Enchanted Lounge
Copyright© 2026 by Danielle Stories
Chapter 4: The Basement Accord
The kitchen smelled of shattered casserole and shocked silence.
Pudding, our basset hound, had taken one look at us, let out a long, mournful howl, and retreated under the table, where he now peered out with one white-rimmed eye.
My mother had reacted to it mildly poorly.
After the initial scream, she’d lunged back inside and returned with the tablecloth from the kitchen table. With a frantic, “Cover yourselves, for heaven’s sake!” she’d thrown the floral-patterned fabric over our heads.
It had burst into flames. Not a big, roaring fire, but a quick, magical whoosh of blue flame that consumed the cloth in seconds, leaving Lila-Beth and me standing there coughing, slightly sooty, and very much still naked and glowing.
My father, ever the pragmatist, had immediately called Pastor Miller. I heard his side of the mumbled conversation from the hallway phone: “John, it’s Phil Dawson. We’ve got a ... situation. Magical, it seems. Nudity. Glowing. Yes, both girls.” A long pause as he listened, his face growing increasingly grim. “No, John, I don’t think it’s a moral failing, I think it’s a literal curse ... What do you mean you ‘don’t do exorcisms anymore’?”
He’d hung up, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Now we sat at the kitchen table. Lila-Beth and I on one side, my parents on the other. The only concession to modesty was a large wooden fruit bowl of apples, bananas, and a lone pineapple placed strategically between us. It felt ridiculous. It was ridiculous.
“Let me get this straight.” My father rubbed his temples as if trying to physically massage the information into his brain. He’d changed out of his work clothes into a faded Huskers t-shirt, which somehow made this all worse. “You’re telling me you’re magically bound to this girl.”
“Cursed.” Lila-Beth corrected softly, picking at a cuticle. Her glow had dampened to a nervous, pulsing shimmer.
“Cursed to this girl, and the only way to fix it is to wait for an eclipse while continuing to be ... like this?” He gestured vaguely at our general state.
My mother made a sound like a tea kettle hitting its final, screaming peak. She’d been silent since the tablecloth incident, her face pale, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. “What about school?” The words were strangled. “What about church? What about ... basic human decency?”
As if on cue, the fruit bowl between us shuddered. The apples wobbled. Then, with a sound like popping corn, the wooden bowl sprouted four slender, bark-covered legs. It gave a little shake, then scuttled sideways off the table like a giant, fruity insect, dropping to the linoleum with a clatter and skittering under the stove.
We all stared at the space where it had been.
Lila-Beth sighed, a long, exhausted sound. “Miriam’s really leaning into the whole ‘no barriers’ thing, huh?”
My mother made another noise, this one utterly hopeless, and put her head down on the table.
My father just looked at me, his eyes tired and old. “Maeve.” His voice was quiet. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
I looked at Lila-Beth, her profile etched in the soft light of our shared glow. I felt the faint, humming connection between us, a wire pulled taut. I thought of the chair, the ledger, the blood moon clause.
“I don’t know, Dad.” My voice didn’t shake. I just resigned. Honest. “But I’m in it. We both are.”
That night, we discovered the first rule of our new existence: the ten-foot tether.
My parents, after a hushed, desperate conference in the living room, had laid down the law. Lila-Beth would stay in the guest room. I would stay in my room. There would be no “cohabitation.” There would be doors. Closed ones.
It lasted seven minutes.
I was in my bathroom, the familiar blue tiles a small comfort. I’d just sat down on the toilet, the simple, profound need for privacy a physical ache. The second the back of my thighs touched the cool porcelain, I felt a sudden, violent yank deep in my sternum like a fishhook lodged behind my ribs had been jerked hard. It wasn’t painful, exactly. It was irresistible.
I was pulled straight off the toilet, my feet scrambling for purchase on the slick floor. I didn’t fall so much as I was flown, dragged horizontally through the open bathroom door, across my bedroom carpet, and
THUMP.
I crashed, shoulder-first, into my closed bedroom door. But the force didn’t stop. I was pulled through it.
Not around. Through.
There was a deafening crack of splintering wood and a shower of drywall dust. I left a perfect, Maeve-shaped hole in the cheap hollow-core door, landing in a heap in the hallway. At the same moment, Lila-Beth came flying backwards out of the guest room doorway ten feet away, as if snatched by the same invisible leash. We collided in the middle of the hall in a tangle of limbs, a shared “OOF!” of air leaving our lungs.
We lay there, stunned, coated in a fine white powder, our glows pulsing erratically in the dark hallway.
From the master bedroom door, my father’s silhouette appeared. He flicked on the hall light. He looked at the two of us in a naked, dusty pile. He looked at the Maeve-shaped hole in my door. He looked at the similar, Lila-Beth-shaped indentation now marring the guest room doorframe.
He sighed a deep, weary sound that seemed to come from the foundations of the house. He ran a hand over his face.
“We’ll call the contractor in the morning.” His voice was utterly drained. “For now ... I guess you two better just ... stick together.” He turned and went back into his room, closing the door softly behind him. The finality of the click was louder than the crash.
Lila-Beth, pinned partly beneath me, groaned. “Are you okay?”
“I was peeing.” I hissed, my glow flaring a bright, embarrassed crimson. The sensation of the interrupted ... process ... was still humming unpleasantly through me. Or was that her?
“Yeah.” She muttered, wincing as she rubbed her hip. “And now I know what that feels like, thanks to whatever voodoo this is. It’s like having someone else’s bladder anxiety.”
The intimacy of the complaint was so bizarre, so gross, and so specific that a choked laugh burst out of me. It was half-hysteria, half-exhaustion. She stared up at me, and then a giggle escaped her, too shaky and disbelieving.
We lay there in the debris, two glowing idiots laughing at bladder telepathy, while our shared light cast crazy shadows up the walls.
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