Unfinished curse piece. Literally no idea how to continue it so just leaving it up like this

My mother says we are cursed. Everyone in my family rolls our eyes and kisses her on top of her head like she's being silly when she says it. My mother is a wonderful woman, but she is very old-fashioned and superstitious. As we’ve gotten older, she’s become smaller and frailer. We don’t want to upset her. A sweet woman like that does not deserve to be upset. When she worries, the whole house becomes shades colder, like the lightbulbs shifted their hue from yellow to blue. But we all – well I haven’t asked, but I’m pretty sure – believe she’s right. If not a curse, something is happening. Something strange and wrong. And we all wonder why.

This is when I believe it started: one morning we found a chicken garroted in the wire of the coop, barely alive but untouched besides that. We had to clip the wire to free her and replace the whole side. It was annoying work, and of course it went to me. That silly hen. I know I did a good job. I am diligent and careful to the point that my family teases me for working slow. But in the morning, the side had fully blown off and we were chasing chickens around the neighborhood for weeks. We lost almost a third of them. Sometimes our neighbors still call us about picking up a rogue hen. We never found the wire that flew off.

And then, last month, we had foxes. We could hear them screaming at night from the house. There’s nothing strange about that; foxes will scream, it’ll just keep you up a bit if you’re not used to it. Not a big deal. But they kept getting in. Every night they would start outside, but they would get louder. And then, some days, you would hear scratching and scrabbling at the walls. And then the screaming would echo from the first floor. You could hear the nails of their paws clicking on the wood in the kitchen. Someone – usually my brother, who sleeps the lightest – would run down to see what was going on. When he flipped on the lights, six or seven foxes would run out of the open front door.

After this happened a couple times, my father started standing outside the front door with a shotgun. They never came up while he was standing guard, just screamed at each other from miles apart. But he couldn’t sleep. After a few weeks of this, he was seeing nothing and everything. He was jumpy and nervous during the day. The foxes kept sounding closer. Then one night we heard shooting. My mother ran downstairs in her nightgown. He came in, crazed and stomping, looking for more bullets. My mother begged him to stay in, and he fully deflated; curled in on himself on the ground. My father is a proud man but he knows when he looks insane, and he listens to my mother always. In the morning, shells littered the front porch. I remember seeing my father stooped over picking them all up. No one ever talked about it. We don’t want to embarrass him. But he told me once, quietly over his coffee, not looking at me. Like he didn’t want to say it, but he had to make it shared. He swore he saw something in the dark. Something big.

But the worst one… It brings me no joy to say this, so I will spare the details. In the morning of December 13 2024 we found my sister’s favorite cow, Ellie, eaten to the bone. Just a pile of them in the middle of the field. We knew it was Ellie because she was the only one missing when we counted. Nothing of her was recognizable. Nothing of her – her massive kindness of being, her sweet gentle touches with her nose, her patient huffs during milking, the way she would paw like a cat with her front hoof when my sister brought out a carrot – was left. What else was strange was that there were no carrion birds to shoo away from the carcass like usual. Like they knew the meal was over. Like they already knew there was nothing left.

My sister was completely heartbroken. She did not leave the house for days after. The eggs – usually it was her job to collect them – piled up and spoiled; the hens began to eat them. Until my mother quietly took over the task. No one ever mentioned it to my sister. How could we? It was like she had lost a friend. And the other cows haven’t been acting right since. They don’t want to be touched or approached, even with food.

Now there is this strange neurotic spectre haunting the countryside. I felt it, just a tickle in my brain one day while I was picking apples out back. It was sunny out, surprisingly for the time. And then it wasn’t anymore.  It feels like when you’re swimming in a lake and you feel a cold spot, and you look down and the floor has dropped off – open water, who knows how deep.