Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories by Susie Bright Page A

the soapy sponge in her hand. She told me she loved me very much, and then she told me to go watch The Amateur Hour with my brother. That evening, my father didn’t come home for supper.
    In the middle of the night, terrible yelling woke me up. My mother and father were having a big fight. I put my thumbs in my ears and my pillow over my head, but I could still hear them.
    The next morning my mother told me we were going on an adventure, a visit to my Aunt Zippy in the Bronx. She sent my brother to spend the day at his friend Bruce’s house.
    When we got on the train at Utica Avenue, my mother started to tell me about Aunt Zippy. I only knew her from weddings and bar mitzvahs. She was an old lady who wore velvet dresses and funny hats on special occasions. Even though she was bent over and had wrinkles on her face, the men buzzed around her. She danced every dance.
    My mother told me that Aunt Zippy’s full name was Zipporah. She was a witch, a real witch with potions and spells. She’d studied with the most famous witch in Lithuania, Hephzibah the Hebrew.
    Aunt Zippy came to America long, long ago. On the day she arrived, she was standing on a street corner trying to hail a livery carriage. She had the address of a Witches Association in Rego Park, Queens. A distinguished gentleman in an elegant carriage pulled by two snow white horses drove up and offered to take her anywhere she wanted to go. It was Diamond Jim Brady. He was captivated by her ravishing looks and brilliant wit and helped her set up shop on the top floor of the Woolworth building. She was quickly successful, drawing her customers from the cream of New York society. The Great Houdini came to drink champagne with her after his magical feats. Boss Tweed, with whom she had a passionate affair, was among her many admirers. Powerful men among her acquaintances helped her make some good investments in real estate.
    Then she fell in love with a musician, a saxophone player named Slim Fats she met at a speakeasy. I knew what a speakeasy was because I had seen The Public Enemy . She soon found out Slim Fats was already deeply in love with someone else—his sister. All Aunt Zippy’s spells and incantations were not strong enough to break that tie. When Slim Fats left her, she went out of her mind and was sick for a long time.
    Eventually Aunt Zippy recovered, only to find she had lost her powers, as witches do when they fall in love. After she spent a miserable year of doing nothing but crossword puzzles, one of her powers came back, that of clairvoyance. She wanted to return to work right away and help women like her who had suffered disappointments in love.
    She moved out of Manhattan to one of her properties, a tenement on Jerome Avenue high on top of a hill in the Bronx. Once again, Aunt Zippy took the top floor with its many windows, because a witch must be able to see the nighttime sky, the moon and the stars. A few phone calls was all it took, and soon she was back in business, women clients only.
    Gradually, Aunt Zippy regained the ability to do simple spells, but she knew that never again could she change herself into a tiny fairy the size of a thumb or fly through the night riding one of the hounds of hell.
    Two huge, battered stone lions stood guard at the door to Aunt Zippy’s building. We ascended six flights of stairs to stand in front of a heavy steel door. The door was flung open before my mother had a chance to knock.
    There was Aunt Zippy. She was wearing a tall, black pointy hat and a long, filmy red negligee. Beneath the flimsy fabric of her negligee I could make out the top of her low-cut black brassiere. Aunt Zippy had amazing cleavage.
    “Darlings,” she cried out. As she stood on tiptoe to embrace my mother, who was only five foot two, I saw that Aunt Zippy’s eyes were yellow, smoldering like the eyes of the tigers in the zoo. She kissed me on both cheeks, then took my head in her hands.
    “You resemble your mother,” she said,