The Family Curse
A tale for All Hallows’ Eve
Iphigenia dreamt of a glowing hand signaling a certain day on her wall calendar. The calendar etching for the month of November displayed a shimmering lake, the very place her mother Helena had taken her often as a girl. Rattling the dream’s walls, an unfamiliar voice issued from the lake, commanding her to go there and bathe.
When Iphigenia’s husband proposed a tentative plan for the first day in November, Iphigenia assented, remembering nothing of the eerie nocturnal experience. A second dream came to her later, commanding her again to go down to the lake on the first day of November and bathe there nude. As the first of November approached, Iphigenia planned to ignore the command from this dream as well. The lake-voice returned a third time, on Halloween night, in the guise of a cruel nixie rising from the waters. In a sinister voice, the nixie told her, “Today you will go down to the Black Lake and bathe.”
When Iphigenia mentioned to her husband the nightmare, he suggested its source was her impression of the year’s least holy night, which this morning was now behind them.
Iphigenia convinced her husband to abandon his prior plan for the day of selling her butter at the market. Instead, they observed All Saints’ Day by attending Hallowmas services at the chapel, which consumed their entire afternoon.
After reading the ninety-first Psalm, the priest delivered a message honoring those accounts of saints whose hagiographies, over the course of many centuries, had become entangled with myth.
The priest shared the example of Saint Martha the sister of Lazarus. The persecution Martha, Mary, and Lazarus faced for their resolute faith after their Master’s ascension forced them into exile far away from their Bethany home. Authorities bound them in a boat with neither oars, rudder, nor sails. A gale transported them all, miraculously unharmed, across the Mediterranean Sea to Gaul which is present-day France. These siblings (whose hospitality Saint John set down as record in his gospel) traveled up the banks of the Rhône river, where they settled in the village of Tarascon. What terrorized the locals there was a huge creature with a body half-fish and half-horned-beast, the monstrous issue of Job’s Leviathan.
Martha encountered the killer tarasque as it chewed a man between its sword-sharp teeth. Holding up a crucifix in one hand and holy water in the other, she reproached the creature in the name of he who had once identified himself in her presence as the resurrection and the life. The unholy thing dropped the man from its mouth and floundered on the shore. Saint Martha then subdued the amphibious villain by tying her belt about its neck.
A common liturgical practice, not exclusive to Iphigenia’s parish, involves the rambling of the shepherd, a ritual meandering at the lectern into uninteresting speculations. But Iphigenia noticed during this boring part of the sermon a curious word. The priest offered to his flock that such water-dragons as the one conquered by Saint Martha were of the same stock as the aquatic monster slain five hundred years later by Saint Columba while converting Scotland’s Picts. Whatever animal this was may have inspired the Capricorn image of the zodiac, and possibly the later fairy stories of malevolent merfolk and nixies.
At this word, “nixies,” Iphigenia recalled the illustrations in a children’s bestiary her parents once read from at bedtime. The lithograph depicted a water-dwelling sea-goat who inflicted magical mischief on those who earned his displeasure. The color illustration bore the caption “Nixy.” It shared an identical figure with the menace who appeared at night to demand Iphigenia’s undressed obedience.
On the second morning of November, Iphigenia sensed a darkness on her left side when she awoke in bed. She waved her hand in front of her face. When she covered her left eye with her hand, the world looked the same. When she covered her right eye, she saw only darkness. From that morning until the morning of her death decades later, Iphigenia’s left eye never recovered from its blindness.
Iphigenia’s daughter Juniper had a similar dream as a grown-up. A voice echoed forth from the water and told her to bathe on the first day in November in the Black Lake, naked. Worried a man would see her uncovered body, Juniper did not bathe in the lake, and no subsequent dreams could sway her resolve. On November the second, Juniper woke up blind in her left eye, just as her mother had.
Juniper had one daughter Kirsten who grew up and dreamt she too was to go down to a certain lake, named Black from time immemorial, and bathe there, nude, on a certain morning, the first dawn of November. Kirsten had no husband when the dream appeared to her, and no conflicting events or daily chores produced any barrier whatsoever to her traveling to this lake. Kirsten bathed at the Black Lake on the morning of November first. From total immersion, Kirsten lifted her head and shook of the water to notice an ugly young man on the shore who had been watching her for a length of time she guessed was far too long.
Embarrassed though she was, she could find no exit from the situation than to return to the spot where lay her clothes. Her close proximity to him sparked an inevitable conversation with this man, whom she learned was named George. George learned enough about Kirsten from this encounter to begin pursuing her earnestly. At the beginning of the following year, they were married. Another three-quarters of a year passed, and the couple had a daughter, whom they named Lenka.
Now a new mother, Kirsten held her infant to her breast one night. As the baby nursed, Kirsten had last year’s dream again. “Go down to the Black Lake and bathe naked on the first day of November,” the night nixie repeated. Shaken as the dream left her, Kirsten determined it would be impossible to return to this lake with a newborn to care for. On the morning of November the second, Kirsten lost all vision in her left eye.
Kirsten’s daughter Lenka grew up. As an adult, Lenka dreamt that she was to go down to the Black Lake and bathe naked on a certain day, November the first. Lenka recalled the tale of her mother, her mother’s mother, and her mother’s grandmother. They all had lost one eye’s vision after similar nightmares. Lenka canceled every plan she had for that day and made full preparations to attend to the demands of the nixie speaking to her through the dream.
Lenka marched to the Black Lake before sunrise on November first. She hid her clothes beneath a gooseberry bush, and dunked herself once in the dark waters. She waded back to the shore, dried off, and put all her clothing back on. No one, as far as she could tell, noticed her.
The year after, Lenka had another dream that she must go down to the Black Lake and bathe completely naked on the first day in the month of November. Dutifully, she did so again. Lenka arrived at the lake’s shore before dawn, plunged quickly, and redressed herself, apparently unseen. Aside from her vision in both eyes remaining intact, Lenka could find no psychological confirmation— neither visceral, emotional, nor oneiric— that the lake baths helped in any way. On the contrary, they were inconvenient in the extreme, and cold besides. Nevertheless, she saw the nixie in the night who demanded to see her at the lake, naked, every year. And so a ritual it became. Once a year, on the first day of November, Lenka removed her clothes and bathed at the Black Lake.
Eventually, Lenka married a man she met at the office where she held a job. She bore him a daughter. After a few years, that company offered her husband Gregory a promotion, a role which required their family to relocate to a bigger city. Gregory’s salary increase would have allowed Lenka to stay at home with her little girl, christened Marta. An obstacle was that the Black Lake would be so far away from them geographically that traveling to it ever again would become a logistical hassle, effectively prohibitive.
To her husband Lenka insisted the family must remain nearby the lake. She explained her family history, that the curse under which she suffered was handed down from mother to daughter. She believed the same fateful force which blinded her mother Kirsten in the left eye would strike her in the eye as well if she failed to comply with the demanded annual bathing ritual. Even their daughter would one day hear the nixie’s call.
For the sake of his wife, Gregory did not move away from the Black Lake, and he kept his job at the minor satellite office in his small village on its shore. He understood his wife’s reasons, but he never found them wholly credible. From that hour on, the marriage soured. They never discussed divorce, but Gregory took up drinking, and his spirit withered.
Lenka and Gregory spent their unhappy days living within walking distance of the Black Lake. Nearly grown, their daughter Marta played alone one evening by this lake. As the sun set, a figure rose out of the obsidian waters. Immediately, Marta recognized the creature as the nixie of her grandmother’s stories. A fish from the waist-down, with demon horns above its ears, it loomed over her in the shallow muck. Marta felt the terrified urge to run. The nixie glared down at her and spoke: “Stay.”
“What do you want from me?” asked Marta.
“I know who you are,” the nixie’s voice crackled like an electric eel. “You are Marta, the daughter of Lenka, the daughter of Kirsten, the daughter of Juniper, daughter of Iphigenia, daughter of Helena. I am the nixie who dwells at the bottom of the Black Lake. There is something I want to show you.”
The nixie gestured. Up to the surface of the lake, flopping above the water tension, wriggled one rainbow trout, then another, and another. Each fish had above the center of its head, a round, veiny eyeball jammed into the top of its brain.
“My fishy slaves see with the third eye of your ancestors. Your grandmother, your great-grandmother, back three generations; these fish wear their left eyes. I am he who claimed their eyes and took these eyes for my fishy slaves. A third eye grafted in from a human being grants these fishy slaves unnaturally long life but suffocates their joy of living. No, my fish remain unhappy despite their enhanced state. Each new generation of your line is, for me, a chance to try again.”
“My grandmother has both her eyes,” Marta sputtered. “She can’t see out of her left eye, but she has it still— I have seen it. That eye cannot be hers!”
“The spirit of her eye!” shouted the nixie. “Not the physical eye, but it’s soul. We nixies deal in the flesh of the spirit, that tissue which Paul the Apostle called the heavenly body. I have extracted these eyes as debt from your ancestors’ resurrection bodies. Their visual system failed them when I took away their eyes of heavenly flesh. Your ancestors sowed their sensory organ in dishonor; now observe how I have raised them back up in glory!”
“Not my mother— she kept her sight!”
“Since Lenka bathed in my lake, as I wished her to, I could not bring myself to remove her eye. As a result, I have no eye for my fourth fishy slave. So long as your mother continues to bathe every year here on November first, your family curse is forestalled, and I have no new eyes for my fishy slaves.”
“Why us? Why have you haunted my family’s dreams for generations? What difference does it make if we bathe in your lake?”
“You tread in the footsteps of your great-great-great-grandmother Helena, whom I caught bathing in this lake naked on the first day of the month of November a century ago. When I saw her, I wanted to make her my bride because I found her so beautiful. She tricked me, promising that if I swam to the other side of this lake, I would see a great marvel. When I investigated, Helena ran from me. I never saw her here again.
She said to me on that day, ‘On the other side of the lake, where I have just been, you are certain to see the marvel I have just seen: a three-eyed fish.’ I swam to the other side of my lake to catch this three-eyed fish. Imagine my embarrassment to be tricked by a woman when I found there no such fish. From your great-great-great-grandmother’s deception, I claim the right to make my own three-eyed fish from your family’s eyes. What she intended as a lie, I make true. The left eyes of your ancestors are my just payment for a cruel falsehood that still brings me to cringe with remorse.
Marta inquired, “So because no one in my family has ever showed you a three-eyed fish, you steal our eyes?”
The nixie replied, “By bathing naked in this lake on the first day of every November, your mother reminds me of your great-great-great-grandmother. I cannot steal her eye when I see the lovely form of her body, as beautiful as her ancestor’s. When Lenka your mother enters my black waters every year, I allow myself to feel pacified as she refreshes my memories of Helena, the first of your line to bathe before me.”
“But,” insisted Marta, “is it this unfulfilled promise of a three-eyed fish that leaves your curse on my family?”
“How can I forget that day? If your grandmother or your great grandmother had bathed here on the anniversary of my deception as I commanded, they too could have postponed the bitter debt.”
“If it will revoke your claim on our bodies, I will show you a three-eyed fish,” Marta said.
“Little girl, do not toy with me as did your great-great-great-grandmother Helena. It was her I wanted. But to see a marvel like a three-eyed-fish, if I could behold such a sight as that, and not one of the fishy slaves constructed by my own powers, then never again would I ask you or your bloodline to bathe in my lake again.”
Marta’s voice grew confident: “Truly, I will show you the marvel you seek if you agree that never again will you appear to my mother, to me, or to any of my daughters or granddaughters, to the end of the age.”
The nixie growled. “If you break your promise to me, then out from your face will I pluck your eye— and not just one eye, but both eyes, because two promises will have been broken. You will stay blind in this life, and in the life hereafter. Blind physically and blind spiritually, for eternity!”
“Swear that the curse on my family will be fulfilled; then I will show you the three-eyed fish!” shouted Marta.
“So be it,” conceded the nixie. “Let me gaze upon this three-eyed fish.”
Marta stiffened. “If you vow never again to compel us to strip naked in your lake, then I will show you this marvel my great-great-great-grandmother promised you.”
“The curse ends today if I see a three-eyed fish.”
Marta opened her smartphone. She touched the Disney+ app. Navigating to season 2, episode 4 of The Simpsons, Marta began to play the episode titled, “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”. Original air date: November 1, 1990.
Fishing poles under their arms, Bart Simpson and Lisa Simpson dangled their feet in a lake beneath the shadow of Springfield’s nuclear power plant. A stranger parked his car alongside them, introducing himself as an investigative journalist. With a rude remark, Bart dismissed the persistent journalist. Just then the boy’s fishing pole tightened. Bart yanked his pole upwards and revealed his catch: an orange fish, three-eyed. Shocked, the investigative journalist counted the fish’s eyes: “One, two, three!”
Marta held her phone screen up for the nixie to watch the entire 22-minute episode, which concluded with the owner of Springfield’s nuclear power plant forced to eat a bite of the three-eyed fish from a plate, cooked just for him by Bart and Lisa’s mother Marge Simpson to demonstrate the harmful effects to aquatic wildlife of improper nuclear waste disposal.
Throughout the playback, the nixie hardly blinked.
“Now,” Marta declared over the credits, “you have seen the three-eyed fish, of which my great-great-great-grandmother spoke. As you promised, you must free my family from your curse.”
“You have shown me a three-eyed fish,” the nixie admitted, “although I doubt it was the same fish of which Helena spoke so long ago. Nevertheless, I hereby lift my curse from your family. No more will I demand an eye or a nude body from the women of your line. Bathing in this lake every November will never again be asked of any of you. I hold the promise of your ancestor fulfilled.”
With that, the Nixie slunk back into his lake. With a splash, his trout vanished below the surface. For autumn, the night felt unusually warm.
When Marta told her mother of the nixie’s defeat, a heavy fog of oppression exited their home. Lenka, Gregory, and Marta soon left that lake forever, and indeed they left the country. Gregory found work abroad, taking advantage of a managerial opportunity at another company that opened to him soon afterwards. Marta’s mother never again heard the nixie’s sharp voice bidding her doff her clothing at his waterline. And the women in Marta’s family from then onwards— her daughters, granddaughters, and all her descendants— were blessed with excellent vision, so perfect that none ever needed glasses.
The end.
