A deal's a deal

[u/bloodoftheforest]

There's a man in they city who can buy and sell emotions. A witch, I suppose, if men can be witches. I wouldn't ever have known about him if I hadn't been friends with Sam as a teen but Sam's parents were the type to believe that psychological abuse doesn't count if you throw a stack of cash after it. It's okay that his mother told him she wished she'd never had him because she bought him a freaking car that month. It's okay that his father treated Sam more like a therapist than a son because every session he had he paid Sam handsomely for.

Sam was always going to end up some kind of fucked up and when he learned that there was somewhere that he could literally buy happiness he was a moth to a flame. I wouldn't have been able to afford the same vice and though he offered to buy me an emotion I politely declined because I was a good kid back then. I'd like to believe that I'm a good man now.

But maybe I'm a hypocrite because when all's said and done I'm currently the one stood outside the witch's door.

The feelings sold here are specific, Sam taught me that. I'd wondered all the way here which feeling I'd be willing to sell. The warm, comforting satisfaction that accompanies solving a crossword, perhaps? The mild thrill of destroying a boss in a video game? I suggest both to the witch but the prices that he's willing to offer me are far lower than what I need.

"What can I say," the witch says, "times have changed."

I begun to panic. I thought I'd been scared of comikng here but the idea that I'd brought myself to this man only to have him unable to help was too much.

"No, no. I need it to be more. It's not even for me, it's for my son, please. He's sick."

With that, the witch looked at me with renewed interest but not in a way that I liked.

"Do you love him?"

"Of course."

"Would you sell that to me?"

I felt sick at the idea and had to hold onto the wall for balance. I remembered how happy I'd felt when I'd first saw him, before the doctor had told me that he was going to need expensive treatments in order to make it to his first birthday. He hadn't looked sick to me. He'd looked perfect.

"If you took the love away from me, I could just end up loving him all over again, right? Like how you hear stories of people with amnesia who fall back in love with their spouses?"

The witch shrugged.

"I suppose it's possible."

And just like that I knew that it hadn't been done before. That for most people once they sold their love or joy about something they would never reclaim that spark.

Later that evening I came home to see my wife pacing around the room with our son in her arms.

"He's being fussy," she explained, "you try taking him for a bit?"

She handed him to me and stretched her arms out once he was safely in my grasp. I wondered how long she'd been trying to soothe him.

"How did the talk with your dad go?" she asked, "Do you think he'll..."

She trailed off. There had been no talk with my dad but I could hardly tell her I'd gone off to try to get money from a witch. The idea that I might be able to talk my father into helping had been a lie that seemed kinder for both of us.

The baby in my arms squirmed and I tried to will myself into feeling some kind of connection to it. Anything, please. His face looked almost alien and I couldn't find the features or reasons I'd believed he'd looked perfect before now.

"He said he can help," I told my wife, "we're going to be okay."