Jupiter Jones

Listen to Jupiter read her story

The day after I was born, Aunty Ingrid cursed me. I heard her heels clackety-clacking down the corridor of the old maternity hospital where I was one of the last arrivals. The place is derelict now, said to be haunted. 

Cr-ea-ea-k. A door with bone-dry hinges scrapes open. Clackety-clack comes Aunty Ingrid up the ward – imagine an abattoir painted cream gloss, metal beds, bed-pans and rules. Aunty Ingrid swishes back the curtain printed with dispirited rabbits and I startle. Feeble arms and legs jerking like she’d used a cattle prod. Eyes narrowing against the harsh light, against the sight of the witch. Top-to-toe in black, eyeliner, piercings, studded collar, scowling, hench. I emit a faint whimper.

‘So, Trudy, you’ve dropped your brat at last,’ she says. ‘I was beginning to suspect it was just wind.’

‘Oh, there’s a sour old thing,’ says my mother sitting up in bed, wincing in discomfort from where I’d clawed my way out. ‘He’s a fine handsome boy.’

‘A boy?’ Ingrid peers into my scratched plastic bassinet; I shrink into the white cellular swaddling. I can smell her, smell her like prey smells predator.

‘Unwrap him then. I want to curse his winkle,’ she says.

‘Just because you dress like Halloween, doesn’t give you powers.’

‘Oh, I’ve got powers,’ says Aunty Ingrid. ‘And he can never be one of us.’

‘There’s no ‘us’ Ingrid,’ my mother says, ‘Your weird sisterhood, it’s all bunkum.’

I cry, a thin helpless sound like bitterns over marshland.

Jupiter’s prompts were: A Hospital, a Strange Child, and a Cursed Object

She said of the challenge: “Trying to write flash fiction to a prompt can be like giftwrapping a bicycle – badly. Writing to three prompts is more like coaxing a trio of slugs through a keyhole. There are moments when not only is it not working out, but you wondered why you ever thought it might be a good idea.

Faced with the random prompts hospital, strange child and cursed object, I knew two things: one, I would never willingly set a story in a hospital, and two, writing about children – even strange ones – is not ‘my thing’. So, cursing had to be my way in. The mind begins to wander … Who curses? Curses what? Why? Why is for the reader to fathom, my job ends with the slugs.

Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions published by Ad Hoc, Aesthetica, Amphibia, etc. She is the author of three novellas-in-flash, including Lovelace Flats published by Reflex Press. Being a proper nerd with very little social life, she is currently working on a PhD on (dis)connectivity in the novella-in-flash. On Twitter @jupiterjonz