There’s this fantasy scenario that has been repeating in my head for a while now. Introducing… the Cursed Girl.

The story takes place in the Middle Ages. I lived as a peasant with my family wearing nothing but an old veil of linen to hide my beard, as I haven’t shaved yet. I would spend my days trying to find a job and paying for makeup and new veils every so often with my pocket savings.

I was seen as incredibly strange, teasing me for my indecency, and wondering why I acted so strangely and kept a veil on my face. They would come up with stories about a young woman years ago who would dance clad in only the moonlight, a pagan witch of the wheat fields who caused the crops to grow. Some would accept me… the church however, did not. They kidnapped me and called me a whore and a succubus, drowning me in holy water and causing my makeup to run off and my veil to come loose. I looked hideous. There was no hiding it. I was a man.

I had enough. I used their own fears against them, cursing that their fields will dry and go infertile, and none of them would be able to feast on the body of Christ for 50 years. I would escape from their cellar with a rag tied around my mouth. The rest of my savings went towards tainting the soil around the church they used to grow their holy bread, and I would watch from a hill in the night, just like the myths they used to gossip about me.

Soon their wheat turned brown and sickly, and suddenly the religious folks in the town didn’t want to talk about me anymore. I payed for my makeup. I got medicine for my mother. I got a new scarf for my face. The mask helped me feel like a woman. And once they all realized who I was, they started to say I was a woman too, nicknamed the Woman of the Wheat.

A very slice-of-life fantasy about how I would manage being in the Middle Ages. No magic, no fairy tales, simply what it was like back then when people would believe basically anything. The story would often start with me minding my own weird self before being harassed by the locals and the church. Then I would say I cursed them, and out of pure coincidence, what I would say actually worked, and they would pay just a bit more respect for me. Maybe I would take a job at the church. In some fantasies, I BECAME the new religion in that town.

I am a simple girl with simple needs. I don’t need all the HRT and surgeries in the world. Just being respected despite my strange looks is enough for me. The cards I lay upon the ground will one day sprout a field of healthy wheat in the eyes of someone, or maybe more, and I can be the pagan witch of the woods I was supposed to be.