Today’s sentence: “Where are you?”

The crone with the bent nose and the wire-rimmed glasses looked down at the recipe in front of her.

The demand for potions was as great as ever, and today she was making one that she had not made in many a year.

Half way down the list of ingredients her scanning of the page stopped.

One small boy.

Goodness, she thought that might be a problem. Small boys were not as common as they once were. In the old days, children played outside, in the street, in parks and where have you, and it was never a problem to pick one up when needed. As it was people didn’t seem to worry too much if one small boy disappeared from time to time.

Nowadays with CCTV and forensics, the chances of picking up a small boy and getting away with it were slim on a good day.

She looked across at her cauldron which was just coming to the boil and remembering the instructions in the recipe, an old one for increasing fertility, required all the ingredients to be mixed in together for it to work. Fertility was a dicey issue, and you had to get it right, and if a woman to give birth to a boy, then it was a small boy that was required to give the potion the potency it needed.

But in this day and age she thought to herself there had to be some sort of substitute. After all, there seemed to be substitutes for so much, sweeteners instead of sugar, synthetics for cotton and the vast range of instant foods requiring a cup of water and there before you could be a baked dinner.

It was then she remembered her aged and sage mother telling her that pork was similar meat to human. She just happened to have a leg of pork in her freezer and so decided to throw that into the mix. She opened her freezer and went in search of the leg of pork. ‘Now where are you?’ She asked herself as she rummaged through the frozen ingredients. Dragging the leg of pork from the bottom on the freezer she threw it in, and before long the cauldron was bubbling away making all the right sounds and more importantly the right smells. There was enough left over once she had filled in her order to put the rest away for a rainy day as she liked to think of such things.

She sent the potion on its way and got on with the next order, a simple one, to keep one’s hair lush and shiny.

Several months later she received an email from the fertility potion recipient containing photos she was not at all happy with.

The woman in question had given birth to a set of twins, gorgeous little boys with pig’s trotters for feet.

‘Goodness,’ thought the old crone, ‘I must not use a leg of pork again. I’m glad I didn’t throw the head in.’

Written for: https://thehauntedwordsmith.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/story-starter-challenge-april-15/