Chime

Each bell toll told Neve that she was losing more and more time. She looked down at her pale hands as they began to wrinkle, shriveling just as they did every day at this hour. By the moment the hour bell finished its song of eight, she could see gray hair beginning to sprout from the roots growing from her skull. Neve was only twenty-one, but she easily could have been mistaken for her fifties in this lapse of her particular curse.

Every day, without fail, she began to age with every passing hour. She woke up as a child and fell asleep as an old woman, knuckles curled like knots in a tree. And so it always went. Once, she had thought she would profit from her anomalous body—but then the media coverage became so much that a close friend had to help her conceive a new identity in a different area of the country. It hadn’t been easy, crossing a continent and trying to keep her rapidly aging self from detection.

The worst part was noon every day, when she was in her prime of youth and so intent on finding a lover to spend an hour with before he realized her skin was growing dry and chalky before his very eyes. It had been a good year since she had indulged in lovemaking properly, rather than a quick fling in a back alley, because she could never spend too much time with the partner of the day. She didn’t even know what it was like to fall asleep in an embrace that wasn’t her own.

The true test came in how she had to migrate from town to town. In another age, she definitely would have been hounded as a witch—and most likely persecuted for it. The media charade had been an interesting distraction, until scientists wanted to get involved to try and study her. And then she had fled, ready to begin a new life that did not scrutinize her situation but instead accepted it as just another quirk of the universe.

When she awoke in the morning as a child anew, she relished the growth spurt as it happened in only hours instead of years. But the nighttime brought with it aches in her muscles and creaks in her bone. Even with blankets piled atop her quickeningly frail form, she always fell asleep cold. And she imagined someday she would die just the same way, with skin that was as thin as paper and a heart that had frosted over.

A regular job was out of the question, at least until the days when it became commonplace to work from home via the internet. She acted as a consultant who was always too busy for video call meetings, and she always pretended she was older than she actually was. Her boss had hired her from connections alone (thanks to that same old friend). Of course there were questions and rumors—every workplace had its gossip, even if the proverbial water cooler was a series of emails and chats instead—but she did well enough of a job that no one really bothered her.

Neve wished life could go on in this simplistic fashion, but a part of her hated her cursed body for being so unpredictable. She was supposed to be young and thriving, not hiding in a studio apartment under a different name while she made money for things she would never be able to do freely, like traveling or building a family. And, despite the face that greeted her by nightfall, she was still shorn of a youthful cloth inside her decrepit form.

Curses were meant to be broken, weren’t they? If this were a fairy tale, a kiss from a prince might have done the trick. But her life was no fairy tale. Every single waking moment, she was reminded only of how magic could be used for ill.

And on her deathbed Neve’s mother was the one who had spoken the words to damn her: “I want you to know what growing old feels like.”

The next morning, Neve was a child waking up to find her clothes were enveloping her like a parachute. She could still remember staring in the mirror and seeing the version of her that had been barely old enough to go to kindergarten. It had been like seeing an acquaintance after a long, long time apart.

Death’s door had made her mother spiteful, obviously. But what could undo a curse bound by blood and death?

Neve didn’t believe in gods, no matter their origin, but she did believe in the supernatural—to an extent. After all, if words alone could bind her to grow from child to adult to crone in only a 24-hour span, then there had to be more out there. Somewhere. She just had to find the right pathways leading to that point.

But she wasn’t getting anywhere sitting in an apartment she could barely afford. The online friend who had been like a fairy protector of sorts tried to caution her, but Neve was tired of waiting. She had to do something rather than continue the cycle of life in its entirety every day till her heart gave out.

“You need to be careful,” her friend told her. “Do you want a repeat of New York?”

New York was where it had all nearly fallen apart. She had had a stalker who got too close for comfort. The chilling letter, full of threats and adoration alike, had been enough to spook Neve. Some people wished they had the key to what they had deemed “a power” she had gained. But it was no power. It was just a nuisance, a reminder that magic might exist but did not always promise wonder and enlightenment.

“I’ll do my best to avoid that,” she wrote back. But a response never came. Obviously she had more faith in herself than her so-called friend did.

Neve left California just as another heat wave had caused trees to ignite in patches of wildfires across the state. She left early in the day as a child pulling along a suitcase, and the travel bus was empty as she boarded it. Everyone who came aboard after was too engrossed in cell phone screens and social media to pay her any mind. The only downside came when the bus driver gave a double-take as she, much taller than earlier in the day, exited the bus at their destination.

A Midwest sky greeted her as she made her way to the area where her aunt was set to meet her. Her mother hadn’t had many relatives left, but Aunt Mina wasn’t like her sister—at least in the ways that counted.

Neve was already back to her teenage body when she greeted her aunt with a hug. “I hope you can help me,” she whispered.

“I hope so too, sweetheart,” Aunt Mina said.

There were never any guarantees, but Neve would take what help she could get in making sure she got rid of this blood curse once and for all.