Love Potion

 Love Potion

Graham Swanson 

4 of Wands

 Bring the exchange of ideas to ensure a universal need of approval and support. Seldom do the final wands turn on the heads of the illiterate against the unlearned. Too soon will the millennial find themselves widowed with the insufficient burden, as the oldest creep away to quiet catacombs. All will find the wash of fire turning the shiniest pink path to balms of bloody flowers where deer come to eat.

In these rings of destruction, after a hundred years or more, a special herb will grow from the charred ruins of temples of giants. The skeletons of iron towers bend towards the floodwaters, their shadows keep away the giant birds, and the pools created by silent stars nurture silver roots of a plant that hums in the night and fills the air with a narcotic haze. It’s a prize in the land of charcoal craters and giant cats. Burglars come from many villages and castles away to explore the haunted beds where the pedals erode. The rocks are coated in a fine dust of dead Lust Plant.

Regulators from insurance companies kept tabs on the collection and export of extract Lust plant and raw beds where it flourished. Eliza came from the islands of white beaches and open windows to investigate fraud in one of the offices in trembling black boxes in the middle of the New Capitol. She worked with former athletes in steel-colored suits, inexperienced yuppies straight out of college who collect music records from the 60s, and women from all over the world. The managers and people who ran the place averaged age 100. All of them former lawyers reached their substantial ages by a diet of red meat from endangered cows treated with enriched GMOs.

Eliza only liked a few of the people and felt that she had the most depressing life since she found the New Capitol unlike her home in the sunny islands. The streets turned white with frost in the morning and torrential downpours flooded the streets at night. Strange villages of weird folk of the fields surrounded the city and its cluster of counties. She would’ve stayed in the islands but the doctors told her that her body rejected the vitamin D from the sunlight, that her organs failed to digest seafood and rice, and that the problem is exacerbated by salty climates like ocean adjacent shores.

In the New Capitol, the sun seldom shined and night lasted for days. She took five-mile walks every night in costumes she created. She carried food prepared at home with her. The strange folk provoked her suspicions because they didn’t make as much money as her and they mostly worked what she saw as shitty jobs in food, cleaning, manufacturing, writing. However, the wealthy lawmakers of the ancient fields offered her a job in one of the most important offices in the New Capitol. She hated the entire place and wished she lived back on the islands. Her mission there was to monitor the insurance claims on the Lust Plant beds of the "Charming".

On the night of the grand musical Eliza went on a date with a young wealthy lawyer and met with her co-workers who traveled the world a little. They all agreed that the poor peasants are moot because most people are shit anyhow, and since the pandemic already killed off millions of people, what's the point of helping them? In other words, it’s as imperative as a medicine cocktail for the clinically ill, that they show no mercy for anyone trying to steal the Lust Plant, especially among the fields of strange folk surrounding the New Capital. Anything they create, music, literature, art, is inherently inferior to the comics parched together back in her beloved islands. She wanted no lovers. She didn’t like having her handheld in the snow. She didn’t want children, and couldn’t have them anyhow. She pursued a career instead and loved catching frauds and thieves.

Smoke stacks pumped purple fumes as tubes ad machines processed Lust Plant into potions. In the times after the Great Summer reduced crops to ashes, spread disease, incited the Balkanization of the content, and killed millions, the Lust Plant potion skyrocketed in demand. For men, it gave them both sexual vigor and incredible enthusiasm. Not only did it engorge their love flesh with blood, keeping their veins strong and stiff for hours, but it also prevented other sexual dysfunctions like premature ejaculation, STDS, and post coital anxiety. With that, it also made the moment of passion incredibly powerful, like teenagers or soap opera actors. For women, it made the most frigid person orgasm several times in one night only after a few minutes and made the most infertile three times more breedable, so that even one-time contact resulted in pregnancy. The average family consisted of eleven children. The refineries refined more and more Lust Potion to repopulate the humanity lost in the Great Summer. The Lust Plant was seen as vital. The most important substance in the land, and it only grew out of these beds of the most destroyed places.

The beds of destruction nurture the roots, and entire fields of these flowers grow where once towns and forests stood. These heavy vintages grow together to assemble a jungle of forbidden purple flowers. The wind carries their haze into the land and intoxicates wildlife with its effects. However, anything caught in the violet fog of the Lust Plant will not only be infatuated by its potent effects, but the haze will be so strong that someone will shortly fall into a coma that lasts for five days, and then kills them. As the plants die, they break apart and blow away, spreading seeds and haze as new ones grew on top.

Trailer villages popped up around these untamed masses of fuming flowers. People wore masks and kept thermometers on their phones that read the Lust Plant content in the air. Businesses arose that drove trucks, fixed tools, and sold parts for machines. Huge twelve-house silos rose to the sky. Banks and insurance companies arose to track the flowers and the trucks. Legends spread of gems hidden among the fatal coils of purple flowers.

The peasants of these villages survived the heavy haze. Some even ventured into the thickets to explore the flowery volcanoes of musk and came back out alive. They relished the extreme effects rumored to cause secret openings to appear behind the thorns and dead plants that unleashed their inner desires. Forbidden was the way, as the flowers nurtured moss that coated the ruins of the old world, so did the commissioners of its dearest earnings.

Eliza heard of the villages of strange peasants living among and worshiping the Lust Flower in her criminal profile orientation. One of the men who wandered into the flowers and returned. He immediately burst into flames. The peasants then watched in horror as he survived the fire with precious stones glowing in his hands.

The company sent their detective to the village to investigate and find out what they had in the flowers that they didn’t report on their insurance. She tightened a gas mask over her face and walked only in the moonlit roads because the sun hurt her skin. She found the village deserted, but bells rang in the flowers and staffs pounded the ground. Despite her investigation, she found no people, only empty buildings and trailer homes with food still on the table.

The flowers grew over the roofs and out of the well. Jewel encrusted skeletons littered the ground. Midnight drew near, so Eliza moved to her car to sleep for the night. She typed up her report and looked forward to escaping back to the New Capitol when she realized the moon grew larger under the haze drifting in the wind. A tap came at her window, and she put her work down to see one of the skeletons walking by his one hand guiding along the window as it knocked off the mirror.

Eliza stayed shocked in her seat, caught in disbelief as the dead walked out of their trailers, sat up from their seats, covered in moss, grass, and purple flowers. They wandered into the border of Lust Flower. She left her car and followed after them with her gas mask tight, and stockings high. Her boots mashed mud and snail shells. Fog obscured her lenses and the plant debris filled her respirator.

Bony hands took her by the skirt and tried to guide her along, but she twisted around to run back. She tasted the Lust dander on her tongue. It burned her throat and made her rest against the single wall of a fallen tower. The pain in her stomach went away, and the scars left by the sun went away.

The skeletons sank into the mud, but something else rose from the vines on the ground. The high plants blocked the moon and the stars, and she saw the shadow of a stone casket arise. The markings, the picture, all tonsured by plant slurry and erosion of time. She pushed open the lid. Beneath the bed of spiders and fungus, she found a skull attached to a spinal cord with no ribs, hips, or arms.

The tops of the flowers parted and the moonlight flooded through several arches to shine on her. She lifted the head up to see it closer and brought it into the light. Slowly it grew moist flesh and became soggy with warmth in her palms. Blood trickled down her arms as eyeballs rolled in its sockets and a tongue lashed against its teeth. Its muscles tightened as lymph nodes and sinuses sank into rivets. Blue lips appeared and eyelids slid over.