Now I’m just imagining Shane making his fourth cup wish that the curse is undone for everyone who’s be under its effect and that it’s deleted from existence. There would be headlines on every continent of reports that people are free. It’s less than a 1000 people across the globe but everyone knows it’s because of Shane Hollander. I’m not crying. You’re crying.
I really like leaving the ending open where the reader gets to ultimately decide what happens down the road but if I’m the reader I think this is down my ideal, wish-fulfillment road that I shan’t be analyzing in light of broader narrative meaning I’m just going to have a fun time Chewing on it
I really love this point because I think one of the hardest parts about the curse is this sense of unimportance. You are utilitarian. Who you are as a person doesn’t matter—you only get to exist for the convenience of someone else. And the longer you spend under the curse, the more it reinforces that everyone else wants you like that. No one cares about you, really you—you’re just an object to be used.
But then there’s someone out there who used to be like you and he does care, he cares so much that when he was given the chance to wish for anything in the world he wished for you to be real again, he doesn’t know you as a person but he still wants you to be a person and it’s the first time since you’ve been cursed that anyone’s loved you for more than what you could offer them. You can’t give him anything he didn’t ask you for anything he doesn’t even know you and you can’t remember the last time someone gave something to you instead of taking. He had a powerful wish that only one person gets once a year and he gave it to someone who’s never meant to get anything ever again. He wished for your freedom he wished for it to never be taken from you or anyone else again he wished for the wheel of luck to turn your way and guide you to safety away from whoever had cursed you. He wished for you until the Cup ran dry.
There’s something so healing about it to me. Shane spent so long under the curse feeling forgotten, feeling like no one cared about him as a person, and even after he was freed the idea of there being other people out there trapped like him lingered in his mind. Most people are cursed by their spouses. He was an outlier, having Ilya, having a spouse that wanted him to be a real person. Most people won’t be freed because they have no one to want their freedom.
Things are better for him now. He thinks of himself as happy more than he thinks of himself as hurt. Some mornings he still wakes with something under his skin. Some days he still can’t bear to have anyone touch him. But it’s only some days. He can go days and days and days without dwelling on how badly he used to hurt. His body feels like his own again. He doesn’t feel disgusting. He doesn’t feel like a thing.
Most nights, he can sleep in the same bed as Ilya again. They have separate beds for the nights when one of them can’t. It’s different than what they had before but it’s still good. Some days are hard and some days they struggle and every day they have to work hard to make their relationship work but they have more good days than bad ones and they’re finally able to help each other through a lot of the bad ones. They have a new cottage that looks nothing like the first one and their memories there are mostly happy.
He has a new ward tattooed to his wrist. A witch designed it for her graduate thesis. It does nothing but turn from blue to black when black magic enters and lingers in someone’s body. The witch who designed it reached out to him after its creation to offer to cast it on him and Ilya personally. She tells him that all of her advisors warned her off this project. Attempts to make this kind of ward in the past had always failed. Too many false positives, too many different curses out there for them to all be detected by the same ward. But she had insisted on trying.
She had been in attendance at the Stanley Cup playoffs a few years prior. The year that Ottawa won the Cup.
Shane saw an article in the paper last week. Someone had been possessed—not by the stepford wife curse, not even by the type of possession curse that had Shane, but the kind that blacked you out and did its best to ensure that you’d wake to your life in shambles. It was discovered early. She had a ward on her wrist that had turned from blue to black.
Shane always catches Ilya’s eyes dropping to his ward and just as often he finds his own eyes dropping to check Ilya’s matching ward. They have never been black. On the days where they can both comfortably touch the other Ilya kisses Shane’s ward in the morning after they wake up. Sex is different between them now but it feels good again and when it doesn’t it always stops as soon as one of them wants it to stop. Ilya never touches Shane without checking his ward first and Shane always checks Ilya’s in turn and a part of him grates at the fact that they’ll probably never be able to fall into bed together without concern the way they used to but the wards make it so much easier than when they first tried to find their footing with each other again and Ilya was waking up in a cold sweat over the thought of history repeating itself.
He’d like to think they’re happy now. It’s not perfect but life never is. Some days are bad for Ilya and some are bad for Shane and some are bad for both but more days are good and they’re getting better.
It will never have not happened. They’ll never have exactly what they used to have. But that doesn’t mean that what they have instead bad.
Shane would say he could go days without thinking about what happened to him but that’s not exactly true. He thinks of it every day. He thinks of it every single day, in the moments before he falls asleep. He thinks of them every single day.
The maybe-others out there. The ones who are still cursed in the way he used to be cursed.
He thinks of all those nights he spent locked in his own head, waiting to fall asleep and knowing that it’d all start again as soon as morning comes. He thinks of all the times he fell asleep praying he wouldn’t wake up. And he wonders if there’s anyone out there locked in their own body desperate to fall into a sleep they’ll never wake from.
He didn’t even know for sure if the wish would free anyone when he made it.
The government has changed the curse’s official designation from “extinct” to “unknown.” They’re not sure if there are others. They can’t rule it out. Please report possible cases to your public health official immediately.
Shane always suspected that there were others still out there, a scattered handful of cases were found in the wake of his freeing—the fact that such a high profile celebrity was able to remain in the public eye without anyone spotting a possession curse caused a public scare around curses, which led to a wave of testing, which led to so many curses being found including a few other instances of the stepford wife curse—but the nature of this curse made it borderline impossible to spot. Most of the people who would know you well enough to spot the curse signs are the ones most likely to curse you to begin with. The curse by nature made you isolate yourself and not form or maintain meaningful relationships with anyone outside of your spouse. And a lot of the remaining instances of this curse were with the very powerful and very elite, and they could just… refuse to let their spouse get tested. He has no way of confirming that there are still active cases when he makes his wish. But at the very least, he’ll be able to ensure that there will never be another case. He wishes and wishes and wishes until the Cup runs dry. He wishes for their freedom he wishes for it to never happen again he wishes the curse wiped from existence he wishes for the wheel of luck to turn their way and ensure they find safety once they’re free.
The wish catches. He passes the Cup to J.J. to take his lap. He only tells Ilya what he wished for. He goes home and turns off his phone and crawls into bed. He thinks of the maybe-others out there and he cries and Ilya cries and neither of them talk about it. They wake up the next morning and Ilya kisses the ward on his wrist. It is blue.
He turns on his phone. He has 39 missed calls. 117 text messages. The entire world knows his Cup wish because it came true. An alarming number of spouses of prominent government officials across the globe, a few billionaire’s wives, scattered cases here and there… exact numbers were still being determined.
All trace of the stepford wife curse appears to have vanished from the face of the goddamn planet. It’s not even in governmental vaults anymore. It’s gone. It will never happen again.
He thinks about the others again that night, in the moments before he falls asleep. He’ll still be thinking about them and what happened for a while, he thinks. Too much is happening right now about it for him to think about anything else. He goes to sleep and he wakes up and Ilya kisses his ward and it is still blue.
He gets a phone call. Some of the other survivors were asked if they could contact anyone for them and they asked for him. He has a plane ticket for tomorrow. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say to them.
He goes to sleep that night. He thinks of the others again. He thinks of what happened to him. It still hurts to remember. But for the first time since it happened, it feels like he’s going to get to have days where he doesn’t think of it, not even once. He sleeps and wakes and there is nothing under his skin. Ilya kisses his ward. It is blue.
