Cursed items at a garage sale?
May 27, 2022 5:26 pm
The Magic of Lost and Found
This past week I found something I thought I'd lost (phone holder) and lost something I thought I'd had forever (plastic splint). So often in stories, the macguffin drives the plot, and so rarely, the macguffin gets misplaced or lost in a move.
Like, what if Bilbo Baggins packed up and went to a retirement home and the one ring had been left in a shoebox full of soy sauce packets and individually wrapped plastic forks so many of us are loathe to throw away? Things go missing, even with the most professional movers, and I have a hard time believing hobbit movers wouldn't stop for beer breaks four times a day.
In the second Kit Melbourne book, Dryad's Blade, Kit spends quite a bit of time trying to find the ingredients she needs for a spell. Nothing turns out quite the way she plans, and some of those things end up being as useful as the items in my abandoned Amazon cart a week later (Why did I think I wanted four hundred plastic baggies? What were you thinking, past-Kater?)
That never seems to happen in fairy tales. When the hero goes to the ends of the earth to get unicorn horn to save the princess, she never dies of septic shock two weeks before he gets back, the way she might in real life. For sale, unicorn horn, unused.
Kit ends up using one of those ingredients in Faerie Killer, but I've been thinking about how easily it could have been lost. Sometimes things just disappear. It's a common haunted house trope that something will go missing and then turn up in the middle of a room that had been searched several times. ADHD, or a trickster spirit?
The original cover of Faerie's Killer was yellow and had a sword on it, upon which I wrote the previous title (Faerie Killer) in fake blood. I wanted to use a Chinese sword my husband had, but the sword, which had been behind his desk for years, had vanished. So, I used my wakizashi instead. We never did find that Chinese sword.
Have you ever had something get lost in an inexplicable way? I do love your stories.
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Gratuitous Cat Picture
You have to look twice to see the second cat in this photo.
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