My Potion

My potion was blue. Up on the top shelf, in a little vial, with my name on it. It tasted like raspberries and other flavors that I didn’t know existed before the liquid slipped between my lips.

After a while, I started to like the occasional sip of my potion. I carried the little vial around with me everywhere, tucked away in my coat pocket. It was beautiful, I thought. Blue, like the sky, and bubbling, too.

But one day I dropped my potion. The little vial smacked against the concrete and cracked wide open. I stared at the blue stain on the sidewalk and the shards of glass, wondering whether or not it was for the better.

It was an awful potion at times, numbing my left arm and blurring my vision. Not at all like the other potions I’d heard about. I wondered why I didn’t try one of those potions.

The strangest potion was orange. I plucked it from the bottom shelf early one morning. It smelled like cinnamon and tasted like cantaloupe. It made me remember, every time I would sip it, until one day I woke up and couldn’t go to sleep for fear of shadow-pixies. I dropped the orange potion into the lake the following week.

The best potion was pink. I snatched the vial from the middle shelf late one night. It was bubbly, like mine, and tasted like sea air and roses, incredibly salty and inexplicably sweet. It made me treasure nuisances—ladybugs, traffic, dandelions, change. But I frequently left it lying around, and it mysteriously disappeared.  

The nastiest potion was green. I found it on the wrong shelf one quiet afternoon. It was brackish, slimy, and smelled like dirty feet. It made me forget for a while. It was only the rancid smell that prompted me to return it to the shelf, after I woke up from a two-day sleep.

When you asked me why I tried all those potions, I didn’t have a decent answer. I suppose I just wanted to see what they would taste like, and no one was there to stop me.