This idea appeared before I even finished reading this ask. I really don’t know what happened I’m sorry.

~~~~

The curse followed Guy, just like Grandad said it would.

It didn’t happen all at once. A couple of them appeared the day Grandad passed, and no more than four the day after. But by the time of the funeral, they were appearing a dozen at a time.

Socks. Everywhere.

Grandad had said he’d been haunted all his life by them; that there was no way to make them stop coming, and all that could be done was dispose of them. And they never appeared in unassuming, out-of-the-way places, which would have been slightly less inconvenient. No, they were always there in plain sight. Guy didn’t know how the old man had coped with it. He didn’t know how his grandmother had put up with it – or his mother, back when dad was still alive. His apartment now constantly smelled of feet, and no amount of ordinary air freshener could hold back the odor for long. He dreaded the thought of trying to entertain friends or girlfriends in his home.

“The curse was passed to me from my father when he died,” Grandad had said. “He never told me how or why it started.”

Guy moved to a new apartment, one with an open fireplace. The socks didn’t smell much better when they were on fire, but at least they were gone quickly.

One of his coworkers had once dated a man who was in a support group for cursed people, and Guy managed to get the name of the group. He was anxious during his first meeting. Everyone else’s curses seemed so much more serious than his. This one cursed with scaly skin, that one cursed to spit up frogs. When it came time to open up about his own curse, he expected them to laugh. Instead they were silent for a moment as they thought about what it would be like for them. Guy left the meeting feeling relieved, and he returned often enough to make some friends.

The closest of these new friends was Danica, who, on account of some childhood event, had no sense of smell.

“You should come with me this weekend to visit my aunt,” Danica said one evening as they faced the sock-fueled fireplace. “She’s some kind of mystic. A proper one, I mean. She did something that kept my curse from being worse than it is.”

“Are you saying she could do something about mine?” Guy asked, not very hopefully. There was no getting rid of it, Grandad had said. Briefly Guy entertained an image of the socks at least appearing directly into the fireplace.

He agreed to go with Danica to see her aunt.

The woman greeted both of them warmly when they arrived, apparently excited to see that her niece was in a relationship.

“We were just having some coffee, come sit down and I’ll get you a cup.”

Guy became suddenly less sure of his relationship status when he saw who the rest of ‘we’ was.

Reclining on the air as if there was a chair there, a black-suited man with glowing eyes and a floating top hat sipped politely at his coffee. The moment Danica saw him she ran across the room and tackled him with a hug. The demon let go of his cup, which floated out of the way without spilling a drop, and spun her around. Guy blanked out a little as his girlfriend babbled happily to the demon, and then he was aware of their attention turning to him.

“I met him at the meetings,” Danica said. “He’s cursed with socks.”

“Hi,” Guy said weakly.

After peering at him a moment, the demon burst out laughing. Guy could only stare in confusion, and even Danica seemed surprised. Her aunt came in with another two cups of coffee, and handed one to Guy with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. He drank it without tasting it as they waited for the demon to stop laughing.

It turned out that one of Guy’s ancestors, some short time after the Transcendence, had gotten so fed up with constantly losing his socks that he made a foolish deal with an inexperienced demon to allow him to always find all lost socks.