By M.D. Smith IV
After an aimless stroll through the park, where pigeons strutted with more romantic confidence than I’d ever possessed, I returned to my apartment on a crowded sidewalk. I found a note slipped into my jacket pocket, like fate delivering me a business card or a secret confession. It looked rubber-stamped and slightly crooked:
A new pill that lets you be the man you want to be. Women can’t resist.
Below that, in smaller print, an address on Thirty-Fourth Street—the side of town where paint is peeling, and streetlights flicker like they’re tired of living. At the bottom: Results guaranteed or your money back.
Through college and into my early twenties, I had been a spectacular failure with women. I collected polite rejections the way some men collect baseball cards. I had heard every variation of “you’re sweet, but…” known to humankind.
The address led to a narrow storefront wedged between a pawnshop and a tattoo parlor. A hand-lettered wooden sign read: “Miracles for Sale.” I chuckled at such modesty.
Inside, incense hung in the air like cheap fog. Behind a desk sat a woman dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller, complete with jangling bracelets and a dramatic patch over one eye.
She slid a tiny bottle toward me. “It alters your pheromones,” she said. “Like animals in the wild. One pill under your tongue. It will last seven days.”
“One pill?” I asked.
“One,” she emphasized.
I handed over three hundred dollars, telling myself desperation is just courage wearing ragged clothes.
Outside, curiosity overpowered caution. Instead of one pill, I popped three beneath my tongue and waited for magic to bloom.
It bloomed.
The first woman I passed stopped mid-stride, inhaled as if she’d caught the scent of fresh bread, and smiled at me like I was the last lifeboat on earth, and walked closer to me with her hand out.
I felt the rise in my pants. This is what I’ve been missing.
But then another. And another. Within minutes, women were turning, circling, drifting toward me as if I were gravity itself.
Compliments flew. Hands brushed my arm. Phone numbers were written across my palms. Someone kissed my cheek. Someone else hugged me so tightly I gasped to draw a breath.
The crowd thickened. Laughter sharpened into shrieks. My miracle bloomed into a siege, and my rise now deflated. I broke into a run, dodging grasping hands, my heart pounding like a kettle-drum. The swarm followed, a tidal wave in perfume.
Gasping, I ducked into an alley and hid behind a horrible-smelling dumpster until the noise drifted away. Then I sprinted back to the shop and burst through the door.
“You’ve got to help me!” I shouted.
The woman looked up calmly. “Did the pill not work? Want a refund for the unused portion?”
“It worked too well,” I said. “I took too many. I need an antidote.”
Her single visible eye sparkled. “Oooh,” she purred, turning slowly toward a shelf behind her. She lifted another tiny bottle with one pill in it.
“This one,” she said, sweet as fresh honey, “will cost you three thousand dollars, and sorry, no checks. Cards have a ten percent surcharge.”
M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Spillwords, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Phantoms, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/
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