Secrets of the Jeweled Flask

Vito Glandell is a fearful man approaching forty with little hope of ever determining his own fate. The overbearing mother he still lives with sees to that, with help from a Catholic priest who has been telling Vito what to do for as long as he can remember.

Then a strange, jewel-encrusted flask comes into Vito’s possession, offering him hope of being lifted from his dreadful existence. But when the gin he sips from the flask renders his whole world gray, Vito loses his job as a paint salesman.

To get his colors back, Vito must complete a series of adventures that begin through a magic portal in the basement of his mother’s house. Aided by the spirit of his long-dead Uncle Frank and three sisters who happen to be witches, he begins. When he enters the fog at the top of the basement stairs, he comes out the other side sharing someone else’s body. He goes back in time to become the bully who beat him up, his mother just after his own birth, and others.

Vito must complete these adventures before the next full moon or one of the witch sisters, the rightful owner of the magic flask, will die. And so might his new love, Lucia.

Along the way, Vito learns important lessons about what others in his life have endured, why his mother has fought so hard to protect him, the value of forgiveness, and just how much better the world is when gray turns into the colors of the rainbow.