Author's note: This tale is fiction, deeply inspired by lululuvsblack in the Story Ideas forum - thanks! All sex is of legal age. The author knows diddly-shit about voodoo but that did not slow me down. Enjoy the story.
***** Sweet Voodoo To You, Too *****
Achebe was a towering figure.
He was big. He was black. He was strong. He was studly. He was very, very smart. And he was pissed off.
Being big, black, strong, studly, and smart were merely his personal heritage. He had no qualms about using his heritage as a tool to advance himself. He had WORKED for his achievements, his social position, his scholarships. He had BUSTED ASS to make his way in the world. He was proud of what he had done. He was a doer.
And he had good reason to pissed off. It was his college dorm-mate, that rich asshole Watkins. As underclassmen at this prestigious private university, they were forced to share a dorm room. As engineering students, they were often in the same classes. But Watkins was eager to show that they were not of the same class, no, not at all.
Achebe was born poor. Not starving-in-the-ghetto poor, not eating-garbage-rats poor, just old-clothes poor and macaroni-and-cheese poor. His ancestors were subsistence farmers. His parents worked hard.
Watkins was born rich. Not Walton-family rich, not oil-magnate rich, but old-banking-family rich. His relatives sat on corporate boards, counted dividends, and played wherever in the world they wanted.
Watkins never hesitated to tell people how rich and superior he and his family were.
"Sure, I had to leave the Maserati behind at our summer house in Genoa. Broke my fucking heart, I tell ya. But I'll get another."
Watkins bought another round of drinks for his friends at the Club Rialto and continued bloviating about fun in Europe and Asia and wherever.
"Or maybe I'll just ask Dad to ship that one over here. And I can get my roomie to keep it clean for me. Colored boys are good for stuff like that, don't you agree?"
This is what pissed-off Achebe. Watkins called him 'boy' in public.
"Oh, boy, is our room clean? You
did
mop and vacuum, right?"
Achebe could ignore Watkins but he could not rebuke him. Why? Because Achebe's parents worked for a Watkins-owned subsidiary and he could not afford to antagonize the little turd.
Life sucks sometimes.
Watkins played his my-shit-don't-stink games and Achebe gritted his teeth. Moving off-campus at the end of their sophomore year would solve nothing - Watkins would still be his arrogant asshole self whenever he referred to Achebe or any other black, brown, yellow, or less-than-super-rich people.
Things changed on Achebe's birthday.
His birthday presents were never extravagant. His folks had no money for any foolishness. But this one was special.
"Son, this is my mother's diary," his mom's note said, hand-written on a paper scrap. "She wanted you to have it and now it is yours. I only glanced through it but there seems to be much that is meant for you. Now you are a man; you should be able to understand it. Happy birthday, son."
Achebe opened the twine holding shut the butcher-paper-wrapped bundle. Inside was a large leather-bound volume. Leather, or...? He felt it gingerly, stroked it, sniffed it. Could that be... human skin?
Achebe opened the heavy cover. The volume was a fat journal, its unlined pages filled with a spidery scrawl. He looked closely and saw words in English and French and Spanish.
This was not too much a puzzle. He knew his mother's mother was from Hispaniola and often crossed the line between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He knew his parents knew only English, but he had taken language classes and recognized the patois. He could decipher his grandmother.
His birthday was at the start of a long weekend. The asshole Watkins would not re-appear from his expensive partying before Tuesday. Achebe had no critical classwork to occupy him for a few days. His girlfriend Giana was gone for the weekend too. He set himself to read the strange heavy tome.
And strange it was. Achebe found himself at his laptop googling many phrases and allusions. The further he got, the stranger it was. Were those spells? Curses? Incantations? Prayers? Instructions?
Yes, they were all of the above. Achebe's grandmother had been a voodoo priestess, a very senior priestess, a practitioner of the highest degree. She wrote of her training and adventures, her successes and failures, the discipline and calculations needed to achieve anything in voodoo - a sort of psychochemical engineering.
And she include very specific plans for certain mystical tools.
Achebe was most transfixed by the soul-identity paradigm. As above, so below, sure; that equated everything from atomic to galactic orbits. But also: As the lesser, so the greater. Living souls could be modeled in miniature, could be held in parallel suspension in... dolls.
Yes, voodoo dolls. Dolls that encapsulated their human sources. Dolls that could be used to manipulate those humans.
The procedure was rather straightforward. Make a figure of the target with some bits of the target's self included. Add certain organic compounds - no eye of newt, but something similar. Do this and that and this again, and chant words like a software algorithm, and be sure to check your work.
Achebe was ready to test his knowledge that Monday evening. Watkins would return tomorrow. What would happen if...?
Watkins was a fucking slob. He never cleaned his area of the dorm room's bath. He left plenty of hairs and other debris in the sink and shower. Plenty of hairs... more than enough to be added to a wax-and-dirt figure, a homunuculus, a hand-sized model of the asshole aristocrat.
"What will I do with this honky?" Achebe asked himself.
He had pondered how to treat the moldy fetish. Pins through extremities? A hot blade in the crotch? Packed in ice? Smothered in pennies?
He had a different plan. He shopped the local Dollar Tree store for doll clothes, Ken-and-Barbie-type stuff. He dressed the Watkins figure in a cheap blue suit. Under the trousers: women's knickers. Under the suit shirt: a bra. And onto the figure's butt: a red flashing LED light.
Watkins did not return to the dorm that Tuesday. Achebe read in the local news that his roommate had been gang-raped outside a gay bar in Fire Island.
"Poor bastard," Achebe thought. He thought many other things, too.
---
Achebe thought of other people who left him royally pissed-off. Not because they were merely assholes; the world was full of assholes. No, because they were
actively engaged
assholes, bent on hurting others. The race-haters and gay-bashers, relay stations of lies and vitriol. Yes, he thought about some he knew and who directed shit at him and his friends. He thought about possibilities.
But he thought of his friends, too.
---
Achebe had his dorm room spic-n-span when his slender girlfriend Giana arrived that night carrying a small sports duffel. She could sleep-over with no worry of a roommate crashing in to disturb them. This would be fun.
Giana Carvalho's heart-shaped Portuguese face broke into a broad smile as she absorbed Achebe's efforts - the soft raga music, the lit candles, the Thai take-out and wine flutes arrayed at the small table, the box of condoms in the middle of the turned-down bed.
She giggled, "For
me
?" She glowed inside her ruby sundress.
"All for you, baby," Achebe growled. He wrapped his studly arms around her.
Her sneaker-clad feet hovered above the floor for uncountable minutes.
"Dinner's icing over, baby," he said when their mouths parted. "Let's eat."
Achebe had turned the thermostat to a 'comfortable' level. They dined naked.
Dinner was a tangy as their conversation. The wine, a classic Rochioli chardonnay, was creamy and smooth as Giana's skin, but cooler. She yelped when he dribbled a stream onto her small breasts and licked the shining droplets before they could fall from her pen-nibs of nipples.
Achebe filled several condoms over the night, each carefully applied (with her mouth) and removed and tied-off. His covered cock pistoned in her tunnel of love like a limitless machine, ever pounding, ever working.
