a meeting that should have been an email.
I am a ghost of my former self now — thinner, crankier, considerably more translucent. But my services remain available to you. The living. The beleaguered. The quietly vengeful. Point me at a rapscallion. Hand me a trinket to curse. I will see that his life becomes, in some barely perceptible way, worse.
Or nothing will happen at all. And what, precisely, have you lost?
Nothing. That's what.
So. Do we have an understanding, or must I stand here until one of us turns to dust?
“Oh. It's you again.”
Illustration conjured by Gemini · Tale told by Pepper Legs, whether you asked or not
The Story of Pepper Legs
I am Pepper Legs. I have shuffled through this village since before your bloodline learned to fear the dark, and I will be haunting its cobbles long after the last of you has had the decency to die.
I was born in an age without a name. The Stone Age, the Dark Age — what does it matter? They were all ages, and they were all ages ago. My mother scrubbed floors that were never clean. My father broke his back for bread that was never sweet. We were poor in the way only the truly poor understand: poor enough that the poverty itself became a relative — the one who never left.
I married a man named Tortilla Legs. Don't you look at me like that. Names were different then. He was poor too, which is to say he was honest, which is to say the world would one day take him from me.
And it did.
Rapscallions. That is the word. They came with their shenanigans — loud, smug, lubricated by a confidence they had done nothing to earn. They tore him from me. Not with swords. With small, casual cruelties. The kind that leave no mark a magistrate would recognize, but that hollow a woman out just the same.
I could not bring him back. So I did the only thing left to a woman of my particular temperament. I learned to meddle.
My curses are not the fire-and-brimstone sort. I have no interest in turning anyone into a newt. A newt is too dignified. No. I deal in inconveniences. A rapscallion's shoes wear out a week too soon. His porridge arrives unspeakably hot, every time, without fail. His left sock goes damp at precisely the wrong hour. Small things. Petty things. The sort of misfortune a man would never trace back to the old woman in the hood — because who would believe her capable of anything but dying slowly?
They never noticed. That was the beauty of it. I noticed. I noticed every single time, and it sustained me through the long grey years the way your coffee sustains you through a meeting that should have been an email.
I am a ghost of my former self now — thinner, crankier, considerably more translucent. But my services remain available to you. The living. The beleaguered. The quietly vengeful. Point me at a rapscallion. Hand me a trinket to curse. I will see that his life becomes, in some barely perceptible way, worse.
Or nothing will happen at all. And what, precisely, have you lost?
Nothing. That's what.
So. Do we have an understanding, or must I stand here until one of us turns to dust?
“There you are. I was trying not to notice.”
Illustration conjured by Gemini · Tale told by Pepper Legs, whether you asked or not