voodoo

SNAP!

I opened my eyes and looked around.  He and I stood on a walking path in one of the local parks, but I didn't immediately recognize which one.  It was sunny and lightly breezy, a perfect mid-summer afternoon.  I looked up between the treetops to a clear blue sky, with an occasional puffy cumulus cloud.  A college girl was jogging away from us, her ponytail bouncing up in the air as she ran, so she must have just passed the two of us on the path.

“Did it work?” he asked.

The mirror confirmed what Ballard Wilcox feared: He was getting bigger.

There was no change in his diet; in fact, he’d been eating less since he’d become chronically unemployed. Yet his clothes were tighter, his shirts impossible to button, his pants barely closing around his waist. Stranger yet, he gently pinched his puffy arm, and it just felt…light. And hollow. Almost balloon-like.

“Putting on a few, Bal?” his wife Dana chided him from the doorway of the bathroom.

Trudi was in a hurry. She’d enjoyed all the Wiccan events her friends arranged, as keen as any of the girls to spend an evening drinking, chatting and getting verbal revenge on their boyfriends. What she’d never expected was supernatural occurrences, let alone one that would strike such a chord in her.