If Wishes Were Horses...
[WP] For years you’ve done your very best to hide your powers for your loving boyfriend, but it’s getting increasingly hard to do so due to you being a powerful genie, and him having accidentally made a wish that removed the limit on how many wishes he could get from you…
*****
“I’m at the doooooo-oooooooor!” my husband calls in a playful voice.
“Not today, Jack,” I call back from the kitchen. “I’m busy right now.” I’m actually right in the middle of folding in the almond flour for my macaroons and it’s important I don’t let them deflate. Not like last time.
“I’ll saaaaaaaay it,” he teases some more.
“No you won’t if you want to eat something better than microwaved ramen the rest of this month. Just put on your shoes and leave like a normal person!”
“Say, don’t you just wish sometimes that—”
“Agh!” I drop my utensils and rush out of the kitchen. He’s standing by the front door with a shit-eating grin on his face as he watches me barrel towards him. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I slap a hand over his mouth when I reach him. “Not another word, mister!”
He pulls back, cackling with laughter. It becomes his favorite game of keep-away and I can’t help smiling with him even though deep down I dread what he might say next. As usual, I’m forced to play along, letting his strength overwhelm me as he slowly frees himself rather than snapping his handsome little neck like I very well could if I wasn’t careful. “That the drive to work was shorter, so I could spend more time with you!” he finishes.
I put on an overly-shocked expression. He thinks he’s being cute and lovey. And just because he is doesn’t mean a small part of me hates him for this little game he likes to play. “Fine. You win, come here,” I tell him. I place my hands on either cheek and pull him down for a quick kiss.
He makes an exaggerated swoon. “She does love me!”
I pout. “You don’t need a kiss every morning,” I complain.
He gives a few thoughtful nods, pretending to consider my proposal. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. I don’t need a kiss. I want a kiss.” He smiles again and I could swear his eyes sparkle as he looks at me.
I don’t know what I was thinking with the macaroons. I’ve lived a thousand thousand lifetimes and I know my time with Jack will be so brief. “Fine,” I admit with false reluctance, “but you know how I feel about that word.”
“Oh, right, the double-u word.” He pretends to zip his lips closed. “Never again!”
“Liar!”
I roll my eyes. “Just get out of here before you’re late,” I tell him. “If my egg whites deflated I’m going to be cross with you.”
“Love you,” Jack says before leaving.
“Love you, too,” I say back. He waits to hear my response before finally opening the door.
Then I go back to preparing my macaroons. I’m delighted to find they did not noticeably deflate and I put the whole “wish” thing out of my mind. After all, I stopped him before he finished it. I get a tingle in the tips of my fingers as I’m loading the first round of macaroons in the oven. I drop them.
“No!” I shout. “No, no, no!” I look up at the ceiling and try to address the general universe with my immense displeasure. “I stopped him!” I shout. “I put my hand over his mouth and we were laughing and then…” I replay the interaction with Jack in my mind as the tingles in my hand intensify. Soon they will start getting uncomfortable. He’d broken the wish, hadn’t he? But no. He hadn’t. I’d been the only one to say anything. All he’d done before finishing his sentence was laugh a bit. Shit! Now I was going to have to find a way to grant his stupid wish!
He wanted a shorter drive to work. Surely he would notice if the house jumped half a dozen blocks East… I considered my options. It was always best to start small when you were attempting to spoil a wish. I transported our entire house and property exactly three inches to the East. It was no small feat. It was actually just as difficult as moving it significantly further, and in a few ways slightly more difficult if you considered the necessary edits to zoning ordinances to justify an exception to their usual boundary lines for this one particular house. I didn’t do it because it was easier though; I did it because Jack would be less likely to notice anything was amiss.
So when the tingles in my hands continued to grow stronger I was admittedly quite furious. “What do you want from me?” I shouted at the ceiling. “I did what he asked!”
But the tingles could not be reasoned with. They would continue to grow until the terms of my husbands silly little wish were fulfilled. I still didn’t see what a shorter drive had to do with his long-ago with to “love me forever” but those damn tingles were pretty insistent that it met those conditions. I needed to think of my own way to release the wish before the power built up and released on its own. That always tended to lead to disastrous results.
Think, Julia, think! He wished for a shorter drive. Three inches was technically shorter. So why were the terms of the wish still unfulfilled? Nothing came to me so I was forced to cycle through a few different options; I tried swapping our house with our neighbor’s; I tried putting in a roundabout on 4th and Terrel so the traffic would flow better; I even tried doubling the horsepower of his car so he Jack could theoretically make the trip in half the time. All of these options seems like mild enough adjustments that Jack either might not notice them at all or assume he was mistaken if he did. None of them got rid of the tingles, so I reset everything back to baseline.
I left the kitchen in shambles as I went to the living room to lie down. I knew I only had a few more hours to figure out what the missing element of his wish was. The answer came to me some time later while in a half-asleep state. Jacks final words from this morning came back to me. “So I could spend more time with you!”
Time with me! I shot up out of the couch as the realization struck me. Moving the house a few inches or even a block closer to his job wasn’t going to help Jack spend more time with me. Neither was a roundabout or a faster car. But what would? Three words I’d actually heard him complain about a number of times in the last few months:
Work. From. Home.
*****
THE END.