Voodoo

You’d never know by looking at her, that’s what I said to myself when I opened the closet door and began snooping around. That’s what you would say too, well that is if you had looked at her and then weeks or months after getting to know her, you opened her closet door and began snooping around.

There it was before me, and I still couldn’t believe it. Taped on the back wall of the closet, behind the button down blouses on hangers, were twenty or so drawings of characters. On closer inspection I saw that these drawings were done on cardboard and cut meticulously with what must have been and exact-o blade. No big deal, it’s just weird art project I thought. Until I noticed that they were all drawings of our friends, most of them guys. Cool dudes. Then I began to notice some people I had never seen in my life, and what was strange about these were the tufts of hair stapled in the middle of their tiny corrugated bodies and big ‘X’s’ drawn across them.

Freaked out, I looked around for more. I looked for mine. In the process I found a stack of books hidden beneath a pile of size four capri pants. Books with titles that read “What Can You Do With Voodoo” and “DIY: Head Shrinking,” I think I even saw a pamphlet that said “Sacrificial Rituals: Cool, or Not?”

Continuing my search in earnest now, I dug through everything that got in my way: Shirts, pants, shorts, skirts, skorts, and even her unmentionables. That’s when I found it. The explanation, or… at least as close to one as I was going to get. Sitting in the darkest corner of the closet was the box. The fabled box. The box that all girls keep. It is said to be full of love letters and ticket stubs, pictures and tiny keepsakes. It is the physical gathering and representation of all meaningful, emotional, and romantic moments in a woman’s life. Hers was empty. Empty, save a damn cardboard drawing of myself.

Quickly I put everything back into place, or as near to it as I could anyway. I closed the door to the closet, and began plotting my escape. Suddenly a light switched on behind me and a silhouette was cast onto the wall I was facing. It was her, and she was holding a knife. A sacrificial knife no doubt. When I turned to face my destiny, she said, “What’s the matter? I made quesadillas, you want one?” It was true, I could see the knife covered in strands of melted cheese.

“Sure,” I said, and that was it.

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Written for Intro to Fiction at the U of O