There once was a traditional herbalist who ran her own shop in the tiny back room of a strip-mall nail salon in a small Arkansas town. She had painted a small sign that hung in the window of the nail salon, offering her services: traditional herbal health treatments, aromatherapy, prayer candles, country incense, homeopathy. She had a steady trickle of customers, to whom she sold a lot of prayer candles and incense, and in this way she was able to keep the lights on in her small house and keep her refrigerator stocked with food.

Despite her relative success, she was disappointed by the infrequency with which she was asked to perform her traditional herbalist medicine. She had been taught in the ways of country remedies by her mother, who had been taught by her mother, and so on up the family tree as far as her heirloom Bible went.

In her backyard, she maintained the family garden: sumac, whole cloves, cubeb, prickly ash, a patch of ginger; an orange tree; angelica, peppermint, caraway; coneflower, foxglove, black-eyed susan. She used these infrequently in her shop, but often for personal use, and it was important to her to continue the family tradition.

One night during a full moon, when the plants were at their most potent, she harvested ribwort, and hazel and lavender, and other things. As she did so, she heard a muffled high-pitched whine, like a small child screaming into a pillow. She stopped picking and listened, and followed the sound to its origin beneath a bough of her rowan tree. Carefully and slowly, she reached into the soil with her fingertips, and pulled out a screaming mandrake root. “How curious,” she thought, as the mandrake shrieked into her face. “I have never planted mandrake.” She placed her thumb over its wee little mouth, so as not to bother the neighbors, and took her harvest indoors, where she began preparing the plants.

Some went into an infusion, some were ground in a mortar and pestle, and some were laid out to dry. As she worked, the mandrake root sometimes coughed. As she broke up rowan bark, it started to loudly clear its throat, and as she zested oranges into a small jar, the mandrake spoke to her. “Tomorrow, a woman will come in to the shop. She will have rheumatoid arthritis.” Then it rattled off a list of ingredients, and instructions for their preparation. The woman quickly gathered the materials, and put the mixture into a jar to soak overnight.

The next day, a woman came in for arthritis. “I knew you were coming,” said the herbalist, and handed her the jar with a small label stating what it was for. “Tonight, heat up a cast-iron skillet on your stove. Put a towel over your head, and pour this into the cast-iron skillet when it’s good and hot. Put your head over the skillet, and breathe the smoke and vapor for thirty, forty-five seconds, or until it starts to really burn. Then stop. That’ll be forty dollars.”

That night, the mandrake root said, “Tomorrow, a man will come in with a broken heart. Here is what he will need.” The mandrake listed ingredients and instructions, and asked the woman to cut off a chunk of its own mandrake root body, to include in the mixture. The woman did as she was told, and the next day she sold it to the man and gave him instructions for inhalation. The man came in the next day and bought some prayer candles and incense, and he thanked her, telling her that he’d never felt better.

This went on for weeks. The mandrake told the herbalist about customers who would come in with specific needs, and told her what to give them. These were always mixtures to be burned, steamed, and inhaled. For certain customers, the mandrake demanded that she cut off parts of it to be included and breathed in by her customers. The woman became much more successful, and had to order many more prayer candles and much more incense.

In addition to initial successes, the herbalist started getting repeat customers.

The broken-hearted man came back in, for an inflamed liver. “I can feel it pulsating inside me,” he said, “like a great black prune, a hungry prune.” She gave him more mandrake infusion.

An insomniac woman returned because now that she could sleep, she had terrible dreams. “A combine chases me through a field of wheat under bright moonlight,” she said, “and I can feel that my feet are broken, but I must keep running, as the machine chases me and chases me.” She gave the woman more mandrake infusion.

A man haunted by his father came back because he missed the presence of the ghost. “It was bad, hearing him moan and drip blood onto the floor while I lay in the dark, but it is much worse to not hear him moan and drip blood onto the floor, while I lay alone, in the dark, in the middle of this universe.” She gave him more mandrake infusion.

The business kept coming. The woman’s savings account grew plump. The body of the mandrake root dwindled until all that was left was its head.

One night, the head of the mandrake root said, “This is the end. Two days from now, an old man will come into the shop. He will not speak, but his breath will smell of honey, and shit, and saffron. You must muddle an herbal concoction to exact specifications.” The mandrake root gave her a very specific list of ingredients, with multiple steps for muddling, infusing, powdering. “Now, you must place what’s left of me in your mortar, and use your pestle to grind me into mush. I will go into the jar last. Bury the jar beneath your rowan tree and leave it there overnight.”

The herbalist did as she was told.

She thought she was prepared, but when the man arrived, she was shocked. His skin was all white, and his beard and hair too. He wore a suit made from the brightest white cloth she had ever seen, including a white leather tie and hat. His eyes were bright pink and rapidly moved back and forth as he looked at her. When he opened his mouth, all she could see was a deep ruby red, and the shop filled with the deep sweet permeating stench of honey and saffron and shit. Silently, with shaking hands, she handed him the soil-caked jar. The man reached into his inside vest pocket and brought out six small grains of gold, the size and shape of rice, and dropped them, tinkling, onto her counter.

Then he left.

The woman closed early, went home, and looked at the grains of gold. That night, under the waning moon, she buried them beneath the rowan tree.