Dave's Anatomy: My Second Novella: Strange Brew

Strange Brew was the second novella I published. It took its title from an old song by the British rock group Cream:

  She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue.

  In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you.

 With you!  What are you gonna do?

 Strange brew, kills what’s inside of you.

I always interpreted the song to be about a relationship where the woman is just trouble for the guy. I thought of her as being as bad as a witch. But then one day the idea struck me:  What if a real, true-to-life witch with considerable magical powers fell in love with you? The line, “With you! What are you gonna do?” had creative resonance and I began working on the story.

The witch is English, she is named Lybecca, and she is the most powerful witch in England. She has lived for almost two millennia. And, she has recently followed the trend of many in the late 1960s and early 1970s and begun using drugs, which has deranged her mind a little bit. She meets Andrew Cabot, an American blues/rock singer who has recently hit it big and is establishing his career after two chart-topping singles. They meet, drop LSD, and spend the night together. Andrew plans to go his way, thinking Lybecca one more groupie girl. She tells him she is in love with him. He says they hardly know each other and they agree to go their separate ways. She tells him she is a witch, but he attributes her statement to being her being burnt out on hallucinogenic drugs. She agrees and goes off.

The next day at practice, Andrew feels ill. He has an attack of severe intestinal pain and his band members take him to the emergency room. The doctors tell him he has advanced gastro-intestinal cancer, chide him for not seeking treatment, and tell him there is nothing they can do to help him. The cancer is too advanced; he should have sought medical help when he first sensed something was wrong, which would have had to have been six months ago. They give him painkillers and send him home.

While he is waiting for his ride back to the flat he has rented, Lybecca appears:

She wore a minidress with wide horizontal stripes. She crossed her arms.

"Convinced?" she asked.

I could not answer for the pain. I nodded.

She got up, walked over, and touched my head.  The pain vainished

I knew she had healed me.

"I'll be at the Bronze Bell at 4:00.  See you there."

Then she was gone.

Thus their relationship begins. Andrew finds out, though talking to friends of hers who are witches, that she is mildly deranged but is too powerful for anyone to confront. Those who have crossed her up have suffered unpleasant fates. He is trapped. Yet as he gets to know her, travels time with her, and meets her daughter (whom he finds out he fathered when he and Lybecca made love on a trip to the past and his child is in fact older than he), he begins to see Lybecca someone who is hurting, vulnerable, and unhappy. He begins to feel something for her—not exactly love, but empathy.

Later, she tells him why she began to use drugs. Her other child was killed. She also tells him how she became a powerful witch by studying with a Hoodoo practitioner in the American South in the 1930s. They had a child together. The child had come to see her and had died in an accident. Only the Hoodoo man can cure her of her affliction. And his cure may not work. It may destroy her.

They go back in time to the 1930s. As Lybecca undergoes the cure, Andrew meets blues singer Robert Johnson and other bluesmen he has listened to and imitated. He also gets in a wrangle with local men over his willingness to associate with African-Americans (this is the time of segregation). After he beats one of them up, he is cornered by a group who mean to do him despite. It is at this point that Lybecca returns, cured by the magical spell, restored to her sanity. And even more in love with Andrew. Now he loves her as well. They return to the present to begin their relationship under more favorable conditions.

The novella is available, here is a link to it: Strange Brew.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #45: "The Strega of Fitzgerald Street."

Streg is the Italian term for witch. A strega is a witch (with the "a" to designate the female gender). If you read to your kids or to young children in general, a good chance is you read Strega Nona (Grandmother Witch) by Tomie dePaola. In my history of a writer, I have written and published a handful of stories about a streg named Alessia Bernini who, as an ongoing character, is connected with the stories of Sossity Chandler, but not directly. The character who introduces Alessia is Kathy Farisi, a woman who was Sossity's best friend but destroys her marriage through an affair with her husband. At the beginning of the story "The Strega of Fitzgerald Street" we see Kathy in the aftermath of her disastrous adultery. She has visited the confessional but does not feel forgiven. Her aunt tells her she should go to see a streg to get help from her depression. Kathy will not hear of it at first, but desperation and the torments of depression make her finally agree.

Alessia

According to tradition, streg do not practice black magic; that is, they do not sell their souls to the Devil in order to get magical powers. Their magic is not evil—well, not exactly. They practice what is called natural magic—magic that derives its power from nature and from the study of natural forces found in the earth and in the power of life, growth, and continuance. Continuance, in fact, is very important, because a streg's power depends on her place in a line of magical practitioners that goes back a thousand years. The power Alessia possesses has accrued over a millennia.

The skeptical Kathy goes to see Alessia. She is surprised that the streg is young, very pretty, and stylishly dressed. And Kathy is immediately confronted with what she has done and with proof of Alessia's magical power. Alessia tells her she needs to see Sossity Chandler to begin making things right and to cleanse her soul of the guilt she feels—the same thing Kathy's priest told her when she confessed. Kathy flatly refuses: “I can’t. I can’t face her.” She took a deep breath. “If I think I have to see her, or even be near her, I’ll kill myself. I would rather die than see her, and I mean that.” Alessia asks her to agree to a contractual proposition that, she says, will cure Kathy. But there are is a penalty involved. If she reneges on the agreement

“I’ll come for your soul. We are not playing a game, Miss Farisi. This is a serious matter. If I tell you to do something and you don’t do it, you are in my debt and thus in my power—and I have a great deal of power—the power of the fifty generations of practitioners in whose succession I stand. I don’t like making people my possessions, but I will, and I have done so many times. Fail to do what I instruct you to do, and you are mine forever.”

Fear had taken her by now. Yet she had to make it clear to this woman that one thing was non-negotiable.

“I’ll do anything except go to Sossity. I won’t agree if you tell me to do that.”

“I will not ask you to do that or ask you to do anything like it. I promise as much.”

“What do you mean you’ll make me your possession?”

“You don’t want to know,” Alessia answered darkly.

They drink wine to seal the agreement. Alessia gives her particular instructions. She is to go to the campus of a local college, find an ash tree by a bridge, and eat a tiny portion of a leaf that has fallen from that tree. Kathy determines to obey the instructions.

She goes to the campus, finds the tree, picks up a leaf that has fallen from it, eats the tip of it, and throws the remainder on the ground. When she looks around, she sees Sossity Chandler and her daughter, Cheryl. They have come to the woody campus so Cheryl can collect leaves (a thing children inevitably end up doing at some time in their elementary years—mine did). Alessia has not lied. Kathy did not have to go to Sossity; Sossity has come to her.

The meeting is awkward. Cheryl, in her innocence, greets Kathy enthusiastically and says she is looking forward to staying at her house the next month (custody rights). To Kathy's surprise, Sossity is civil, perhaps even conciliatory, though the meeting is tense and the two women are uncomfortable. Still, Sossity silently communicates that she does not hate Kathy. She does not excoriate or insult her. Then Cheryl picks up the leaf Kathy has thrown to the ground. Kathy tells her it's broken and she should get a whole one, but the child says she likes it and puts the leaf into her basket—a sign, undoubtedly, that Alessia's spell has worked and what happened was not merely coincidence. After an awkward but gracious parting, Sossity goes her way. Kathy is enabled by what happened to begin what she was not able to do before:  to find healing and know the possibilities of recovery and perhaps even reconciliation are still present.

 "The Strega of Fitzgerald Street" can be found in the archives of the journal NewMyths.com (note:  this is the actual title of the publication, not its web address). Great story, enjoy the read.

For more the titles of novellas and novels, check out my Writer's Page.  

And if sorceresses are your thing--along with martial arts and wuxia--get a copy of my latest novella, The Sorceress of Time. 

I would love to hear your comments!

Enjoy the day.

Read!