The Wish Artist
by Stephan James
The little bell above the doorway tinkles as she enters my parlor. Immediately I recognize the signs: clothes rumpled, eyes sunken and dark, fingernails picked to the quick. She’s desperate.
“Help you?” I ask.
“I need one,” she says, and I don’t even bother with the charade of asking one of what. Those in her situation only ever want one thing — to survive — and so they’ve followed the rumors of the magic that might live here.
I nod at the half-finished yin-yang symbol on the man’s shoulder blade between my fingers. “Let me finish up with this one first.” I gesture with my iron towards the OPEN sign in the window. She sits on the dumpy chair and puts her feet on the small glass table, piled with books stuffed with pictures from my portfolio, then reaches back to flip the sign to CLOSED. Smart girl.
Twenty minutes later we’re in the secret room, and she’s settling into the chair that only gets used about three, maybe four times a year. “You ever done this before?” I ask.
She shakes her head, and I grab a tiny card. I point out the rules as she nods along. One: tattoos are permanent, so she’d better be certain of what she’s wishing for.
Two: everyone will know because I will not ink hidden spaces with this gun. If you really need it, you’ve got to own up to the fact that you couldn’t get whatever it is on your own.
She’s still in the chair. So far, so good. Unfortunately the third is usually where I lose them.
“Three. I don’t have the power of life and death.”
When she hears the last, her face falls. “Damn,” she whispers, then buries her head in her hands. That’s when I see fresh bruises on the back of her arms and their fading replicas at the base of her neck.
“Listen,” I say, “one of the other guys may be able to pull a string or two. Some of them have different arrangements.” If I’d known what it would really cost, I would never have made the deal. What you value most in this world, the genie had said. And to a stupid twenty-something deadbeat looking to score some kind of metaphysical power and finally give himself some purpose, what else might he imagine being more valuable than a car? I couldn’t have imagined how wrong that was.
“If you need a recommendation — ”
She cuts me off with a wave of her hand. “No, it was a dumb idea anyway.” She takes a deep breath and seems to steel herself against the world. “I was stupid to even get with him in the first place. I guess this is what I deserve?” She tries to stand, tries to laugh, but her legs are weak and the sound is even weaker. She reminds me of a newborn kitten: helpless, scared.
“Hey,” I say, “tell me about it anyway. There may be something I can do.”
She raises her eyebrows, skeptical, then sits back down. I flash back to the image of myself on the therapist’s couch, seething with anger. Pissed off that no matter how many times I tried, I could never bring my mother back. “Magic doesn’t work like that,” they had told me, and I hated them for that. It was true, but being true doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
“It’s my ex,” she says. “Well, my boyfriend, but I want to break up. He says I’m the best thing to ever happen to him. That it would destroy him if I ever left.” She takes in a shuddering breath. “That he would find me and destroy me.”
I put a soft hand on her shoulder, initiating a flinch. “Looks like he’s already working on that.”
She nods. “You can’t bend the rules just this once?”
I hold up my arm, covered from wrist to shoulder with a thousand variations of I wish my mother were alive again. A thousand futile endeavors. A thousand wishes I couldn’t fulfill. “I don’t make the rules.” She looks ready to cry. “But I think I know how to get around them.”
She sits up straighter and finally looks me in the eye, color and life seeping into her face. “You can?”
I nod and start to gather my supplies. “This might sting a little.”
An hour later she’s tinkling the bell above my door again, this time on her way out. Her back is straight, her step proud. And my soul is glad, even if I recognize it will only last a few minutes.
I know that she will eventually get tired of the questions, but it comes with the territory. I’ve given her a butterfly on her left wrist so that she’ll have something she can point to and change the subject. And I know it will confuse her, too, to wake up every day with an unanswerable riddle permanently marking her body. But it’s better this way. Even if she does not know why her right forearm reads, in stark black lines, I wish that I could forget knowing Jackson K, and he could forget ever knowing me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephan James lives in Missouri with several children, several pets, and several works in progress. His stories have appeared at 101Words, Every Day Fiction, and Altered Reality. Find more of him at www.stephanjameswrites.com.
