The Nightcap
Larry had always been in love with Lucy, from the first moment they met. But Lucy had rejected him constantly.
He was a decent man with an honest job. He had never looked at any other woman. He was only fond of his wife, and the only goal in his life was to make her happy and, most of all, to make her proud of him. He would stare at her for hours when they were together, but she would get pissed off at his behavior.
Lucy was always too busy to spend much time with Larry or even to listen to what he had to say; she spent all her time chatting or on Facebook, posting sexy pictures of herself, and she could not stand Larry’s presence. She was always distracted by something happening somewhere else, and if Larry wanted to kiss her or touch her, she slid away from him, going toward the window, lighting a cigarette and grabbing her cell phone to see who had just sent her a text.
Let’s be clear: she was very sweet and gentle with Larry. He knew that she loved him. It was just that she was always a step ahead of him.
She had always been like that, but he had hoped that over time things would change and the relationship between them would become more balanced.
One day, as he was coming home from work, a fortune-teller stopped him. She was sitting under a porch on a rickety stool with a table and a crystal ball. She glanced at him as he passed by, and she said, “Larry, please have a seat!”
Larry was simply astonished, and he froze. He asked, “How could you know my name?”
She looked at him with a certain disappointment and said, “I am a clairvoyant. My name is Jaga, and I know everything; you see, I have a crystal ball… I pictured you taller than you actually are.”
She had a Slavic accent, and she looked very attractive, even if it was impossible to guess her age. She could have been twenty-five or fifty-five, but she was still very appealing.
She moved her hand over the crystal ball and looked at it. “I see… It’s your wife… Her name is Lucy, right?”
Larry winced on the chair and said, “Yes… What… What about her?”
“She is not happy with you. She doesn’t like you anymore. She is not sexually attracted to you, and she shares her body and her pleasure with other men…”
At this point, Larry jumped up from the chair. “What the fuck are you talking about? How dare you? I cannot hear any more, crazy woman…”
She looked at him with a pitiful look. “Oh, please stop,” she said, “and see for yourself.”
Larry looked into the crystal ball and saw a strange, disjointed sequence of images of his wife: first she was smoking near the window, then she was with him in their living room, evidently annoyed, then she was at the computer and taking off her T-shirt to show her breasts to someone who was looking at her from the screen; after that the image was all fuzzy. Then he understood; it was Lucy, naked, sitting on the lap of another man, a stranger, also completely nude. She was moving, waving repeatedly, on and on, over and over.
He felt shattered and could not speak.
But Jaga, who knew everything, also knew what to say: “I know how you feel. What you are looking at is painful. I know, because I know everything. I also know what you need. Don’t be sad! There is something that you can do to get your wife back. For twenty dollars, I have the answer to your problem: a magic potion. You can make your wife come back to you and be completely and only yours.”
At first, Larry was not very confident about spending all that money for a ‘magic infusion,’ but the picture of his wife with another man haunted him. If that woman, that fortune-teller, could guess his name and show him his wife in a crystal ball, maybe she was also right about the potion. So he bought it.
He arrived at home and had his usual lonely dinner in the kitchen while Lucy sat at the computer, chatting on Facebook. She looked so innocent, but now he knew what she had been doing all afternoon.
So he tried her: “My love, what have you done today?”
After a silence she said, annoyed, “Nothing.”
He giggled hysterically because he knew she was lying. “Would you like a nightcap?”
After some seconds, she answered: “Mmhmm… Yyeeaaah.”
He took the tiny bottle from his pocket and poured the magic drink into a cup full of clear, cold water. Surprisingly, the cup started to smoke, as if it held hot tea!
He brought her the drink, and she tasted it. After a few seconds she said, “Thanks. It is good.”
Larry sat on the couch and waited, fifteen minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes, but nothing happened.
Then Lucy stood up and yawned, saying that she was going to sleep.
Pretty surprised, Larry wondered what had gone wrong. He went to the kitchen and looked in the garbage to find the bottle that had contained the fluid, but there weren’t any instructions.
He thought, ‘What a moron I was to believe in a fortune-teller. How could I think that a woman with that name—Jaga—could predict my future? For sure, she was a scam. She stole my twenty dollars…’
Then, when he felt calmer, he went to the bedroom to go to sleep. The light was off, so he could not see anything in the room. But once he was resting in the bed and had turned towards his wife, he noticed that the bed was empty.
He jumped off the bed and switched on the light to check where she was. Lucy wasn’t in the room, and the window was closed. Where had she gone?
Then he heard a sound, a faint hiss: “Hey, hey.”
It was coming from the wall, near the headboard of the bed.
He moved toward the headboard, then moved closer and closer, and finally, he could see a tiny spider hanging from it. “Larry, it’s me!” the feeble-voiced spider said. “It’s me. It’s Lucy, your wife.”
He moved even closer, and he saw that the little spider with the long, thin legs had the pretty face of Lucy, his wife.
“Holy shit!”
It was the only thing that he could say.
He put the little spider in a small box, one of those used to keep earrings, to keep her safe, especially from himself; she was so tiny now that he could have easily mashed her.
Larry stayed awake all night, thinking about what to do. The next day, he took the day off from work. He picked up the little box with his wife-spider in it and decided to find the fortune-teller and ask her what had gone wrong and what he had to do now.
It was not so easy to find the woman because, of course, she was no longer under the porch where they had first met. He had to ask a lot of people if they had seen a woman who looked like this and like that, etc.
Finally, as he was walking along a side road, he saw her and stopped her.
“Good morning, Larry. How are you?” she said.
But he was too upset to have a normal conversation: “Hey! Yesterday, I went home, and I gave my wife the potion you gave me. Something went wrong: she turned into…a spider.”
He took the box from his pocket and opened it. Baba Jaga looked inside, and a tiny spider with long, thin legs and a pretty human face peeped out.
Baba Jaga looked at him, and shaking her head in disillusionment, she said, “Oh, Larry, Larry, how could you be so stupid? The magic potion was not for your wife. It was for you! You should have drunk it, and she would have fallen for you. But now there is nothing I can do. You turned the magic against your wife, and there is no way to go back.”
Hopeless, Larry watched the fortune-teller shake her head and move away into the crowd, leaving him with a little spider with a pretty face peeping out of the box in his hand.
The End
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