A Windy Wish

Ramona Weatherby’s superstitions border on the scientific. Just ask her and she’ll tell you: lucky objects, events, and rituals follow a precise, unyielding order. She doesn’t remember learning these rules; rather, they seem to be some innate, biological knowledge wound tightly through the coils of her DNA. Certainly no one ever sat her down and explained how long you needed to hold your breath before picking up a lucky penny (fifteen seconds) or how many days after its plucking a four-leaf clover retains its good luck (four), she just knew. As surely as she knew her own name, she knew the rules of luck and misfortune, and she has followed them as rigidly as anyone with intimate knowledge of the world’s daily magics would be expected.

No division of luck is more strictly regulated than that of wishes. To the untrained eye, it may seem that wishes are commonplace, something you could stumble upon with hardly a second thought. Birthday candles, eyelashes, shooting stars - the world is rife with wishes, just waiting to be made. Ramona, however, knows the folly of that belief. Wishes, when made correctly, are one of the most powerful forms of luck magic. A lucky shirt, worn inside out and washed only on a full moon, might cast a protective net around your whole day, but it won’t know that you specifically need help on your math test. So even if they have your favorite lunch in the cafeteria that day, and your teacher lets you lead the recess line, and Charlotte Weaver lets you borrow her pink glitter pen, you might still fail your math test, just because the shirt didn’t know.

Ah, but wishes, wishes can be directed. You might not have gotten your favorite lunch, or been the lineleader, or written with Charlotte’s pink pen, but you would have passed your math test. That kind of luck doesn’t come cheap - you have to follow the rules. You must always make the wish with your eyes closed, while holding your breath. You have to hold your breath the whole time you make the wish, which must be repeated in your head three times, so you can’t make it too long. You can’t tell anyone what you wished for, even if they try to guess it. A birthday wish will only come true if you blow out all your candles in one go. A shooting star wish only works if you keep your eyes closed until the star has vanished from view. A dandelion wish, one of the harder wishes and therefore one of the most powerful, requires the wisher to dislodge every dandelion seed in a single puff. At eleven years old, Ramona still hadn’t managed a dandelion wish.

Most of the time, when people mess up a wish, the consequence is nothing more than a missed wish. If you open your eyes to see a single candle still burning around the rim of your cake, it is as if you had never made the wish at all. A missed wish is harmless, a disappointment more than anything. A few wishes, however, can be spoiled, and a spoiled wish is dangerous. Ramona had seen a spoiled wish up close only once, and the consequences were devastating. Last year, at Sarah Henley’s birthday party, Ramona knew she would be wishing that they won their soccer game on Saturday. She hadn’t asked Sarah, and Sarah hadn’t told her, but the game was all Sarah had talked about that week. Sarah wanted to be a soccer player when she grew up, and she took their games very seriously. So they hadn’t broken any wishing rules, but Ramona still knew what Sarah was chanting as she held her breath and closed her eyes behind the ten flaming candles. But then, before she had opened her eyes and set her wish free, tumbling over her pink buttercream frosting and taking the fire with it, Sarah’s little brother leaned over and blew out the candles.

Having your candles blown out by someone else is a sure way to spoil a wish. Nothing missed about it - the wish actually spoils. Sarah’s parents had scolded Kyle and relit Sarah’s candles, but the damage was done. When Saturday came, the team played the worst game of soccer of their young lives. They lost 6-0 to the same team they beat last year, and Sarah was furious. As they were walking off the field that afternoon, just as the girls thought they’d seen the worst of the spoiled wish, Sarah tripped over her untied cleats. She broke her ankle and spent the rest of the season glowering on the bench.

So Ramona knew the cost of a spoiled wish, and she took precautions to avoid it. She made her wishes in private, where no one could steal them or sour them into something wicked. She was careful, diligent. That is, until today, when she was careless. Today, of all days, when she should have been the most meticulous with her wishes, she was careless. Her dad had caught her off guard when he touched his finger to her cheek, pulling back to show her the eyelash he had captured. He usually didn’t like to talk about Ramona’s wishing; it seemed to make him upset, and so Ramona tried not to wish when he could see her. But now suddenly here he was, offering her a wish on a silver platter. She had hesitated at first, afraid he’d ask what she was wishing for, but she needed the luck, and so she closed her eyes, held her breath, and repeated her wish three times before blowing on her father’s outstretched finger.

When she opened her eyes, the eyelash was still there. For a split second, she felt the gentle sting of disappointment - a missed wish. But then she heard the leaves rustle in the trees overhead and felt her hair whip around her face as a gust of wind tore down the sidewalk. When she looked back to her father’s finger, it was empty. He shrugged, as if to say, “Ah well, the wind got it.”

Ramona felt her entire body go cold. Could wind spoil a wish? Surely, if someone else had blown her eyelash from her father’s finger, the wish would be as sour as week-old milk. Did wind count the same way? Why didn’t she know if wind could spoil a wish? She should know this, there had to be a rule about this! Her father had continued down the path toward the bus stop, tugging her hand to drag her along, but Ramona was frozen in place.

Her father stopped and turned back to her, puzzled. “Ramona? Come on, we’ll miss the bus.” Ramona stumbled forward in a daze, her mind riffling through her catalog of luck rules, searching for anything about wind souring a wish.

She boarded the bus numbly, barely noticing the scratchy fabric beneath her legs as she sat down beside her father. She couldn’t believe she had been so careless. For months, she had hoarded every ounce of luck magic she could find, painstakingly shifting through the detritus of each day for every tiny sliver of luck, every wish the same.

Hiding her rituals from her father had been tricky, but she managed, making more wishes over the past seven months than she had in the whole of her life before. Hundreds of wishes, and not one had been spoiled, not one! She’d missed a couple, sure. When she came across a dandelion in her nightly clover hunts, a few straggler seeds always stubbornly attached when she opened her eyes; a ladybug that flew away too soon; a coin that landed in the fountain tail-side up. She was making the maximum thirteen wishes nearly every day, of course she’d missed a few! But what was all that wasted magic now? Surely not even seven months of wishing could undo this final spoiled wish.

Ramona could feel the ugly, oily mass of the spoiled wish rumbling along the road with her, skimming past the windows of the bus, racing them to the hospital. When their stop came into view, she saw the spoiled wish start to slow, to settle itself around the tires and windows. She felt it, thick in her throat, as she stepped off the bus and onto the sidewalk. It gathered around her shoulders, trailing behind her like the train of a gown.

How could her father not see what she had done? She knew he was nervous, and trying to pretend that he wasn’t, but surely he would look up soon and see the twisted magic she had brought into the world. Even if he never saw it, if he never looked at her long enough to see the black clouds that billowed at her elbows, her knees, her ears, he would know. When the doctors came out and talked to them, when they delivered the news that Ramona’s spoiled wish had all but guaranteed, everyone would know it was her fault.

The hospital was a six minute walk from the bus stop. If she slowed down, made it in seven, would that help offset this terrible thing she set in motion? Did she have time to search for clovers before they walked in? Ramona’s father was marching determinedly toward the sliding glass doors of the entrance. Distracted as he was, it was no use trying to delay; at this rate, they’d make it there in four minutes.

A blast of hot air greeted them as they crossed the threshold, the sliding doors ushering them across the lobby. There, leaning across the desk and chatting with the nurse behind the counter, was Ramona’s mom. Even in her scrubs, hair limp and skin greasy from a night shift in this same hospital, her mom was beautiful. Even with her short hair, growing back in uneven chunks that she tried to tame with bobby pins, she looked like a queen. When she saw her daughter and husband, she smiled, and her whole face changed with the motion. Her mother, the kindest person Ramona had ever met, whose smile was the best kind of magic, and Ramona had doomed her.

She could feel the black inkiness of the spoiled curse pulsing with her heartbeats, felt it reach out and caress her mother’s cheek right where her father kissed it. The three of them held hands, her mother in the middle, as they walked toward the elevators and up to the floor where the doctors had her mother’s test results. No one was talking, and the air felt thick with their worry.

Ramona’s father asked if she wanted to wait in the lobby, but her mother said she could come if she wanted. She felt her mother’s fingers tighten around her hand, the only outward sign of her anxiety, and Ramona knew she couldn’t drop her hand. Spoiled wish or no, she would not leave her mother’s side.

And so they walked into Dr. Schreiber's office together, as a family. There were only two chairs in front of the giant wooden desk in the center of the room, and so her father stood behind her mother’s chair, his hands resting on her shoulders, her left on top of his and her right still in Ramona’s. Dr. Schreiber smiled and opened the thick file on his desk. He started talking, but Ramona couldn’t seem to make out any words from the sounds. The spoiled wish was pushing on her head, wiggling in her ears, just waiting to spread through the whole room, through Ramona’s whole life. She tried to hear past its whispering, to read Dr. Schreiber’s lips and make sense of what he was telling them, when a single word made it to her ears: remission.

She gasped. She turned and saw her mother crying. Did she hear him right? But then her father was pulling them both into a hug, and he was crying, but laughing, too, and thanking Dr. Schreiber and kissing her mother’s head. Just like that, Ramona felt the spoiled wish vanish, its darkness dissipating as quickly as it had come. The months of wishing had been enough, her mother’s scans had come back clean. There were no signs of cancer, they had made it through the worst of this.

“Oh look at that,” Dr. Schreiber said, pointing to the clock above the door. “Eleven eleven, make a wish!” Ramona laughed, but she didn’t close her eyes. She had nothing more to wish for.