The Shape of a Wish

On the first Monday of every month, Holly cleaned out her desk.

She sharpened pencils she never used, untangled charging cords that belonged to no known device, and threw away sticky notes with cryptic messages like “Call Ladonte???” and “DON’T FORGET THE THING.”

At the very back of the bottom drawer, beneath an expired passport and a fossilized granola bar, she found a notebook.

It was small, bound in dark blue cloth, with no title on the cover. The pages were thick and cream-colored, and on the first page, in her own handwriting, were the words-

Be careful what you write.

Holly stared.

“I hate when Past Me gets dramatic,” she muttered.

She had no memory of buying it. No memory of writing that warning. But it was undeniably hers, right down to the slanted H.

She flipped to the next page. Blank.

“Okay,” she said to no one. “Very Blair Witch.”

She was already late for work, so she shoved the notebook into her bag and forgot about it until lunch, when her boss, Bob, leaned over her cubicle wall like a gargoyle in a tie.

“Status on the Cuban account?”

“Almost done.”

“It was due yesterday.”

“Time is a social construct.”

“Employment is a legal construct,” he replied. “Three o’clock.”

He vanished.

Holly sighed, pulled out the notebook, and without really thinking, wrote-

I wish Bob would disappear.

The ink looked unusually dark, almost wetly black.

She blinked.

Then the fire alarm went off.

Everyone in the office groaned and stood up in the slow, resentful way of people who assume all emergencies are inconveniences.

Outside, standing in the parking lot under a weak October sun, Holly learned that Bob had, in fact, disappeared.

Not metaphorically.

He’d gone to the bathroom on the third floor and simply never come back. Security footage showed him entering. No footage showed him leaving.

By five o’clock, police were involved.

By six, Holly was sitting in her apartment, staring at the notebook like it had grown teeth.

“No,” she said.

The notebook remained offensively silent.

“No. Absolutely not. That is ridiculous. I am an adult woman. I pay taxes. Magic notebooks are not—”

She opened to a fresh page and wrote, with deliberate sarcasm-

I will receive ten million dollars tomorrow.

She slammed it shut.

“Let’s test your stupid haunted nonsense.”

The next morning, her Aunt Mollie called.

“Holly, sweetheart, are you sitting down?”

“No, but I can lie if needed.”

“Your great-uncle Daymond passed.”

“Oh. God. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well. He was ninety-eight and believed vegetables were communist propaganda, so it was time.”

Holly smiled despite herself.

“There’s more,” Mollie said. “Apparently, he left you ten million dollars.”

Holly stopped smiling.

“What?”

“He won the lottery in 1997 and became impossible. You were the only relative who still sent Christmas cards.”

Holly sat very, very slowly.

After the call, she opened the notebook again.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I would like to renegotiate our relationship.”

She tested it carefully after that.

I want my neighbor’s dog to stop barking.

The dog stopped barking because it learned to howl.

I need a vacation.

She got one when a pipe burst in the office and the building closed for mold remediation.

I want Kevin to notice me.

Kevin, the beautiful barista with tragic cheekbones, noticed her because she tripped into his tip jar and broke her wrist.

“Wow,” he said, helping her up. “You really committed to the meet-cute.”

“I like to make an entrance.”

He laughed. She got his number. Her arm was in a cast for six weeks.

Technically, success.

Holly learned the rules.

The notebook granted exactly what she wrote, but with the personality of a smug genie and the ethics of a raccoon.

Precision mattered.

She became careful.

Not “I want to be happy.”

Too vague.

Instead-

Tomorrow, I will feel calm while drinking good coffee in clean sheets with no urgent emails.

That worked beautifully.

She started using it for small things. Safe things.

Better sleep. Found parking. Avoiding flu season.

Never love. Never health. Never death.

She wasn’t stupid.

And for a while, life became strangely manageable.

Then her mother called.

“Holly,” she said, voice too bright, which was always a bad sign. “Don’t worry, but I’m at the hospital.”

Every part of Holly went cold.

“What happened?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Mom.”

There was a pause.

“They found something on the scan.”

The tests took two weeks.

Holly spent those two weeks carrying the notebook like a bomb.

She didn’t write.

She cooked meals her mother barely touched. She sat in waiting rooms with magazines from 2019. She learned that hospitals had a smell made of bleach and fear.

And then the doctor said the word.

Cancer.

Early, but aggressive.

Treatable, but not simple.

Her mother nodded like she was being told about weather.

Holly nodded like if she stopped, she would shatter.

That night, she sat at her kitchen table with the notebook open.

Rain tapped the windows.

She held the pen above the page for an hour.

There had to be a perfect sentence. A loophole-proof wish. A combination of words that could force the universe into mercy.

Finally, she wrote-

My mother will be completely healthy and live a long, joyful life.

Her hand shook.

She waited.

Nothing happened.

No thunder. No eerie wind. No ghostly whisper.

Just rain.

For three days, nothing changed.

Then her mother called.

“I have news.”

Holly gripped the phone.

“The doctor says they mixed up my scans.”

Silence.

“They what?”

“There was another Emily Strauss. Same birth month. Can you believe that? Mine were clean. Completely clean.”

Holly sat down on the floor.

She laughed once, a broken, startled sound.

“Oh my God.”

“I know. Though apparently the other Emily is furious, understandably.”

Relief flooded in so hard it hurt.

It worked.

It actually worked.

Then her mother said, softly, “There’s something else.”

Holly's stomach dropped.

“I’m tired, honey. Tired in a way that has nothing to do with hospitals. I think…” She exhaled. “I think I’ve been waiting to be sick to admit I don’t want this life anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m leaving your father.”

Holly blinked.

“He doesn’t know how to love anything he can’t control. I’ve known that for thirty years. I think I’d like the next thirty to be joyful.”

Rain ticked against the glass.

The wish.

Completely healthy. A long, joyful life.

Not the way Holly intended.

But maybe the way it was needed.

A month later, her mother rented a tiny yellow house near the coast and bought herself an absurd sunhat. She sounded younger on the phone.

Her father sent long texts with too much punctuation.

Holly ignored most of them.

She kept the notebook, but used it less.

Some things, she realized, should not be edited like bad email drafts.

Some things had to unfold ugly and uncertain and real.

One Friday evening, Kevin sat across from her at dinner, stirring pasta and pretending not to be nervous.

“I need to ask you something,” he said.

“That sounds ominous.”

“It is if you hate it.”

He took a breath.

“I want to move to Seattle. My sister had the baby, and I want to be there. And I…” He smiled, small and terrified. “I want you to come with me.”

Holly looked at him.

At the candle between them. At the cheap red-checkered tablecloth. At the man she liked more every day because he was kind to waiters and called his grandmother every Sunday and once cried over a documentary about octopuses.

In her bag, the notebook waited.

She could write it.

Everything will work out.

She could force certainty.

She could build herself a perfect answer.

Instead, she reached into her bag, pulled out the notebook, and walked it to the restaurant’s tiny bathroom.

She tore out every page.

Every blank one.

Every dangerous possibility.

She dropped them into the trash.

When she came back, Kevin looked up.

“Well?”

Holly sat down.

“I have absolutely no idea,” she said. “Which is horrifying, because I usually like pretending I do.”

He laughed nervously.

She reached across the table and took his hand.

“But I’d like to find out.”

No magic.

No guarantees.

Just that.

And for the first time in a long while, it felt like enough.