Chicken Skin, Bad Karma, and the Thread
Bad things happen to me. They just do. I wish I could be one of those people who say they have no luck, but luck can’t be blamed for my misfortune. I suffer from not a lack, but a surplus—a surplus of bad karma.
Karma’s a bitch, so the Western adage goes. I think karma works a bit differently than that. Karma consumes. She devours. She’s made a feast of my life, a full-on, five-course meal. But I can’t play the victim, at least not this time, because I am the one who invited her. In the sixth grade, I killed a girl—accidentally—no, incidentally. Without full knowledge of what I was doing. My bad karma began in a public library.
It all started with a girl called Chicken Skin.
#
In elementary school, she was drawn towards the strangest things: insects, lizards, small creatures that crawled, animals who lived in grottos. She loved fantasy stories and fairytales, anything by which she could be permitted to escape the world and retreat into her unreasonable imagination. She admired what her peers deemed “nerdy,” and for the most part, she didn’t care that she didn’t have too many friends. What really hurt her the most was that in the sixth grade, when she had developed a particularly bad case of eczema, Caroline Adams, the most popular girl in the entire school, got everyone to call her Chicken Skin.
From that day forward, she was known as Chicken Skin.
Chicken Skin, Chicken Skin, Chicken Skin.
#
The mentioning of death mortifies me. When I hear death, see it, smell it from the road kill on the side of the street, I freeze. Stop. I can’t help but think of Caroline Adams and what I did to her. My best friend, Addie, has told me hundreds of times, “Maggie, you didn’t kill Caroline Adams. She was struck by a drunk driver. You didn’t kill Caroline Adams.” But Chicken Skin couldn’t believe that, and she wouldn’t let herself believe that. She didn’t believe in believing in a lie.
#
When she was in the sixth grade,
Chicken Skin was deeply fascinated by the fringe. She was an odd girl, often
aloof and alone. She used to wander aimlessly throughout the Pennsylvania
wilderness that pressed up against her backyard. She followed a small footpath
that meandered in between blackberry brambles and pokeweed. She walked until
she reached a creek, where she would lift the rocks and look for salamanders
beneath them.
#
She passed up a book in the public library one
day: Black Magic, The Occult, and The
All-Seeing Eye by R.J. Merriwether. As she felt the spine of the book, a
shiver ran down her own. The book was old, bound in worn, brown leather. She
picked it up and flipped through its yellowed pages. She started reading from
one:
Black magic. Black magic has the power to harm your enemies. But spell casters beware: what you send out inevitably comes back to you. It is my advice to caution you against black magic or the use of these spells. Spell casters: use these at your own risk.When Chicken Skin read this, she immediately thought of Caroline Adams. Caroline was the snotty little girl who made up the name “chicken skin” in the first place. After that, the entire school started to call her Chicken Skin. Maggie hated Caroline Adams. So she decided to check the book out.
The librarian looked at her curiously through her glasses. “I’m sorry, young lady, but you have to be 16 or older to check out this book. It’s restricted,” she said, pointing at the restricted sticker on the side of the binding. Chicken Skin frowned and walked out of the library. She would have to come back tomorrow and steal the book from the library.
#
Chicken Skin narrowly escaped the library with the book in her large overcoat pocket that she had taken from her mother. The library, who had been shelving books, did not see her leave the scene of the crime. Chicken Skin walked back home and went downstairs into her observatory.
The basement was cluttered with tanks and critter carriers, tons of books about Pennsylvania plants and insects. When she grew up, Chicken Skin wanted to be an entomologist, or a biologist, or a gardener. She hadn’t decided which one, but all of these interests were deep at heart.
When she got to her reading chair, she removed the book from her jacket and sat down. She opened the book to the section about black magic. Again, she read the warning. Bad karma. This didn’t matter to her. She thought only of her anger for Caroline Adams, how even her best friend wouldn’t come over to her house anymore because Caroline Adams had told everyone that her mom is a nurse, and that her mom says that chicken skin spreads.
“It’s chicken pox, not chicken skin,” she said to herself. “Eczema isn’t contagious.”
Chicken Skin knew this, but there was no way of convincing her friends. She read through the black magic spells in the book. Most of them involved materials she didn’t have: plant oils, candles, a full moon, blood sacrifice. But then, she stumbled upon one spell that was perfect for her situation. It was a spell that required only a single thread.
Three knots, and with each knot, Chicken Skin had to think of the anger and hatred inside her for Caroline Adams. When she tied the first knot, she thought of how Caroline Adams first looked at her eczema and called her “chicken skin.” The kids around her started imitating chickens, bawking around her and flapping their arms folded into wings. With the second knot, she thought of how her best friend, Manny Moore, called her one day after school and said they couldn’t be friends anymore. She tied the second knot with the worst feeling of betrayal. Finally, she tied the third knot, and with this knot, she thought of Caroline Adams’s smug face, her blonde hair, and smooth skin. She wanted so desperately for something terrible to happen to Caroline Adams. Chicken Skin wanted her to pay.
She wanted Caroline Adams to feel what it was like to be ostracized by everyone in the school.
Tomorrow, she would follow the spell book’s instructions and place the string among Caroline Adams’s belongings. Then, she would get what she had coming.
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