Satan's Dollar Store & other stories

Wish World

"I knew everything about him," Marcus said, "but I didn't know that."

He paused for a moment, but one that soon turned into an awkward silence. Marcus was seated at the head of a long gray Formica-topped table in the "free morning breakfast nook" of the Coastside Residence Suites. Gathered around him were the eleven official members of the Anti-Wish Brigade, who were in the midst of their fourteenth annual convention. Before Marcus had entered the room only minutes earlier, the membership was busy microwaving popcorn and gulping coffee while milling about waiting for August March to take control of the situation. They weren't much of a group, to tell the truth, hardly worth gathering once let alone annually, but each year on the second Saturday in January, they duly made their way to that drab half-deserted motel to compare notes and swap stories. Most of them were simply fed up with the phenomenon known as "The Sparkles", the mysterious but commonplace way that people's deepest wishes were arbitrarily granted to them willy-nilly by some unknown universal agency. Some of the members of the Brigade had a suspicion that life wasn't meant to be lived this way, yet this is how it was. Everyone in the whole world was unconditionally guaranteed to have one of their most precious wishes granted to them at least once in their lifetime. Of course, you could never know which wish it would be, or when or where this granting might occur, but everyone could see it happening all around them all the time. A person would suddenly be surrounded by The Sparkles, which were brightly colored flashing lights that lit up all around the body, sometimes accompanied by sickly sweety tinkly noises, but more often mute, but in any case there they were, The Sparkles, and within thirty seconds of that flashy showiness, the person so be-sparkled would be gone, in a twinkling you might say, just like that, just gone, their life irrevocably changed forever. You could never knew where they'd get to, at least not right away, and it was the custom to let them go, but there were some who defied the norms. They investigated. They pursued. Sometimes they got lucky. Usually they merely grumbled their disapproval of the whole scam, and these were the members of the Anti-Wish Brigade. They didn't like it, not one bit, but they were just the bitter few. Most everyone in the world was quite happy to go along with. After all, who didn't want their dreams to come true?

Marcus had been one of those. They'd all been among them at one time or another, even August March, who took advantage of the silence to look around the room at the meager collection of would-be dream-destroying avengers. He was the oldest at sixty seven years old and quite certain, although he couldn't begin to prove it, that the world had not always been like this. He claimed to have memories of a childhood in a world where people only hoped and prayed that their dreams would come true. It was probably his own dream, otherwise history and especially literature would have reflected such a world, would have left traces. Such a truth could not be so thoroughly covered up, could it? Even August was not so paranoid as to believe in a conspiracy as vast as that, but still he had his doubts, as did Veronica Pierce, the next oldest at sixty one. She said she'd originally come from a completely different continent entirely, across a vast ocean no less, when it was quite well known that there is only one Gaia and has always been only one, surrounded by the deep vast Oceania with no other land masses out there. Ships have sailed and proved it conclusively, at least those that returned. Makima Dukat was the other elder among the eleven, a pink-toned, pink-eyed, gray haired giantess known to have traveled on foot from one side of the land mass to the other in all directions in her day. She spoke the loudest, if not the most frequently, and it was she who prompted Marcus to continue.

"No one knows anyone's darkest secret," she said, "not even their own. That's why no one can guess where The Sparkles will take them."

"But it turned out he did know, all along," said Marcus. "He knew it in his heart, if not his mind."

"Then you did find him?" Dolly asked. Dolly Parker, at fifteen, was the youngest in the cabal, attending only her second convention. She seemed to have the great gift of forgetfulness, so that every story was new to her no matter how many times she had heard it. The other members liked that very much about Dolly. They all had their stories, their own very personal reasons for joining the group, and were always happy to tell their tales to whomever was willing to listen.