The-Woman-Upstairs lives in a flat filled to bursting with bottles. The bottles come with an instruction that keeps young love forever potent. It reads:

Open to wake, lock to sleep, and pour to grow.

The-Woman-Downstairs has never seen a bottle of love potion up close. She’s a walking, breathing love potion. The thought of her pretty face sends her husband home at exactly 6 pm. The aroma of her meals invites hungry stomachs to fill their bellies with the scent of good food.

Kanem is the good wife’s name. Of the 12 flats in Police Block, her marriage is the happiest. The first six flats are run by wives, whose meals make Kanem want to puke. “Their husbands must be high on love potion to eat such foul-smelling rubbish,” she often thinks. Flats seven, eight, nine and ten are happy to have their husbands away from home on interstate duty.

Kanem’s only job is being a wife. Her fondest moment is walking her husband to work for night duty, and returning with her left wrist blistering red from being held too tight. It’s exciting when the clock strikes six, and her heart pounds in her chest as her hands set the table for him. When his long fingers slam the dining table demanding the whereabouts of his beret, she feels complete when she finds it.

***

Kanem’s husband does a weird thing when he can’t find his money. He did it last night. Kanem thinks, if I could get a teeny weeny drop of love potion, maybe it’ll stop.

One night, after he leaves for night duty, she’s at the door of The-Woman-Upstairs, holding onto hesitant fists, breathing in deeply and wiggling nervous hands. One inch from knocking, someone downstairs calls her name. She’s stepping away when The-Woman-Upstairs opens up. Kanem raises both hands in a quick wave like she’s passing by. The-Woman-Upstairs catches sight of Kanem’s wrists, they’re redder than blood. She grabs Kanem’s arm, shoves a bottle into its pits, and shuts her out before she can object.

Kanem heads downstairs; there, three policemen await her with news; her husband is missing.

***

Three months and three days pass without a word from Kanem’s husband. Whenever the clock strikes six, she’s in tears. She walks the streets alone, dreaming of running into him; it never happens. She begs the aroma of her meals to fetch him, but the scent won’t heed.

Her life slowly falls into a new routine. When her door creaks at six, it’s the tender-eyed detective with a dog’s name, John-Bosco, who won’t give up on finding clues of her husband’s disappearance in the house.

She shops with the women in flats 7 to 10. She stops shopping for food stuff, she binges on new clothes and snacks. Bored out of her mind at night, she sits with The-Woman-Upstairs and the women with away-husbands, gisting till her ears drip with gossip. When Kanem and The-Woman-Upstairs are alone, Kanem regrets that she can’t use the potion with her husband gone. The-Woman-Upstairs laughs, surprised Kanem hasn’t opened the bottle.
“How about John-Bosco?” And that’s when Kanem realizes that other men exist.

The next evening, he shows up, Kanem wears a nice dress. She’s stopped cooking, so she offers him a glass of coke with one slice of cucumber, and disappears before he can thank her for it.

***

Kanem’s new lifestyle is expensive and soon she’s out of money. Her gossip gang tells her to find her husband’s bank papers and report to the station so she can receive salaries on his behalf, since he went missing on duty. Finding bank papers is a hassle because Kanem’s husband is frugal with money. So, she employs John-Bosco’s willing hands to search every square inch of the flat.

They empty drawers, upturn cupboards and poke portraits — nothing. As they search the tiny kitchen, Kanem and John-Bosco keep bumping into each other. In the lobby that splits the kitchen from the sitting room is a shelf holding broken wall clocks, bad DVDs, and mostly old things that Kanem’s husband keeps for future re-use. As John-Bosco ransacks it, Kanem remembers she left the potion in there. John-Bosco’s zealous hands sweep down the contents, his hands near the bottle. Kanem lunges forward before he opens it. The shelf loses footing, it’s toppling down Kanem’s head when he pushes her out of the way.

While he investigates the contents of the fallen shelf, Kanem scans for the bottle. As if aware of her search, it rolls itself toward her feet, unbroken but open. At the transparent part of the bottleneck, a miniature human is moving, crawling out. Kanem lets out a scream, John-Bosco checks on her; she sets the bottle right and tells him she’s alright.

Oh! That’s where the husbands of the gossip gang went: to a bottle, while their wives earn salaries on their behalf. She decides she’ll pour so she can have him back, but her fingers hesitate. Then she notices that her wrists are clear of the blisters.
It dawns on Kanem that the last time she was this anxious was the last time her husband was home.

John-Bosco has news: the bank papers are beneath the old shelf. If she lets him out, there’ll be a repeat of the weird thing. The thing where he cuffs her and locks her in a lightless closet, till she confesses she took his money. The weird thing he did the last night he was here.

Kanem sets the bottle straight and locks it, tumbling the small man all the way down. Then she makes two glasses of coke with two big slices of cucumber and sets her husband between the glasses to watch. She sits with John-Bosco for a drink, tugging at his sleeves with each sip. Then she lifts the lid on the big bottle and pours some of her drink in.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m feeding my husband.”
It’s a good joke, so they laugh at it.