The Witches Brew

It took me months to get the balls to approach the old woman who lived in the shanty, hidden behind a wall of tangled trees, four miles at the end of a single lane mud and gravel road. The woman is supposed to be a witch, a Voodoo queen with knowledge and practice of the supernatural. The outside of her hovel looked like a hovel, but inside is what truly freaked me out. She had shelves stacked with Mason jars holding a million different types of bugs, small animals, snakes, birds and bats. All pickled in some kind of liquid. She had cut roots and dried plants hanging from the rafters and on one wall, pictures of witches and warlocks, including Maleficent and Merlin; and an autographed poster of Stephen King. And to my astonishment, a 65 inch, flatscreen, smart HDTV tuned to Jerry Springer.

It was desperation built up over three years of high school frustration that drove me to seek the advice, wisdom and magic of the woman. I was over my head in love with Marjorie Kim Salinas, she was the most beautiful, sexy girl in the whole world and I spent every waking moment thinking about her. She didn’t even know I existed; she hung out with the sports stars, the bad boys, she chased any hunk she saw. I was the quintessential nerd: 5’5, 122 lbs., thick glasses, elephantine ears, dull brown eyes that matched my crew cut hair, straight A+ GPA for life. I am a weed in a flower garden, and Marjorie didn’t even know my name.

Just the drive to the old woman’s shack was an exercise in imagined terror. Even though it was mid-afternoon, the road was a tunnel of dark shadows interspersed by brief splats of filtered sunlight. I saw every kind of evil; werewolves, zombies, vampires, lions and bears, lurking behind the trees, hidden in the shadows. By the time I got out of the car I needed to change my underwear. I pulled into her yard, scattering goats and chickens into a rotted lean-to shed.

She was cloaked in a blood red floor length dress with a black fur collar from some long dead creature. Her black shoes had thick clog like soles and looked like they were tipped with a blunt gold spike. I wouldn’t want her to kick me. She smiled with all of five teeth, her tongue was covered with ugly warts, she had a single long black hair hanging from her left nostril, but her eyes were crystal blue, bright and young. If you could only see her eyes, she would be beautiful.

“What is it that brings you to me young man” she inquired?

I spilled my guts; I didn’t hold back any part of my story. How I loved the girl but my love was unfulfilled. It wasn’t that Marjorie spurned me, she didn’t know I existed, I needed her to see me, to know me, to love me. How could that happen, “Can you help me?” I asked.

She listened, never saying a word, not asking questions for the entire time I spoke. When I was done, she stared through me for a long minute then put her left hand on my chest and closed her eyes. She sat still for another minute, while I counted the multi-colored stones in the nine rings she wore on the hand, then began to show her few teeth through a broad smile, “I can help you” she finally said. She opened a wooden box that sat in the middle of the table then flicked through a thick file of recipe cards, muttering to herself, “He will need a strong one.”

With card in hand she shuffled across the room and pushed aside a cluster of bottles and grabbed a small vial, it looked like an old perfume bottle, with a glass stopper. The bottle was emerald green with a crosshatch of ruby colored lines etched around the middle. The stopper top was yellow crystal. The little bottle looked like a very expensive antique. She carefully laid the stopper aside then grabbed six jars full of various colored slop, two of them had bugs floating in the liquid. With an eyedropper she measured some liquid from each jar then dripped it into the vial. She counted carefully how many drops of each solution she used. Once the vial was full, she capped it then put it in a microwave for 48 seconds. After the mixture was heated, she set a timer then shook the little bottle until the timer bell rang. The old hag smiled once more and held the concoction to me, “That will be 59 dollars please, I prefer cash, but six chickens would be okay.”

“What is it?”

“To any woman you hand this to, it will be a very fragrant perfume. If she uses this potion, she will fall in love with you, you will be able to love her as you wish. When this Marjorie, or any woman, dabs a drop of this on her skin, you will have five hours with her before its effects gradually fade. Use the time wisely young man.” After I chased a goat off the hood of my car, the drive back through the dark wilderness wasn’t near as scary.

The jeweled vial sat on my bedroom desk, next to my laptop for days. It scared the shit out of me every time I looked at it, not because it was evil or magic looking, but because of its promised potential. I didn’t have enough confidence to offer any girl the chance to sniff or use the perfume. What if one did and she acted just like the old hag said? I didn’t have a problem getting an erection, hell, I was a teen aged boy. My problem was that I didn’t know how to use it. What if a girl ‘fell in love’ with me, did I have the guts to seduce her? That was my dilemma, I knew what I wanted, but was too fucking scared of my own lack of experience and capabilities.

Lola, my older sister came down stairs for dinner acting all goofy, laughing and giggling, she started poking me, pushing me around, generally acting all weird and pissing me off. All through dinner and later while doing my schoolwork, Lola hung near making all kinds of strange comments and making an ass of herself, “What the fuck is your problem?” I asked her.

“I got no problems a little personal time wouldn’t cure.”

“What does that mean?”

She taunted, “It means you really are a geek; you don’t even know when a girl is throwing herself at you.”

Huh?

I avoided my sister the rest of the night, the next morning she was as aloof and uncaring as she had been for my seventeen years. I didn’t want to ask what the hell got into her the day before, I wasn’t all that concerned. It wasn’t until that afternoon I noticed the crystal stopper of my perfume vial was lying next to the bottle, not sitting in place at the top. Had my sister found it; did she try it? My balls shuddered when I thought of how she was acting and knew what happened. My sister found the vial and sampled the potion then tried to get my attention. Was I stupid enough not to know she was advertising, trying to get me alone for some intimacies? If that shit affected my sister that way, how would it work on other girls?

My cock swelled to capacity when I realized that if it worked that well on Lola, it could affect as Marjorie as well. From that moment on I was determined to experiment, to see how my 59 dollar brew influenced other girls before I tried for the gold medal, Marjorie. I picked up my cell and invited Kaleen over to ‘do homework’.

Kaleen is one of my few real friends. She is as homely as a bucket of pig slop, just as smart as me. We bonded as friends after we found out neither of us ever got a wrong answer in math. Most everybody who knew me and her swore we were lifelong boyfriend and girlfriend, lovers to the end, but we weren’t, we both agreed we wanted to love someone who didn’t look like us. Even though we were mentally linked, we were never physically linked. I chose Kaleen as my first experiment because I knew even if she got all hot and lovey, I wouldn’t do anything with her; she was too fucking skinny, had tiny tits, she wasn’t my type.

“That’s pretty, where did you get it?”

“At the flea market, some old guy had a bunch of these, I picked the green one because it reminds me of humming bird colors.”

Kaleen lifted the top and jiggled the bottle, watching the liquid. She lifted it to her nose and sniffed, “Smells nice, what’s it called?”

I didn’t think girls would care if the perfume had a name so I didn’t have an immediate answer, but quickly rummaged through a few mental suggestions, “The guy called it le parfum de Vénus.”

“The Scent of Venus, appropriate,” she commented, then held her wrist out and tipped the bottle to sample a small splash on her wrist. Kaleen capped the bottle, set it aside, then offered me her arm to smell. As I sniffed, she asked “Have you written the critique on ‘Much Ado About Nothing yet?” She was all business, asking if I had done our Shakespeare assignment.

“No, let’s get to it.”

Ten minutes after we opened my laptop and started collaborating on Shakespeare, Kaleen moved from her chair then stepped behind me and leaned over, put her hands on my shoulders and her head next to mine, her cheek and mine were rubbing, I felt her breath on my skin, her fingers began to massage my shoulders as she talked. I was startled at first, but quickly succumbed to the light touch of her fingers as they worked delicately from my shoulders to my neck. The sound of her voice began to change, the tone, the volume; it was becoming more melodious, less officious. In spite of how I felt about my her, my prick began to take an interest in what she was doing; for the first time in my life, my best friend caused a bit of hormonal rush in my nuts, “Clark?” My name on her lips sent a shiver through my chest.

“What?”

“Did you ever think you might want to kiss me?”

I pushed away from the desk and turned my chair to face her, my heart was hammering, “Not really, I don’t think of you like that.”

She straightened up, moved to straddle my legs and sat on them, she hooked her hands over my shoulders then said with a small smile, “Maybe you should.” I put my hands on her waist and pulled slightly, she came easily to me, our lips bonded for the first time ever.