Love Potion Number Ten

Madame Ruth liked to work at night. The streets got quieter past eleven, and the old brick building at Thirty-Fourth and Vine made better sounds after dark. Pipes sighed. Windowpanes clicked. The city hummed faintly through the walls. Those were good noises. The right noises for creation.

Her little pad – part shop, part home, part laboratory of dubious legality – smelled like honey, dust, tobacco, and a dozen flowers that had no business growing in urban soil. Shelves lined the walls in crooked rows, and every shelf held bottles. Big ones, little ones, squat ones, elegant ones. Some full of shimmering liquid, others packed with powders, roots, or things that looked suspiciously like preserved tongues.

People came to her for cures. People came to her for ****. But mostly, over the years, they came to her for love.

She lifted a corked vial to the lamp. Inside, the liquid swirled with a faint lavender glow, like moonlight caught in syrup.

Love Potion Number Ten.

It really was beautiful. Almost elegant.

But Madame Ruth wasn’t fooled by elegance. Beauty could be the most dangerous thing in a bottle.

She set the vial down on the counter with careful fingers. Her gold-capped tooth caught the light as she smiled. Old Ruth had been playing this game a long, long time, though she looked no older than fifty if you squinted. Love magic was good for the skin, even if it was hell on the conscience.

Her eyes drifted across the shelf above her workbench, where eight other bottles rested.

Number One: a harmless thing, more perfume than potion. Good for making a shy girl blush and a bashful boy stammer.

Number Two: made the drinker honest. Too honest. She didn’t sell that one often.

Three gave people the courage to flirt. Four made them less picky.

Five was a confidence spell that once started a fistfight at an accountants’ convention.

Six brought back an old flame, though not always the right one.

Seven… well, she still had nightmares about Number Seven. It worked too well on a pair of newlyweds who didn’t leave the motel room for four days. The cleaning staff still refused to talk about what they found.

And Eight was for the dreamers, the poets, the loners. It created the feeling of being adored, even if no one actually was.

But Nine… oh, Number Nine had been special.

She glanced at the empty spot where it used to sit, and winced at the memory.

A young man. Nice boy. Nervous smile. Said he didn’t believe in magic, but he wanted to try something fun. He drank the whole bottle in one go, bold as anything. Then he staggered outside, flushed bright red, eyes shining with mischief and blind devotion. And the first person he saw was a police officer on foot patrol.

The boy had planted a kiss on that cop like he was the long-lost love of his life.

The screaming started about thirty seconds later.

The paperwork that followed… well. She’d rather face a demon than deal with the city licensing office again.

But Number Ten wasn’t like that. No. Ten was refined. Controlled. Smarter. Ten didn’t whip you into blind infatuation with the nearest warm body. Ten didn’t shove your heart into overdrive. Ten wove itself into the mind more gently.

Ten whispered. Suggested. Nudged.

It made the drinker see love rather than feel it uncontrollably. It made them step into the shape of a person they could love – or a person someone else might want them to be. Vivid. Compelling. Personal.

It wasn’t about obsession.

It was about transformation.

Madame Ruth chuckled to herself as she pushed aside her spellbook – a monstrous, overstuffed ledger filled with notes in at least three different handwriting styles and one language no longer spoken aloud. She wrote a final line beneath the recipe:

Finished. Stable. Potent. Behavioural, emotional, and mnemonic alterations possible. Effects vary by subject. Side effects unpredictable. Perfect.

She rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck, and capped the vial with a wax seal etched in sigils barely visible unless you knew how to look. Then she lifted the bottle, still faintly warm from its final distillation, and carried it to the front of the shop.

The shelves there were tidier, arranged not by ingredient but by need. Fortune. Beauty. Opportunity. Closure. Luck. Courage. And of course, the Love section, divided neatly by numbers.

She cleared a space between Eight and Nine, the old placeholders.

Then she set Love Potion Number Ten onto the wooden shelf.

It glimmered faintly in the dim light, as if thrilled for its debut.

Madame Ruth stepped back, hands on her hips, a wicked little grin tugging at her mouth.

"Come on then," she murmured to the empty shop. "Let's see who you choose first."

The bell over the door jingled – soft, expectant.

And Madame Ruth smiled her gold-capped smile as she turned to greet her very first customer.

Author's note - The intent of this story is to have something that people (myself included) can casually write on. A magic love potion story? Could go any direction you want! Enjoy!