Words for Wednesday - The Answer

  In July Cindi is giving the prompts for Words for Wednesday. They will be published at Elephant's Child's blog. This week's prompt is more to my liking: 

  You have the ability to mentally hear the honest answer to any question just by looking at the person and thinking the question.  It was all fun and games until you looked in the mirror and asked a question you shouldn't have. What was the answer?

  Susan perused the old Bestiary once again. The script was so hard to read, and the instructions so strange and requiring such diverse and exotic ingredients, that she almost did believe most of them to be only speculations, not real spells at all. Like this one, Truthreading: Know the true answer to a question, you think at a person, calling for blood from Robin's breast, dust from the left eye of a peacock, and twelve dew drops from a lady's mantle among other more easily obtainable things.
  To pass the waiting time, Susan looked through the encyclopedia, and discovered that Robin also was a bird, a Peacock a butterfly with eyes on the wings and Lady's mantle a common garden plant, growing in Susan's garden.
  "Maybe I could actually make this potion," Susan thought to herself. "I saw a dead robin in the garden only this morning, it might have some blood left in it still, and butterflies aplenty flock to the butterfly bush." Susan did not stop to think what use she would have for this potion, what Heidi or anybody else at the Unicorn Farm would say to this. She found a pot, the required stirring implements, water, knives and bits and sundry, then she went hunting for a Peacock and dewdrops and the dead bird. All of this went fast and easy, The bird was long dead, but due to the temperate daytime temperatures, a few drops of blood flowed from his chest as Susan made the proper incision. "And now, leave it until the next full moon." Susan consulted her calendar,  it was less than a week hence.
  School, family and friends kept her busy until late Sunday when she remembered the full moon and the potion. She filtered and prepared it. It was only a small mouthful, reddish golden and with a smell reminding her of strawberry flavoured candy straws.
  Next morning on awakening, Susan drank the potion. It also tasted like those candy straws.
  During breakfast she amused herself by thinking at her sister: "What would you really like for breakfast?" Linda's answer - in a tiny replica of her voice in Susan's mind - was unsurprising, toast with liverwurst and a big glass of really cold milk, and a white chocolate bar." Mom wished for the very best coffee with just the right amount of cream, piping hot toast with cold butter and strawberry jam like grandma used to make it. And  a cigarette in peace and quiet after the girls were off. Nothing strange there either.
 When it came to Maths Susan had an easy time being overheard, she just picked the right answers from her teacher's brain. And when Jens came up with some lame excuse for not handing in his homework, Susan 'asked' him the real reason and was 'told' that he had been to the movies, and then his father had found him with the lights still on later trying to catch up, spanked him and put out the lights. Susan felt sorry for him. Susan 'asked' several of her classmates about their favourite candy, least and most favourite school subjects and pets. She was amazed to learn that the quiet and timid Amy wanted to be the owner of a snake, a big one, but not poisonous. Susan remembered her own brush with a snake.

  Linda, her sister, was going to a showing of her guinea pigs, and Susan was told by their Mum to go with her. The showing had involved a parade from one end of the pedestrian street, where the pet shop was, to the other end, where the Town Hall was situated. Susan did not bring her own pet, she had none, and she was there only to keep an eye on Linda. The pet shop owner had called her over and unceremoniously draped a snake round Susan's neck. Susan's first reaction had been terror, but upon unfreezing, she found the snake smooth and warm to the touch, not slimy, cold or nasty. And its eyes were tiny jewels. Susan had tried petting the snake, and it had hissed gently at her, looking at her with its beady eyes wiggling its forked tongue at her and exuding a safe, cosy feeling. It made Susan relax, and she walked all the way to the Town Hall waited out the ceremony there and then walked back again with the snake draped decoratively around her neck, alert but at ease. Watching the world, moving its forked tongue, and for all the world looking smug. Susan had never again been afraid of snakes. 

  And then it was time for lunch. Susan went to the bathrooms to wash her hands. As she looked into the mirror she thought, "And what do I like?" Susan's own tiny voice replied in her ears: "I don't know! I know what I do not want, but never what I want."
  Susan left the bathroom, and went out into her secret place to cry.