Satisfy_642
Legacy Name: Satisfy_642

"Why do you only have one name?" A young girl with deep violet eyes and a doll's face, just as porcelain and expressionless, looked up from her work. The half-diced herbs lay abandoned as the curious child stared down the her older acquaintance. It was an eerie look, like one of the girls in an old photograph. "I have three," she continued, her British accent hitting a sharp, accusatory note, "Ellanora Hortensia Nenet."

The woman whom she was addressing didn't meet her eye. Instead, bent over in what was, for once, a less-than-seductive pose, the dark-skinned thirty-something began paying her mortar and pestle an excessive amount of attention. "Ah don't remembah," she said, the half-truth slipping through her plump lips like a spiteful retort. "Mah last name, Ah just don't remembah. Back to work, unless yah don't ever wanna be a real witch." She sighed. It wasn't so much that she was angry at the girl who stood with her in the concealed back room of the Red Dog Tavern, but that she didn't want to think about the time when she had had a last name, one she remembered.

It had to have been, what? Over 300 years? Yes, that was about right. Three hundred years of hiding, of fighting for her own freedom, of pawning her own body like it was some product to be passed around. Three hundred years of living a life she ought not to even have. All because she had been a child, not much younger than her own apprentice, Ellanora. From what she'd heard later, the death tolls were unspeakable. Nineteen persons having been hang'd, and one prest to death, and Eight more condemned, in all Twenty and Eight... Twenty-eight deaths, according to the writings of Robert Calef, all of whom were her fault. More than half of them of a good Conversation in general, and not one clear'd.

If only that stupid author had known how his words would ring in her goddamn head! Not a single person cleared of the accusations put against them, not a single woman deemed "not guilty" of witchcraft. That, and what of the fifty more, locked away for good chunks of their lives? It had been but an experiment, one she had begun not too far from her friend and fellow slave, a woman known now as Tituba. The woman who had covered for her when her experiment went south. There were 28 dead and 50 more imprisoned, all falsely accused, all unfairly deemed responsible for the work of one young slave girl abducted straight from the African coastline.

I'satta.

Back then, she'd have known the name of her father, and taken it as her own last name. These days, however, she couldn't remember it even if she doused herself in her own memory aid potions. She didn't want to remember. Back then, what was to her just a notch on her belt was the witchcraft that had sent her friends and town-mates to die. Issy, don't trouble yahself, you were young, and aht least you feel empathy, she thought, absentmindedly dumping the well-ground herb powder into a small apothecary jar and setting it on a shelf. And anyway, you ah setting things right now. With your pills ahn potions, all the unworthy will be putty in yah hands. She chuckled to herself, drawing the momentary attention of her surprisingly gifted young apprentice.

"You keep workin' bahk here, Ellie," the eternally beautiful woman said, standing. "Ah have a tahvern to run."

I'satta never spoke of the apothecary she had created in what should have been a second store-room of the Red Dog. The collection was her pride and joy, from potions that could inspire amorous interactions to powder capsules that could kill in 20 minutes or less. All were her creations, her inspired works of magic and herbal knowledge, but she had always needed test subjects. From back in her Salem days to the twenty-first century, she could never be certain of the success of her creation without a human subject to give it a try. Certainly, the less painful of her magical liquids could be pressed upon those with vengeance in their hearts or who's advances had been spurned, but these were few and far between in the more recent days when mysticism was at an all-time low. That, and should her concoctions fail, she'd be labeled a fraud and slandered on the internet, a location where, for once, she could not escape.

No, she had to have a constant influx of test subjects, all of whom would anonymously "agree" to test whatever she had created. She could, of course, return to those many years when she'd been forced to use prostitution as a means to an end, but that was risky and, 99% of the time, unpleasant. It was sometime back in her wandering days that she had stumbled on the old building in a nameless Midwestern town. An old bar, long ago closed down, its wooden walls decaying and the windows beginning to get that wavy look, as if they were melting. The place was a trash heap, as were the many buildings in its vicinity, quite certainly homes and businesses that had up and left when the bar got closed down. Yet another prohibition-era mistake? she had thought, combing her dreadlocked hair back with her fingers as she observed the dying building. Well, bettah than nothin'. Bet they don' get cell reception out here, tho'. This whole town will have tuh come back on da map in ordah for mah work to be successful, but tha's not a problem. Mental manipulation was always a forte of mahn.

TO BE CONTINUED...