She liked the story of the woman who fell in love with her sister’s husband. The woman fell so hard in love with her brother-in-law, her grandmother had said, she put the love medicine on him, a bad medicine that shot up the slick cord of his spine, a medicine so strong it peeled the skin of his heart. The medicine clicked her name in his bones. He left his wife sleeping, on a black winter night. He stood up in his thin shorts with a hard-on so big it pulled him toward her. The March weeds shivered around him but he kept running toward her, toward her small house. When he found his sister-in-law with another man he chased him out of the house, chased him up into the hills and told him to never come back. The woman was so happy she took her brother-in-law to bed. Her medicine had worked better than she had hoped. He was the best lover she had ever had. He could make love all night. And when she turned from him he would still be poking her. She had found heaven. But soon she began waking up, waking up at three and four in the morning and he would be on top of her, his penis hard as a bull horn, even harder than he had been the night before. He would not eat, and when she would sit down to have a meal he would rub up behind her chair until she would slap at him. Even her dog was better company.

His wife began to stand outside her house, the wind tangling her long hair, stand outside for hours with her small children wailing, calling him back, her own sister calling. But he wouldn’t look outside. He wouldn’t even lift the curtain for a moment. She would tell her brother-in-law it was time to leave. She would tell him that his wife was waiting for him. He would just follow her around from room to room until his ragged shorts wore thin and fell off of him. Still she told herself she liked the looks of him. But then when she would go to visit her relatives he would put on a pair of her pants or one of her dresses. He would stand outside waiting for her, pacing her cousin’s house, cupping his hands to the windows, with a hard-on, always with a hard-on, always with whining eyes, his worm lips trembling with tears. And her relatives didn’t like her much either. They recognized love medicine when they saw it. She had stolen her sister’s husband. And if she could steal her own sister’s husband she could take theirs, too, or worse.