120 Blind Dates... And Other Short Stories

The Love Potion

Of course, she hadn't thought that it would actually work. It was a love potion after all, and Lorne Lovely belonged to the majority of wizards in the Kingdom By the Sea who thought that love was the one emotion you couldn't conjure up with a spell or a potion: People fell in and out of love because they wanted to.  

But since it was Valentine's Day and he needed a gift for his girlfriend, he hadn't thought twice about buying the bottle from the old witch. There were two good arguments to consider: The first one was that the love potion was on sale, and the other one was the pink color of the potion. Lorne's girlfriend Isla loved pink and would have painted the world pink with her magic wand if the king's prime minister hadn't issued out a special warning that anyone who disturbed the peace on Valentine's Day would be punished severely. 

Isla became very excited indeed when she found her gift on the kitchen counter on Valentine's Day. "Oh, this is just beautiful! And it's pink! What is it?" 

"A love potion," he said smugly and felt relieved that he seemed to have picked the right gift.

"Yeah, right: Since when do we that?" she teased him. "I think I'm going to open it to find out what it smells like."

"Go ahead," Lorne said, but had no inclination to do so himself even though Isla seemed to like the smell of the potion. 

"Oh, I've never smelled anything like this. It smells better than the best perfumes in the world!" she remarked and closed the bottle again. 

That was it. 

At least it seemed as if the story of the love potion ended there. Lorne had never heard of a love potion that you were supposed to inhale, so he thought the potion wouldn't have any effect on Isla unless she drank it. But she never did because she liked its pink color so much. 

Over the next couple of days, he caught her with the bottle, which she had placed close to her bed, a few times. She apparently liked to inhale the smell of the potion. 

About one month later, Isla told him that she thought the smell was fading. 

"Of course, it is. You've opened that bottle a lot," he said. 

Then she stopped opening the bottle altogether because she claimed that it had taken on a foul smell and that the potion made her sick to her stomach. At least that is how she explained her morning sickness at first. 

When that morning sickness didn't go away after she had put the bottle away, she began to think that there was something seriously wrong with her. So Isla went to see her father, who was the king's physician and one of the best wizards in the kingdom.

"You're with child, my dear," her father told her with the same stern expression on his face that she knew so well from other occasions when she had disappointed him. 

"But I haven't... We haven't..." Isla began, but she realized that her father wouldn't believe her.

"I'm not interested in your excuses!" her father interrupted her. "Your mother and I told you that you could live with your boyfriend as long as the two of you weren't sleeping with each other. How else do you think this has happened?" 

Lorne thought Isla was joking when she told him she was pregnant and that they needed to marry before other witches and wizard found out about it. Any child that was conceived and born out of wedlock was still regarded as a bad omen in the very conservative kingdom. "But I'm not the father because we haven't..." Lorne argued and didn't even notice how much he hurt her with the suggestion that she had cheated on him.

"I know! I don't know how this has happened!" Isla admitted with tears in her eyes. "Believe me that I haven't even looked at another man!"

"But... Wait a second!" Lorne said when he suddenly had an idea. He found the bottle with the love potion in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. It had the witch's home address written on the bottom - in case anybody wanted to buy more bottles. 

The witch was just being arrested when they reached her house, and an angry mob of pregnant men and women was screaming obscenities at her.