The Wish-fairy (by Rune Woodman)
September 12th 2007 10:33
With one last wish I pointed the gun at my temple and wrapped my finger around the trigger. Then the phone rang.
Angered and relieved I picked it up, “Hello?”
“I’ve got one,” hissed a familiar voice.
“Barry…” we had been in school together and remained friends.
“It’s locked in my bathroom. Come over, quick.”
I put the gun on the desk, “I’m on my way.”
It was evening. It was hot. It was wet. My sins walked with me, filling the steamy air, soaking me with their stench.
Barry opened the door, the rattle of a window air-conditioner in his living room wafted out before him on chilled, dry air. “What took you so long?” he let me in, my smell unnoticed.
Only when the door was closed did I dare to ask, “Where is it?”
“Still in the bathroom, come on.” Cautiously I made my way down the hall and cracked open the door to the bathroom. The cool air stayed behind as I entered the room. Thank God I hadn’t pulled the trigger on my gun, the solution to all of my problems sat on the edge of the bath, shabbily dressed in jeans and a green t-shirt.
He was younger than I expected; small, but bigger than I expected. Soft light shone through his eyes.
He stood to greet me. I had no time to be polite and lunged at him with a hard punch to the jaw that sent him to the floor. “There’s something you’ve gotta know – I’m in charge.”
Looking up at me from the floor he showed no anger or malice.
Barry was at my shoulder, “He won’t speak.”
“How do you know he’s for real?”
“He was doing his thing, down in the street, all over the place! People were happy and laughing. I grabbed him and dragged him up here. Kept asking him his name but he wouldn’t answer. Then I called you. Did you see the light in his eyes? He’s real!”
I grabbed the kid by the collar and pulled him up off the floor. “You’ve got a choice mate,” I scrunched down low so my face was level with his and raised my voice – maybe he was deaf, “you can tell us who you are, of your own free will, or I can kick you ‘till your name drops out of your arse.” Barry shut the door; guess he didn’t want the neighbours hearing the screams.
The little guy wasn’t scared, he smiled and his eyes brightened, “You don’t want to who I am,” he had a masculine voice, not what I expected. “You want to know what I am.”
“So what are you?” Barry chimed from behind.
“What do you think I am?” he asked. He was too smug so I punched him in the face, right on the side of the nose.
“Don’t be smart!” I yelled and punched him again for good measure. He didn’t stop smiling. Sweat rolled down my back. Dropping him to the floor I mashed the sole of my shoe to the side of his face and said to Barry, “Leave him. See how smart he is when we come back.” I needed fresh air.
In the living room the rattling air-con cooled my skin. Barry flopped on the saggy sofa and lit a smoke. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said with a puff.
“He looks like a kid.”
“Ask anyone the right questions and they’ll give you the right answers. Get back in there and ruff him up a bit more, he spoke to you, he’s gonna crack!”
Barry understood people better than me. If he thought the kid was going to crack, he was probably right, so I returned to the bathroom alone.
The kid was still sprawled on the floor. I sat on the toilet seat. “I don’t wanna hurt you any more, tell me what you are.”
“I can’t tell you, you’ve got to ask me.”
That was stupid. I wasn’t going to say it out loud. I looked at him. He was a normal kid, a bit of a scruff, but no different from any other teenager - except for his eyes.
With my heart pounding I leant forward, sucked in a long breath and said, “Are you a Wish-fairy?”
He smiled, “Yes, I am.”
Despite the stinking heat a wave of cool washed over me.
“You’ve got to grant me a wish!” it exploded from my mouth before there was time to think it.
He said nothing. A new steamy drizzle of rain pattered on the window.
“You’ve got to do it, right? That’s what you’re about, you grant wishes.”
“What’s your wish?”
“I killed this guy and I wish someone else did it.”
“Why?”
“Barry, out there,” I pointed at the door, “that’s his brother.”
The Fairy winced as he moved to make himself more comfortable. “No,” he said. “I meant, why did you kill him?”
“My boss told me to. He had to die and I didn’t think it’d matter. Someone needed to kill him, and I thought Barry knew about it.”
“So Barry also wishes someone else killed his brother?”
“Jesus no! He doesn’t even know his brother’s dead.” I moved closer to The Fairy, balancing on the edge of the toilet. “He’s just a friend who knew I was in trouble. He saw you on the street and made the most of the opportunity.”
“His brother’s been secretly killed by his best friend and you say you’ve got problems?”
“Yes! I wanted to tell him, I swear I was going to tell him but I couldn’t do it. Instead I told him I was in trouble and he got on the internet and found out about you. I didn’t believe him at first. We’ve known each other a long time, but he’s a Fruit and when he started talking about fairies … well I just went along with it.”
“He’s a fruit?”
“Gay. And that’s the other part of the problem. I felt so sorry for him, because I’d killed his brother. I let him, you know…”
All I got from The Fairy was a blank look, “I know what?”
“He’s been hot for me ever since we were in school. I’ve never done anything with another guy before, EVER. But I guess I let my defences down and next thing we were, um, in bed - together. I’m not gay! That’d be the worst thing – all those girls’ names and herb gardens.”
It was good talking to The Fairy, I figured the more I told him the more likely he would take pity on me and give me my wish.
He said, “You know, your problems didn’t begin when you killed Barry’s brother. You need to look over your whole life, trace your way back to when things really started to go wrong. That’s what you need to wish away. This has got nothing to do with who you killed or screwed.”
Wow, I beat him up and he wants to help me even more! I leant back on the cistern and reviewed my life so far.
“Can you remember the last time things were good?” The Fairy asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “When I was a kid, before my parents split up, before I moved here and started in the new school.”
“So that’s what you should wish for.” He was right.
“OK, here it is. I wish my parents never split up and that I never came to this stinking city.” I closed my eyes in anticipation of everything changing. I expected a white flash of light or something as my past changed and my memories were re-arranged.
Nothing happened. I was still unhappy, my dad was still gone, I’d still killed Barry’s brother and screwed him twice on the very same toilet on which I was sitting.
Angered, I opened my eyes, “Where’s my wish?”
“I can’t grant you your wish,” he smiled.
That didn’t make sense; he just said he was a Wish-fairy. “What-do-you-mean? Are you or aren’t you a Wish-fairy?”
“I am a Wish-fairy, but I can’t grant wishes all over the place just because people ask me to. There are rules.”
I jumped up off the toilet, grabbed his shirt front and lifted him off the floor and yelled, “Barry, get in here!”
Barry poked his head into the room, “Yeah?”
Not taking my eyes from The Fairy I said, “Do you still have your emergency revolver?”
“Sure, it’s under the bed.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.”
“Get it!”
He ran for his bedroom.
“Do you know what I’m going to do with the gun?” I asked The Fairy.
“You’re going to threaten to kill me if I don’t grant you your wish.”
“Oh, so you’re a psychic as well are you?”
Barry returned with the gun, “Here you go.”
Holding The Fairy against the wall with one hand I took the gun in the other and shoved the barrel into his ear.
“So, Mister-psychic-fairy, tell me - are you going to grant me my wish or not?”
“Not,” he answered calmly.
I pushed the gun harder into his ear.
“I can’t grant wishes to people I know, I can only grant wishes to strangers.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s the rule. Wish-fairies have extraordinary power, if we could grant wishes to people we know it might set up a monopoly, we could be corrupted, or enslaved.”
Barry was still behind me, he tittered.
I pointed the gun at him, “Get out!”
He left the room and slammed the door. I let go of The Fairy and returned to the toilet seat. This was a waste of time. Fresh sweat slicked my forehead.
The Fairy whispered, “I would like to try and help.” I raised my head in hope. “But now that I know you, there’s nothing I can do. You’re on your own. Perhaps you should leave town.”
“What good would that do?”
“You could put Barry and all of this behind you.”
“Oh yes, and what about my memory, what about my disgust at what I’ve done to and with Barry? You and suicide are my only hopes.”
“I guess you could still turn that gun on yourself and pull the trigger,” he said with a thin smile.
Barry knocked gently on the door then his voice came muffled, “Let me in, I’ve had an idea.”
Reluctantly I opened the door.
“I’ve been searching on the internet. I think we can work this out!” he was positively beaming at me like he’d won lotto or something.
“Tell me about it.” Breath trickled into my mouth like it was coming through a pillow squashed against my face.
“Apparently, if you kill a Wish-fairy all of its outstanding wishes will come to you.”
I turned to The Fairy for confirmation, “What does that mean?”
He looked uncomfortable, “Not all wishes are happen immediately. I might see someone having a bad day, and wish for them a good day. Months could pass before the wish comes true. Until then the person will have a steady stream of bad days, but I don’t have any control over that.”
“So you see random people walking around the street and you make wishes on their behalf for things they may not want?
‘That’s it,” The Fairy nodded.
“Is it true then,” I began slowly, “that if I kill you all of those outstanding wishes will come to me?”
“Yes. That is true.”
“How many outstanding wishes are there?”
“I couldn’t say, but I give hundreds of wishes a day; could be a lot.”
Barry clapped his hands with excitement. “How wonderful - kill The Fairy!”
Liking the sound of that I pointed the gun at The Fairy again and wrapped my finger around the trigger. “Hang on.” I had doubts. It couldn’t be that easy, “There’s got to be a catch - I get all the wishes but I die immediately. Right?”
“No, as a matter of fact, the person who kills a Wish-fairy will live forever.”
Eternal life with an almost endless supply of wishes was too good an opportunity to think about twice. I pulled the trigger and shot The Fairy square between the eyes.
As I squeezed the trigger, but too late for me to stop, The Fairy opened his mouth and said, “But…” and was dead before another word could come from his mouth.
“But? But!” I gave Barry a panicky look, “What was he going to say?”
“I don’t know,” he stammered.
“Go look it up on the internet! Find out what the ‘but’ is.” He ran from the room and I tried to follow him but an impossible force weighed me down and I couldn’t move. The floor rose to greet me and my face squashed into the dead fairy’s crotch.
Slow moments passed before Barry returned.
“I’m not sure what he was going to say,” he panted at me from the doorway, “but the only thing I can find is that if you come across a fairy who’s granted you a wish the wish will be revoked. If you kill a fairy that has granted you a wish the worst thing in the world, your worst nightmare, will happen.”
I grunted, “The worst thing?”
“Yes, if you’ve been granted a wish then kill the fairy that granted it, you will live forever in a world where the last thing you want to happen will be the thing that happens all the time.”
The weight on my body receded. I reached out to Barry, “Help me up.” He got me to my feet, we stumbled into the living room and collapsed into his sagging sofa.
After we recovered from the events of the evening, Barry and I went to the bathroom with the intention of disposing of the Wish-fairy’s body but it was already gone.
Years have passed. Barry and I are madly in love. We live together in suburbia with our two dogs (Nancy and Louise) and grow herbs in our back yard. I often return to the events of that night but the more I think about it, the harder it is to remember in detail.
Did The Fairy break his own rules and grant me a wish?
Where did all of the unclaimed wishes go?
Was there a fairy at all?
Was I always gay?
Angered and relieved I picked it up, “Hello?”
“I’ve got one,” hissed a familiar voice.
“Barry…” we had been in school together and remained friends.
“It’s locked in my bathroom. Come over, quick.”
I put the gun on the desk, “I’m on my way.”
It was evening. It was hot. It was wet. My sins walked with me, filling the steamy air, soaking me with their stench.
Barry opened the door, the rattle of a window air-conditioner in his living room wafted out before him on chilled, dry air. “What took you so long?” he let me in, my smell unnoticed.
Only when the door was closed did I dare to ask, “Where is it?”
“Still in the bathroom, come on.” Cautiously I made my way down the hall and cracked open the door to the bathroom. The cool air stayed behind as I entered the room. Thank God I hadn’t pulled the trigger on my gun, the solution to all of my problems sat on the edge of the bath, shabbily dressed in jeans and a green t-shirt.
He was younger than I expected; small, but bigger than I expected. Soft light shone through his eyes.
He stood to greet me. I had no time to be polite and lunged at him with a hard punch to the jaw that sent him to the floor. “There’s something you’ve gotta know – I’m in charge.”
Looking up at me from the floor he showed no anger or malice.
Barry was at my shoulder, “He won’t speak.”
“How do you know he’s for real?”
“He was doing his thing, down in the street, all over the place! People were happy and laughing. I grabbed him and dragged him up here. Kept asking him his name but he wouldn’t answer. Then I called you. Did you see the light in his eyes? He’s real!”
I grabbed the kid by the collar and pulled him up off the floor. “You’ve got a choice mate,” I scrunched down low so my face was level with his and raised my voice – maybe he was deaf, “you can tell us who you are, of your own free will, or I can kick you ‘till your name drops out of your arse.” Barry shut the door; guess he didn’t want the neighbours hearing the screams.
The little guy wasn’t scared, he smiled and his eyes brightened, “You don’t want to who I am,” he had a masculine voice, not what I expected. “You want to know what I am.”
“So what are you?” Barry chimed from behind.
“What do you think I am?” he asked. He was too smug so I punched him in the face, right on the side of the nose.
“Don’t be smart!” I yelled and punched him again for good measure. He didn’t stop smiling. Sweat rolled down my back. Dropping him to the floor I mashed the sole of my shoe to the side of his face and said to Barry, “Leave him. See how smart he is when we come back.” I needed fresh air.
In the living room the rattling air-con cooled my skin. Barry flopped on the saggy sofa and lit a smoke. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said with a puff.
“He looks like a kid.”
“Ask anyone the right questions and they’ll give you the right answers. Get back in there and ruff him up a bit more, he spoke to you, he’s gonna crack!”
Barry understood people better than me. If he thought the kid was going to crack, he was probably right, so I returned to the bathroom alone.
The kid was still sprawled on the floor. I sat on the toilet seat. “I don’t wanna hurt you any more, tell me what you are.”
“I can’t tell you, you’ve got to ask me.”
That was stupid. I wasn’t going to say it out loud. I looked at him. He was a normal kid, a bit of a scruff, but no different from any other teenager - except for his eyes.
With my heart pounding I leant forward, sucked in a long breath and said, “Are you a Wish-fairy?”
He smiled, “Yes, I am.”
Despite the stinking heat a wave of cool washed over me.
“You’ve got to grant me a wish!” it exploded from my mouth before there was time to think it.
He said nothing. A new steamy drizzle of rain pattered on the window.
“You’ve got to do it, right? That’s what you’re about, you grant wishes.”
“What’s your wish?”
“I killed this guy and I wish someone else did it.”
“Why?”
“Barry, out there,” I pointed at the door, “that’s his brother.”
The Fairy winced as he moved to make himself more comfortable. “No,” he said. “I meant, why did you kill him?”
“My boss told me to. He had to die and I didn’t think it’d matter. Someone needed to kill him, and I thought Barry knew about it.”
“So Barry also wishes someone else killed his brother?”
“Jesus no! He doesn’t even know his brother’s dead.” I moved closer to The Fairy, balancing on the edge of the toilet. “He’s just a friend who knew I was in trouble. He saw you on the street and made the most of the opportunity.”
“His brother’s been secretly killed by his best friend and you say you’ve got problems?”
“Yes! I wanted to tell him, I swear I was going to tell him but I couldn’t do it. Instead I told him I was in trouble and he got on the internet and found out about you. I didn’t believe him at first. We’ve known each other a long time, but he’s a Fruit and when he started talking about fairies … well I just went along with it.”
“He’s a fruit?”
“Gay. And that’s the other part of the problem. I felt so sorry for him, because I’d killed his brother. I let him, you know…”
All I got from The Fairy was a blank look, “I know what?”
“He’s been hot for me ever since we were in school. I’ve never done anything with another guy before, EVER. But I guess I let my defences down and next thing we were, um, in bed - together. I’m not gay! That’d be the worst thing – all those girls’ names and herb gardens.”
It was good talking to The Fairy, I figured the more I told him the more likely he would take pity on me and give me my wish.
He said, “You know, your problems didn’t begin when you killed Barry’s brother. You need to look over your whole life, trace your way back to when things really started to go wrong. That’s what you need to wish away. This has got nothing to do with who you killed or screwed.”
Wow, I beat him up and he wants to help me even more! I leant back on the cistern and reviewed my life so far.
“Can you remember the last time things were good?” The Fairy asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “When I was a kid, before my parents split up, before I moved here and started in the new school.”
“So that’s what you should wish for.” He was right.
“OK, here it is. I wish my parents never split up and that I never came to this stinking city.” I closed my eyes in anticipation of everything changing. I expected a white flash of light or something as my past changed and my memories were re-arranged.
Nothing happened. I was still unhappy, my dad was still gone, I’d still killed Barry’s brother and screwed him twice on the very same toilet on which I was sitting.
Angered, I opened my eyes, “Where’s my wish?”
“I can’t grant you your wish,” he smiled.
That didn’t make sense; he just said he was a Wish-fairy. “What-do-you-mean? Are you or aren’t you a Wish-fairy?”
“I am a Wish-fairy, but I can’t grant wishes all over the place just because people ask me to. There are rules.”
I jumped up off the toilet, grabbed his shirt front and lifted him off the floor and yelled, “Barry, get in here!”
Barry poked his head into the room, “Yeah?”
Not taking my eyes from The Fairy I said, “Do you still have your emergency revolver?”
“Sure, it’s under the bed.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.”
“Get it!”
He ran for his bedroom.
“Do you know what I’m going to do with the gun?” I asked The Fairy.
“You’re going to threaten to kill me if I don’t grant you your wish.”
“Oh, so you’re a psychic as well are you?”
Barry returned with the gun, “Here you go.”
Holding The Fairy against the wall with one hand I took the gun in the other and shoved the barrel into his ear.
“So, Mister-psychic-fairy, tell me - are you going to grant me my wish or not?”
“Not,” he answered calmly.
I pushed the gun harder into his ear.
“I can’t grant wishes to people I know, I can only grant wishes to strangers.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s the rule. Wish-fairies have extraordinary power, if we could grant wishes to people we know it might set up a monopoly, we could be corrupted, or enslaved.”
Barry was still behind me, he tittered.
I pointed the gun at him, “Get out!”
He left the room and slammed the door. I let go of The Fairy and returned to the toilet seat. This was a waste of time. Fresh sweat slicked my forehead.
The Fairy whispered, “I would like to try and help.” I raised my head in hope. “But now that I know you, there’s nothing I can do. You’re on your own. Perhaps you should leave town.”
“What good would that do?”
“You could put Barry and all of this behind you.”
“Oh yes, and what about my memory, what about my disgust at what I’ve done to and with Barry? You and suicide are my only hopes.”
“I guess you could still turn that gun on yourself and pull the trigger,” he said with a thin smile.
Barry knocked gently on the door then his voice came muffled, “Let me in, I’ve had an idea.”
Reluctantly I opened the door.
“I’ve been searching on the internet. I think we can work this out!” he was positively beaming at me like he’d won lotto or something.
“Tell me about it.” Breath trickled into my mouth like it was coming through a pillow squashed against my face.
“Apparently, if you kill a Wish-fairy all of its outstanding wishes will come to you.”
I turned to The Fairy for confirmation, “What does that mean?”
He looked uncomfortable, “Not all wishes are happen immediately. I might see someone having a bad day, and wish for them a good day. Months could pass before the wish comes true. Until then the person will have a steady stream of bad days, but I don’t have any control over that.”
“So you see random people walking around the street and you make wishes on their behalf for things they may not want?
‘That’s it,” The Fairy nodded.
“Is it true then,” I began slowly, “that if I kill you all of those outstanding wishes will come to me?”
“Yes. That is true.”
“How many outstanding wishes are there?”
“I couldn’t say, but I give hundreds of wishes a day; could be a lot.”
Barry clapped his hands with excitement. “How wonderful - kill The Fairy!”
Liking the sound of that I pointed the gun at The Fairy again and wrapped my finger around the trigger. “Hang on.” I had doubts. It couldn’t be that easy, “There’s got to be a catch - I get all the wishes but I die immediately. Right?”
“No, as a matter of fact, the person who kills a Wish-fairy will live forever.”
Eternal life with an almost endless supply of wishes was too good an opportunity to think about twice. I pulled the trigger and shot The Fairy square between the eyes.
As I squeezed the trigger, but too late for me to stop, The Fairy opened his mouth and said, “But…” and was dead before another word could come from his mouth.
“But? But!” I gave Barry a panicky look, “What was he going to say?”
“I don’t know,” he stammered.
“Go look it up on the internet! Find out what the ‘but’ is.” He ran from the room and I tried to follow him but an impossible force weighed me down and I couldn’t move. The floor rose to greet me and my face squashed into the dead fairy’s crotch.
Slow moments passed before Barry returned.
“I’m not sure what he was going to say,” he panted at me from the doorway, “but the only thing I can find is that if you come across a fairy who’s granted you a wish the wish will be revoked. If you kill a fairy that has granted you a wish the worst thing in the world, your worst nightmare, will happen.”
I grunted, “The worst thing?”
“Yes, if you’ve been granted a wish then kill the fairy that granted it, you will live forever in a world where the last thing you want to happen will be the thing that happens all the time.”
The weight on my body receded. I reached out to Barry, “Help me up.” He got me to my feet, we stumbled into the living room and collapsed into his sagging sofa.
After we recovered from the events of the evening, Barry and I went to the bathroom with the intention of disposing of the Wish-fairy’s body but it was already gone.
Years have passed. Barry and I are madly in love. We live together in suburbia with our two dogs (Nancy and Louise) and grow herbs in our back yard. I often return to the events of that night but the more I think about it, the harder it is to remember in detail.
Did The Fairy break his own rules and grant me a wish?
Where did all of the unclaimed wishes go?
Was there a fairy at all?
Was I always gay?
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