Cursefell by C.V. Dreesman Read Free Book Online Page A

rusted with age and experience and abandoned hopes while we still glowed with the unfinished forging of youthful bliss in the kiln of time.  If only we could stay so forever.
     Of course that also meant we would stop at Stonecrest's newest store first.  Crystals had a sectional big front window to display its best off brand clothing, a mix including European inspired knock offs at outlet pricing.  The owner, Crystal Workman, was a young twenty-six year old self made woman.  She easily talked all about her time learning fashion in the garment districts in Paris and Los Angeles if given half a chance.  She even attended Harvard to learn the business side the industry required, if online extension courses could be viewed as attending an Ivy League.  Not that Crystal cared what anyone said about it.  She only seemed to care about who she was, not what anyone else said she was.  I wondered if that was why she had foregone the parties and drama, if you believed her story, to embrace that passion for fashion.  I'm sure she was one of Anna's current inspirations.  My friend could do much worse, even if Crystal did think a bit much of herself as the garish neon sign above the window displaying her name would attest.
     Anna hooked her arm around mine as we looked over the display.  She started clapping her hands and bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet in giddy excitement.  I disentangled my arm before she could dislocate the elbow, wondering what had gotten her so excited.
     "Look Thera, they have snakeskin boots!  And they're green!"
     She had a great eye for style usually.  But green boots?  The snakeskin wasn't even real.  I knew that at a glance, although it was a good imitation.  For some reason I couldn't understand the sight of those boots and Anna's enthusiasm raised my blood pressure.
     "Come on, Anna.  We are supposed to find something for your mom, remember?" I said, clinching my fists without knowing why.
     "But they are perfect!  I've never had anything like them." She was pulling me toward the door even as I pulled in the opposite direction.  "I wish I had added them to my gift list.  Maybe I can drop a hint to my dad.  He might get them for Christmas."
     The pain those words caused me was nothing Anna, Lily, Evony, or anyone could appreciate.  I flashed back to memories held in repression from that last Christmas with my family, when we were gathered complete and whole together.
     The holidays had changed for me.  Christmas had always been a time for joy and the hope of what might be.  Then that magical morning the reality of what was would come to pass.  It was never all that I secretly wished for in my secret heart, but mostly more than I believed it would actually contain.  Dad and Mom would surprise me with something unexpected, sometimes revealing it first, like when they gave me a frog statue complete with a lily pad held up like an umbrella, or sometimes last, as they did when they surprised me with my first bow and arrow set.  It was the unexpected, I guess, that got me so excited.  The exhilaration when taking that first step of discovery, a gift you can't figure out just by shaking what lies beneath the happy wrapping.
     We all know the rest.  The intentional hesitant slow tear in the paper that offers just a glimpse of the mysterious something.  The bigger, longer strip that follows before the final frenzied shredding.  The final reveal.  The gift itself.  The surrogate personification of the giver's heart no matter the size, cost, or type.
     For the first time my father wouldn't be there.  Mother would barely be present.  It was a holiday broken for me.  My family would always have a hole in it and no old man, no matter how jolly, could make it better.  Not that I could see.  No, this Christmas I knew what I would not be getting at least.  My whole family would never again spend the