Read Homemade Sin for Free Online

dollars apiece. I reckon we got about three hundred and fifty dollars in charms here; enough to buy groceries for a month.”
    â€œBut it’s just ashes and some spices,” Hussey had said. “There’s nothing special in those little vials to make someone love the person who wears it. I thought people used voodoo with weird stuff, like henbane, or bat’s wings, or ground rhino horn.”
    â€œVoodoo is mostly done with the stuff you find laying around the house,” Mama had said. “You don’t actually need eye of newt or ground-up rooster testicles to throw a conjure. It’s all based on belief. If someone believes you can conjure them, then you can. What these charms have that we didn’t put in them is belief. If the wearer believes the charm will work, he or she will have more confidence in themselves around the one being charmed. By the time the person wearing the charm leaves here I will have waxed poetic about the great powers of this charm, devised by the ancient Egyptians, created from the ground-up hearts of great lovers though the ages, infused with all the power of the universe. When the wearer hangs this little glass vial of ashes around his or her neck they will be so convinced of the potency of the charm, their confidence will ooze right out of their pores. They’ll actually be cocky, arrogant about it, almost aloof when they are around the object of their affection. And there ain’t nothing sexier than someone who’s aloof and cocky; someone who acts like being loved is a foregone conclusion. That’s why this charm works; it ain’t what we put in it, it’s what the wearer puts in it.”
    â€œAmazing,” Hussey had said, “it’s all just the power of suggestion.”
    â€œWell, most of voodoo is the power of suggestion,” Mama had said. “A charm here, a conjure there, all mostly a whistle in the dark, but there is a dark side to voodoo too. Some things in voodoo are more chemical than conjure, like zombie powder.”
    Hussey looked at her with skepticism.
    â€œNever mind your doubts, just do what I say.” Mama had stood, crossed the room and disappeared through a door between the living room and the kitchen. Mama had left the door standing open behind her and through the door Hussey could just make out a bed; behind the bed she could see a whole wall of shelves filled with row after row of jars and bottles. Mama had returned carrying a jar of what looked like purple sand, and a thick, leather-bound book.
    â€œLesson number one,” Mama had said, passing the thick book to Hussey as she plopped back down on the couch. Hussey examined the book, on which the title, Conjures was written in beautiful script. “This book has been passed down from voodun to apprentice for two hundred years. It contains all the spells and recipes for potions and cures all the way back to Haiti, some even back to Africa.”
    Hussey had leafed through the book while Mama talked. The book looked like it could be two hundred years old, the paper was yellowed parchment and the leather cover was so worn and cracked it looked brittle. She’d turned page after page of handwritten voodoo spells, recipes and potions. The margins of the pages had been filled with mysterious diagrams and symbols scribbled in a dozen different inks and handwriting styles.
    â€œDo the spells work?” Hussey had asked.
    â€œOf course they work!” Mama had said. “They wouldn’t be called spells if they didn’t work. In time you and I are going through this book, conjure by conjure and spell by spell. But not today.” Mama had taken the book from Hussey’s hands. “Hold out your hand, girl,” Mama had unscrewed the top of the jar containing the purple grains. “You know the cow pasture where you try to get the buzzards to vomit on you?” Mama had poured some of the purple seeds into Hussey’s outstretched