Jessie shuffled his weight from foot to foot as he looked from one side of the street to the other. Go alone, Gavin had told him. Go alone and don’t draw too much attention to yourself.

    Nobody had walked into the building in at least fifteen minutes. The front door had one of the old-world, plastic blue signs which proclaimed ‘Open,’ hanging on it. The bright color of the sign matched the blue and red of the old barber pole on the corner and the lines of fresh red paint between the windows. Not a barbershop anymore, but gathering the attention of one. All of the other nearby buildings were closed up, with once-boarded windows whose panels had long ago been pulled down, fallen away or just rotted. The building brought a splotch of color to an otherwise gray concrete landscape under the Atlanta sun.

    This had to be the place.

    He lingered, chewed at an irritating hangnail, took a deep bracing breath and crossed the street. He looked both ways before crossing like he had been taught. Habits were habits, despite cars rusted in place along the side of the road, nothing more than fixtures in the landscape for years now.

    The edge of the door swept past chimes hanging from the ceiling which rung out cheerful notes.

    Inside of the shop shone brighter than the world he had stepped in from. Candles burned in number at the rear of the store, keeping recesses brightly lit. The large casement-covered front let in light which reflected off glass cabinets and polished countertops. Under the counters there rested artfully arranged wooden pipes, sheaves of rolled tobacco, small piles of herbs and leaves.  Folded triangular swatches of paper named every pile in clean black letters and white modern paper, rough and recently made.

    The scent of tea and tobacco in equal measure, not entirely unpleasant, filled Jessie’s nose.

    “Welcome to Thykar’s Tobaccos, Teas, and Treasures.”

    The man behind the desk bowed slightly with his greeting. He didn’t look like what Jessie expected. The motion took effort, eliciting a small wheeze as he moved. His midsection hung low, covering his belt. He wore an old-fashion, ostentatious, red vest that did nothing to contain his girth, and a set of mismatched suspenders which bowed out, slack, not holding up his pants at all. In his greying mustache, hints of breakfast, as small crumbs, stuck to the corners of wiry hairs. Sweat stains and grey dust plastered a once-white shirt beneath the vest.

    The room felt smaller than the storefront implied. Fifteen feet wide, it went half again as deep. A door in the back behind the line of counters sat low enough that Jessie would have to duck to enter. Perhaps it led to the rest of the shop?

    “Hi,” he said timidly.

    “What can I get for you today?”

    “I’m looking for Thykar?”

    “At your service, my young man.” The vested gentlemen licked his lips, giving them a greasy sheen.

    “Um, maybe I should come back another time.” Jessie said.

    He stared at the floor. Meeting Thykar’s penetrating stare proved worse than meeting her stare. Her lying smile, and her innocent dimples, that said trust me, while I stab you in the back. Damn it, why had he taken Gavin’s word for this? This wasn’t his style.

    The sound of the man shuffling behind the counter drew his attention back to the present.  Jessie felt suddenly very aware of the relative silence of the room without movement.

    “Nonsense,” the large man drew out a continuant ‘s’. “We have something for everyone.”

    “Um.” Jessie said again.

    “We have the finest tobacco south of the Chesapeake Bay, grown right here.” He waggled two tobacco-stained fingers at the young man, and then shook his head. “Not for you though. No, you are much more concerned for your health than that. I see it in your waistline. Perhaps here, we have herbal remedies, for the sore back or headaches which may plague a man when he is already feeling, low?”

    “W…what?” Jessie stuttered thinking of the backache he had even as they spoke, and the migraine he experienced the day before.

    “No?” The man moved further down the counter and waved an open hand at the last shelves in the room, closing his hand to point with a flourish of the wrist. Jessie left the direct sunlight for the diffuse scattered rays’ illumination in the rear of the room. Thykar leaned forward, resting a good portion of his girth on the counter top.

“Perhaps, you are seeking something of a more emotional nature, an herbal remedy to relax the mind, and help you feel at ease?”

    Fairy dust, labeled as talc powder, elf ears, labeled as coca leaves, and blue grass, labeled as flavor crystals, along with a half dozen others filled the curio case; euphemisms for various common street drugs, sufficiently obliquely named that a shop owner could have reasonable deniability, but those in the know could shop as needed. Jessie played -for half a heartbeat- with the idea of simply forgetting the fact in waves of blissful ignorance of a drug or alcoholic stupor, but when he came back to, she would be there again, with that painted, lying smile.

    Jessie shook his head. “Um, I was told that if I had a special problem, you could help me with it.”

    The man leaned back and reached up a hand to tug at his mustache. “Special problem you say? Why don’t you let old Thykar understand what you need, and maybe you and I can figure out a fair deal.”

    “My wife, Amanda, she um...” Jessie swallowed hard to moisten his throat and then started over. “There is a guy, John Graham. I was hoping you could help him. Um. Leave town?”

    “A man who needs help with moving furniture, hmm?” He drew back and looked at Jessie down the length of his wide, oily nose. 

    “Um. No. Um. I just want him to go away.”

    “Perhaps taking up a new and annoying habit around him?” Thykar waved a hand across the glass countertop at the goods below.

    “Look, I was told you could help with special situations. If you can’t help just say so.”

Jessie turned again to walk out, but the proprietor called him back.

    “Making a man disappear like you suggest is quite against the law, of both man and church, but not every problem needs to be solved with such… crudities.”

    Jessie turned back to face the shopkeeper. “Can you help me?”

    “We don’t necessarily do exactly what you are asking, but why don’t you step back this way, and we can see if we have anything on offer that might be of use to you.”

    The man shuffled away from the small door in the back of the shop and waved a hand at it. His large smile showed a matching row of teeth with dark brown stains in the crevasses, and decidedly pink and enflamed gums.

    Jessie looked at the worn wood, hanging on old hinges. The timber didn’t reflect or cast light. Everything else in the room bounced light off carved glass, polished brass joints.

    Jessie blinked. He saw Amanda with him again. She laughed with him in the park, flashing those dimples again. Each note of her chuckle while she rested her hand on his leg pumped Jessie’s heart rate up another notch. 

    He shook his head, unclenched his fist, his fingernails leaving lines in his flesh, and took a step toward the rear of the shop. Thykar lifted up the small glass counter top which barred customers from stepping behind the cabinets.

    He moved slowly, one foot in front of the other, looking alternately between the professional if greasy man and the door. The smell of the burning candle wax lent a sweet smell to the back of the shop, like honey or an open field. The stifling confines behind the counter nearly set him running as the large man let the shelf latch back into place, pinning Jessie between the wall, the glass, the door and Thykar’s rotund body.

His breath blew hot from behind, and a gentle pressure from his vested midsection brushed against Jessie’s back.

    “Go ahead in. It’s not locked.”

    Jessie reached up, placed his hand on the door and found it warm to the touch. The wood’s texture was flat and smooth beneath his fingertips like a thousand hands had pressed right where he pressed. The door swung open soundlessly on oiled hinges. He ducked his head and stepped inside.

    No windows illuminated the dark rear of the shop. A pair of small candles, pinpricks of light, lit the space from the room’s opposite side, and his sun-saturated eyes painted everything in a verdant green wash as they adjusted to the dimness. He picked his path carefully, looking down all the while. Wooden shelves bent with age, lined with leather wrapped glass vials, and small test tubes hung from strings hammered into walls. Everywhere colors swirled in the liquids which reflected and twisted the candlelight and each other’s luminescence. Powders filling open-top glass jars gave off pungent aromas of mushrooms and oil which wormed their way into Jessie’s nose. Behind him Thykar’s clothing swept against the sides of the door frame as he entered the room with Jessie, stepping politely to the side, so fragments of sunlight from the front room spilled in.

    “Now, let’s see what we have that could be of use to you.”

    He looked Jessie up and down once, and Jessie stood taller under that judgmental gaze. He pulled his shoulders back, and tried to look broad. He pulled his shirt flat against his skin to make his torso trimmer and the outline of his chest larger. She might judge him as an inferior man, but a stranger wasn’t going to.

    Jessie blinked, and Amanda’s hand floated from his leg to his broad. He had set his jawline, and had clenched his teeth so as not to scream at them both, and make a fool of himself in a public park. John was bigger than him anyway. Jessie deflated.

After a second more of appraisal, the man shuffled in the small space, turning, weaving, pointing at items, and muttering to himself as he looked from Jessie to each of the concoctions.

    “Not this. No. No.”

    Every time he moved, Thykar’s pressed and nudged against shelves, vials and glass, yet, miraculously, nothing fell. Jessie cowered, elbows bent ready to be raised over head, to avoid the inevitable crash of wood and glass. He kept his knees bent, ready to bolt for the door, and avoid being crushed by the towers of wood and glass.

If he ran, he’d never to return to the shop again. Not under Thykar’s disquieting gaze. He couldn’t run. He had to deal with this, if it killed him.

    “This!”

    Thykar pulled from the shelf a small pouch of old-fashioned worked leather. He stuck two chubby fingers into the top and pulled out a black powder like smashed charcoal and sprinkled it back into the top of the bag dramatically.

    “A pinch in the morning coffee, and the whisper of a name, and everything he does will look reprehensible to her.”

    Jessie furrowed his brow at the man. “In her coffee?”

    “No?”

    “Like drug her?”

    “No, then.”

    Thykar grabbed up a second vial from a different shelf and shook it lightly at Jessie, setting the exact angle so the candle behind him filtered through the thick liquid that clung to the sides of the glass like pre-apocalypse cough syrup.

    “This is guaranteed to make you into, shall we call it, a man of conquest.”

    “It looks... rotted.”

    The large man squinted at Jessie with blood vessel streaked sallow eyes. He sniffed, and stared at him for several labored breaths. Each breath, the rattle of lungs past their prime, wheezed in the otherwise quiet room.

    “Do you know this man you want to… separate… from your significant other’s company?”

    “Um. We’ve met. Twice.”

    He had to shake his hand. He had to touch those hands that touched his Amanda. He had smiled, like an idiot. A polite idiot being lied to by both of them.

    “Will you meet him again?”

    Jessie nodded. His pulse rose at the thought of being in the room with John again.

    “This. One single drop, into any of his food or drink, and I guarantee, he will come to hate you and yours with sufficient vitriol that your current worries will become a thing of the past.”

    Jessie looked at the bottle held up, from which the proprietor drew a single eye dropper.

    “He won’t die or anything?”

    “I guarantee this will do him no physical harm whatsoever.”

    “He won’t, like, know it is me?”

    “His consumption of the potion is not part of the deal. We offer invisibility potions, but how you chose to have him imbibe this is entirely up to you.”

    Jessie swallowed hard against the hot dry air of the room. “Um.” He stared at the vial.

    “Perhaps you could just try speaking to him about it. Man to man. I’m sure everything will work itself out if you were honest about your feelings.”

    Thykar began to screw the dropper back on the bottle top, and place it back on the lower shelf.

    “How much?”

    “We have piqued your interest after all then?”

    “I only have a few hundred,” Jessie began.

    “Oh, your money is no good here. We will just have to come to a different kind of arrangement for something so special as this.”

    The figure of Thykar loomed large as he stepped around the center isle of wooden shelves and blocked the shaft of light from the doorway. He stood silhouetted in the entrance and seemed to glow slightly scarlet from the candle flames which flickered behind Jessie. Shadows danced and crawled across his clothing. Somehow it made him look even larger.

    “Arrangement?”

    “A favor, written simply, as a contract of promise. Nothing large,” Thykar assured him.

    “Favor?”

    “A small thing. A letter that needs to be delivered.”

    “You want me to deliver… mail?” Jessie asked.

    “Yes, mail. I need you to deliver a letter, unopened, to a specific gentleman to be named. Wear something nice. Say nothing, regardless of what he asks, and simply be sure that you place it directly into his hands.”

    “Is he going to hurt me or something?”

    “Of course not, and we will be happy to tell you right where to go to meet him. He will be passing through town in a few days in fact. He and I simply don’t see eye to eye, and it’s better if our correspondence is through other people. We here at Thykar’s prefer repeat customers. It’s better for business. We would always like you to recommend us to your friends and family so we would never want to put our clientele in harm’s way, now, would we?”

    “Um.”

    “All you have to do, is sign here, that you promise to fulfill your side of the bargain, and one small drop of fluid provided by us, will most assuredly fulfill ours.”

He procured a sheet of paper from a top shelf beside the door. The material looked new, pressed from thick material of new post-Fall mills, not the uniform thickness of contracts and notebooks from the world before. Elegant writing flowed across the page in handwritten script like Jessie had seen in history books from a bygone era.

Jessie’s full name scrawled across the bottom of the page captured his attention.

    “How?”

    “We do like to be prepared here at the Thykar’s.” The proprietor smiled at him, drawing out the ‘s’.

    Jessie took the agreement in a trembling hand. The paper vibrated audibly and he quickly brought a second hand up to grab the opposite edge, steadying the calligraphed paper enough to read. It specified the exact terms the man had just verbalized. Delivery of a single sealed envelope with a name and address and time in exchange for a single drop, in a sealed vial of a bitterness potion.

    “Return of all goods and remuneration to the proprietor for the cost of goods consumed in the event of default of reciprocal services,” Jessie read out loud. “What does that mean?”

    “Details, details. If you fail to deliver the letter for any reason, you will simply have to return the vial and its contents to the shop. If you have already used the contents we provide you, but have, for some reason, changed your mind with regard to your side of the arrangement, we will find an appropriate method of payment. Perfectly normal contractual obligations, you see.”

    No more John, no more lies, all for the price of delivering a letter? Why should he say no?

    Jessie nodded and looked around for a pen.

    “Your thumbprint will be just fine,” said Thykar.

    He offered up an ink pad retrieved from the shelf behind him. Thykar popped open a lid with a practiced action of his thumb, and exposed the soft red velvet, moist with staining dye. Jessie reached a thumb up and touched the pad, surprised when Thykar’s other hand reached around and pressed his finger down firmly. Red welled up around the edges of his digit.

    “Ouch! Something sharp in there.”

    Beyond the door the chimes jingled for another customer.

    “Terribly sorry,” Thykar said. He gave another partial bow, and his eyes reflected the light of the room like a cat in the dark. 

    Jessie pressed his finger just above the line labeled “Signatory.” A small prick of pain throbbed dully in the middle of his finger as he applied pressure and the crimson smeared the page. The large visible threads of pulpy paper soaked up the fluids, and Thykar neatly rolled up the makeshift scroll with a practiced action and placed it back onto the shelf where a small stack of similar tubes of signed contracts waited.

Jessie looked down at the vial in his hand, placed so gently, he hardly felt it arrive.

    “One drop,” Thykar said.

    “One drop,” Jessie repeated.

    He held the vial up, and exposed it to the light of the sun filtered into the room, suddenly aware that the large man had moved to provide him egress.

Jessie ducked back out, and found his breathing came to him more clearly. His heartbeat, echoing in his ears, faded and the dryness in his throat abated. The stifling heat and oppressive nearness of the man, along with the sense of claustrophobia, subsided as he entered the light. Another patron looked down at the glass and tobacco. Behind Jessie, bells to the shop jingled when he pulled the front door open and stepped out to the sun-drenched street.

    A voice followed him out.

    “Welcome to Thykar’s Tobaccos, Teas, and Treasures.”