Poison Tongue Read Free Page B

moved to this town when I was only young. When I was fourteen, she once tried to sell me a love potion. I’d guffawed and told her there was no such thing. She’d grinned wide and said I might be too smart for my own good. The next time I’d come in, she’d cut my purchases in half, telling me that I didn’t need most of the things I thought I did. Since then she’d been upfront and honest with me.
    Miss Annamae was a good person, if skeptical by nature. I knew this as fact. I could see her soul.
    “You have a gift, Levi,” my gran had said. It was the first time Gran had ever mentioned the oddness that surrounded me. I was in the fourth grade at the time and had barely understood the weight behind her words. Together we’d been sitting in a field watching the birds in the live oak trees as dusk began to overtake the sky.
    “When you look into a person’s eyes, you will see their soul. It will come as easily to you as breathing air.”
    It hadn’t been until years later that I fully understood what she’d meant. Even though I’d grown up in a house that practiced rituals, card readings, cleansings, spells, and hoodoo, the thought of looking into a person’s eyes and seeing their soul had baffled me. A soul wasn’t like a tarot card, an elixir, or a small bag of herbs and leaves that Mama held in her hand and chanted to. A soul wasn’t tangible. A soul wasn’t a living thing.
    And then there’d been a boy.
    I’d first seen him from across the secondary school parking lot. He must’ve been the new kid that every other student in Malcome was talking about. There had been something off about him—something different and unusual. He was compelling to me in a way I hadn’t fully understood then. It hadn’t just been that he was attractive—it was deeper than that.
    “What’s your name?” In a burst I’d sprinted across the parking lot and stopped mere feet in front of him.
    His eyes were almost as dark as his henna-colored hair that hung low over his eyes. The dirty leather jacket he wore strained over his slim arm as he plucked the lit cigarette out of his mouth and leered at me.
    “Sterling.”
    And that had been when I’d seen it—his soul—in all of its transcendental beauty. It was the ocean: vast, huge, blue. Waves ripped and tore and thundered and crashed. I saw tsunamis that consumed everything in their path, waves that hugged so tightly they engulfed. Waters of unimaginable magnitudes and colors lived behind his eyes, straining to thrash free.
    Sterling had a soul. He had the most beautiful soul I’d ever seen. It was as alive as him and me, as alive as the look in his eyes and the beating of his heart. He was a good person, and I’d known it the moment I’d laid eyes on him. But his soul thundered too loudly. Those waves would rock too many boats. I knew that just as surely as I knew the sky was blue and that life was destined to be unfair.
    After that day I’d believed everything my gran told me, even the things that seemed like they were from her folktales. She told me to trust my gut, my instincts, my head, but never my eyes and never, ever my heart.
    “I’ll go to the back and get the amulet. I have a special one in mind.” Annamae turned and walked through the curtain of beads that covered the door to the back of her store, her long, red skirt swishing behind her.
    The door chimed. Two women, talking in hushed tones, walked through the front door. When they noticed me, they smiled. I dipped my chin in reply.
    They went into the aisle that sold premade potions. That was usually the first aisle that people who were inexperienced in hoodoo or rituals went to. The rosemary leaves sat on a high shelf, tucked neatly into a small plastic jar with a screw-top lid.
    As I collected the things I’d need for my cleansing, I couldn’t help but listen in on the conversation the two ladies were having in the aisle next to mine.
    “Someone moved into the old Poirier house,” one lady