A Taste of Rum

A Taste of Rum 

(“The Black Trinity Series”)

 

I’m as dead as a half-eaten mudbug; a clump of crumbling bones in an unmarked grave at the bottom of the swamp. My physical remains may be fertilizer for the bog's sediment, but my consciousness remains mostly intact. Thinking, thinking, just an endless stream of thinking. I lament my fate as I lay in this horrific state. I go over what led me here, Ad Nauseam. No one to talk with or listen to, only the voice that lingers in my head. It’s maddening. I’m an unformed piece of star stuff, a wisp of ethereal ether, unable to escape the spiritual chains that have contained and imprisoned me.  I’m not even a ghost or specter able to wander the earth or haunt the living. I’m in a demonic box put there by a sorceress whom I tried to trick and deceive with liquor and lies.

 

I was a good old boy down in the Louisiana Bayous. I was an ambitious man, blessed with good looks and charm. It was said I could beguile any woman into my bed. And for the most part, that was true. The end for me came when I set my designs on gaining fame and fortune by enchanting a voodoo priestess. I would trick her into drinking a love potion I acquired from an occultic apothecary. I mixed the potion into a bottle of rum. Once under my spell, she would be magically obligated to give all that my heart desired. I heard she was not only a voodoo priestess but also a powerful sorceress of renown. That alone was enough to stop my idiotic scheme. But I was a narcissistic a*s. Later, I discovered, postmortem, that she was the infamous Witchy Woman married to the notorious Jumping Jack Jimmy Jam Jones, companion and sometimes lover of the Devil herself.  

 

Selene lived in a shack outside a graveyard. She was one beautiful, wild-eyed hellcat. Foolishly, I thought she could be seduced by my silver tongue and handsomeness. I wished I knew she was way out of my depth, that behind her madness and beauty was an insightful discerning mind. It was said she went insane by her husband, who cuckqueaned her.  If I knew Selene’s husband was Jimmy Jam Jones, I would have run for the hills. It was known that Jimmy, the Devil, and the Witchy Woman were some sort of black trinity not to be trifled with. I went down a road filled with daggers and thorns.

 

I knocked on her door, with a bottle of rum in hand. When she answered, my heart did a quick double-take. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with a smile that could light up the heavens. I begged admittance into her home and said I had a dire problem only she could fix. She eyed me up and down, I assumed she was pleased with my handsomeness. I was wrong. Selene was an expert in reading people.  She knew me for what I was, a con artist gigolo. But she let me in, like the spider does to the fly. I told her a disgruntled girlfriend had a death hex put on me. I admitted I was no saint, but didn’t deserve this extreme measure. I lied. Selene just smiled, took the bottle of rum, and guzzled it down. I couldn’t believe my luck. She just took it and drank. Soon she would be mine, or so I thought. She excused herself and went into her bedroom. I took this as an invitation.  It was an invitation, but not the one I envisioned, but one rotting in a box at the bottom of the boglands.

 

She made a voodoo doll of me. Selene laughed and said she was immune to potions but enjoyed the rum. She closed her fist, and I found myself here, in a box, a rotting corpse, wishing I never knocked on her door.  

 

 

 

 

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Author's Note

let her rip