The Endurance Draught

Nanaya turned the key in the lock to open the Store for the morning.  The Sun was bright on her back as she stepped into her own modern temple or whatever modern life left of her sacred space. It was cool and dim where the glass door light didn’t penetrate which was good for the potions and elixirs, she moved among the bottles and focused stilling her self and visualizing the untapped energy around her. As she focused on breathing in love and breathing out energy to the concoctions, she wondered if it was her imagination or if she really did see a bit more sparkle in small glass jars as she projected her love and grace into them.

Her hands moved over the shelves without needing to look — a jar of warming oil that wanted a little more heat today, a candle whose wick asked to be trimmed just so, a string of amber worry beads still holding the ache of the woman who'd return for them Thursday, hoping the man she loved would finally notice she was trying. 

Some of what Nanaya sold was delight for an hour — quick, bright, forgotten by morning, and there was nothing wrong with that; an hour of delight was still delight, still worth reverence. Some of it was delight worn thin by twenty years of marriage, delight that needed coaxing back like a fire banked too long, and that kind asked more of her hands, more of her attention, more of whatever she still had left of the name nobody remembered to call her by anymore.

They came from all corners of the globe, looking for a good time and she loved them for it. All of them. The ones chasing a single good night and the ones trying to remember why they'd once stayed up all night, just talking. Need was need. She didn't rank it. She just profited by it and wished them well on their quest. It was an echo of her ancient rituals that fit into modern life.

Her peaceful little morning ritual was cut short today by a demanding pounding on the front door, 10 min before the sign said they would open. She turned and saw Marcus Kessler at the door. Heavy brow and big shoulders from lots of gym time and very little work. Marcus was oozing self importance and entitlement and it wasn’t even 10 am. The lights came on as Warrick entered from the back for his shift and groaned when he saw Marcus through the glass.

Nanaya intentionally waited until Warrick stepped into the raised counter area and got his apron on before she opened the door with a pasted on professional smile and personal greeting.

“Good morning Mr Kessler, what brings you to my shop today?”

“You know I need my Endurance Draught. I am known for my endurance, the ladies will talk if I don’t deliver.”

“I don’t know what your ladies are saying but my night shift girls have been telling me how disrespectful you are when you drop by in the evenings. People who do not show respect to my handmaidens do not receive the blessings of the — " she caught herself, the word temple rising before she pushed it back down where it belonged — “shop”.

“My money is good.” He growled and his arm shot out and she leaned slightly to the left to avoid it but he was reaching past her for the smooth moonstone they kept on the counter. In this environment everyone thought it was just an electronic device to identify shoppers who entered the store. It was actually an artifact from a long forgotten temple of Love and Sensuality Nanaya had once presided over.

The smooth palm sized pearlescent stone that had a warm glow as if lit from within, suddenly went dark.

There was an uncomfortably long silence that Nanaya let stretch on as she moved one step away from him.

Marcus looked up from the stone and sliced a side eye at her but knew there would be no help from that quarter, so in fine bully fashion he turned to Warrick and immediately started to menace him. “Turn it back on, you little shit, I know you did something to it to make it reject me. I am Marcus Kessler for goddess’s sake.

"It's not mine to fix," Warrick said, and he meant it plainly — not an excuse, just fact. "Never has been. That's hers." He tipped his head toward her, not unkindly, the way you'd point out weather instead of an argument.

Marcus rounded on her instead, face reddening and fists clenched tight, already reaching for outrage as if it were a tool that had always worked for him before.

"You gonna let your boy here tell me I can't come in to my own—"

"It's not your shop," she said. Quiet. Not raised at all. "It was never yours to come into. It was only ever mine to let you in.”

"The moonstone has judged you," she said. "And I've heard reports from the night shift that you've been disrespectful. More than once."

"That's—" He stopped, recalculating, the way men like him always did when the ground shifted under an argument they'd expected to win. "That's not — who said that?"

"Doesn't matter who said it," she said. "It matters that it's true enough for the stone to agree."

He looked down at his hand like it had betrayed him. Like the stone was the thing at fault, not whatever he'd said to some shop girl on a Tuesday night when he thought no one who mattered was listening.

"I need what's in here," he said, and something cracked open in his voice on the word need, the first honest thing he'd said since he walked in.

"I know," she said. Not cold. Almost gentle, which was worse, somehow, than if she'd been cruel. "That's exactly why the door isn't open to you right now."

“You really aren’t going to sell it to me? A merchant exists to sell their wares!”

“Perhaps I am more than a merchant.”

“Is that so? Maybe I'll just tell the city council you're not running a straight shop," he said, backing toward his truck now, throwing it over his shoulder like a last card he was sure would land.

She didn't even raise her voice.

"You could do that," she said. "Or you could remember that I know a great deal more about your business than you'd want the city council knowing about mine. I'd think carefully about which conversation you actually want to have."

He didn't have an answer for that. He turned from the shop and got in his truck. He didn't slam the door, which told her more than if he had. A man who slams doors is still fighting. A man who closes one quietly is already afraid of what comes next.

The calls started that night.

She let them go to voicemail, not out of cruelty, but because some men need to hear themselves say a thing out loud, alone, before they're ready to say it to another living soul. By morning there were six messages. The first three were justifications dressed up as apologies — I didn't mean it like that, you don't understand what kind of day I'd had, Denise took it wrong. The fourth was quieter. The fifth had no words in it at all, just a long breath and then the sound of him hanging up before he let himself cry where a machine could hear it. The sixth, left at 4 a.m., was the only one worth listening to twice.

"I need — " His voice broke on it, and this time he let it. "I'm not good at asking for things I need instead of taking them. I don't know when I stopped knowing the difference. I just — I need to come home able to be good to her. That's all this ever was. I didn't mean for it to look like I thought I was owed it."

The flowers came two days later, cheap gas-station carnations, left on the doorstep before the shop opened, no card, like he couldn't decide if he had the right to sign his name to them.

She stood in the doorway with them in her arms and felt something she hadn't expected to feel: not triumph, not vindication. Just tired, the particular tiredness of having been right about someone's need before they'd been honest enough to admit it themselves.

Warrick found her there. "You gonna let him back?"

"I'm going to teach him how to touch the stone," she said. "Whether he gets back in after that is up to him. Not me. Not even the moonstone. Him.”

He came back on a Thursday, no truck this time — he'd walked, like he needed the extra minutes to lose his nerve and find it again along the way. He stood at the edge of the lot for a long moment before he crossed it, the carnations' cheap green cellophane still crumpled somewhere in his memory of how badly he'd botched even the apology.

She was waiting at the threshold. Not because she'd known the exact minute — she'd simply stopped expecting anything else. Some men took two days. Some took two years. He'd taken four.

"I'm not here to touch it again," he said, before she could speak. "Not yet. I don't — I don't think I know how. Not the right way. I just made it worse last time, didn't I? Reaching for it like that."

It was the first time he'd said a true thing about himself without her having to drag it out of him.

"Yes," she said. "You did."

"Then teach me." His voice cracked on the word, small and unguarded in a way it had never been in the parking lot, in the voicemails, in four years of walking through her door like he was owed whatever was on the other side. "Please. I don't want to need something and keep ruining my own chance at it."

She studied him a long moment, not the stone's judgment, her own, which was older and slower and had seen a thousand men promise a thousand things at this exact threshold.

"It's not a lock," she said finally. "It's not a password either, no matter what it looks like. You don't touch a moonstone the way you'd touch a vending machine. You touch it the way you'd touch a lover. With wonder. With respect, like you understand what you're asking for is a gift, not a transaction. The transaction happens later. Only after you've proven, with your hand, that you understand the difference."

He looked down at his open palm like it was a stranger's.

"I don't know if I remember how to touch anything like that," he admitted. "It's been a long time since I touched anything like it mattered."

"Then that's the lesson," she said. "Not the stone. You."

"Close your eyes," she said.

He did, though his hands stayed at his sides, uncertain what they were for now that grabbing wasn't the answer.

"Don't picture her the way you have been," she said. "Not as a body that owes you an evening. Not as proof you did enough that day to deserve to be met with warmth. I want you to picture her small. Newly born. Nothing about her able to serve you just her essence pure and new fresh from the divine.”

His brow furrowed, the way a man's does when he's being asked to hold two ideas that don't yet fit together.

"A baby can't perform for you," she went on. "Can't perform gratitude, can't perform desire, can't perform being impressed by what kind of day you had. A baby only loves you and depends on you, both at once, without asking whether you've earned it first. That's what you stopped seeing in her. Somewhere along the way you started measuring her like she was a transaction you'd paid into and were owed a return on. I want you to picture the version of her that has no idea what a transaction is. The version that only knows: this is the person who is supposed to keep me safe."

Something moved across his face, not comprehension yet, just the first crack where comprehension might eventually get in.

"That's not," he started. He stopped. Started again, quieter. "That's not how I've been thinking about her at all, is it."

"No," she said. "It isn't."

He stood with that a long moment, eyes still closed, and she watched the muscles in his jaw loosen the way they do when a man finally sets down a weight he'd carried so long he'd forgotten it was a weight at all.

"Now," she said. "Open your eyes. And touch the stone the way you'd hold something that small. Something that can't ask you for anything except to be trusted with it."

She didn't guide his hand. She'd learned long ago that a lesson given by force was no lesson at all, just obedience wearing a different coat. She only watched as he lifted his own hand, slow, uncertain, and let it hover an inch above the stone's pale face, the way you'd hover a hand over a sleeping child, unsure if touching would wake them or simply prove you were there.

When he finally lowered his palm, it wasn't a grab. It wasn't even really a touch, not at first, more like a question, asked quietly, of something he'd finally understood he had no right to command.

The stone held its color a long moment. Long enough that he flinched, certain of dark before it ever came.

Then, slow as a held breath finally let go, it began to glow, warm and shimmering, and the light caught the sparkle of a tear on his cheek before he could brush it away.

He made a sound she didn't have a name for, not quite a sob, not quite a laugh, something that lived in the narrow country between the two.

She was already waiting with his elixir, clutched close to her heart. Her eyes softened. Her head tilted, just slightly, as she handed it to him.

"Good," she said. "Now go home. And touch her the same way.” You may not need the elixir at all.

** Nanaya was a Mesopotamian goddess of love, sensuality, and fertility, worshipped for millennia before her name faded from common memory, absorbed into or overshadowed by better-known goddesses like Ishtar. This story imagines what she might be doing now.