The Most Powerful Wish
What makes a wish?
Combine the thrill of the future with a pinch of hope, the feeling of a good dream woken from too soon and subtract half a cup of disappointment that has been marinated in reality.
You’ll still be no closer to an answer.
A wish is not a recipe, it is not an incantation or an equation, there are no X’s to find because they are not lost. A wish springs fully formed from the depths of a heart too far to fathom, it walks as a giant but whispers softer than the beat of a broken heart.
There is one who believes that the true power of a wish is mileage.
She may arrive by car, touch down at the local air field or tie up at the dock. Nobody can agree on her vehicle: it was a caravan or maybe a truck. Did it have wings or was it and elegant sort of tugboat. All accounts speak of weathered wood and brass, some steel and an engine of the blackest iron.
She smiles only at the children as she walks into town with a pair of leather satchels slung cross her neck and sets up a crude table and the people form a line. Each writes their wish on a scrap of paper in the blue ink she provides and she tucks them away in the satchels until she can hold no more or until the people run out of wishes.
She never reads them. She never makes any promises. Why do the people keep lining up, keep awaiting her arrival?
People of this battered world have stopped praying to god, but faith is a kind of wish, and faith is the hardest thing in the world to kill. A god can be killed, maybe not in an alleyway with a switchblade, but with neglect.
Not a wish.
A wish thrives on being forgotten and grows to fill an empty space, is only powerful in silence.
Nobody has ever seen her feed those scraps of paper into the black iron furnace that powers her vehicle, but for her the power of a wish is the miles it can take you and in this craft of possibility she searches for the most powerful wish of all. She has circled the globe several times, from frost to forest and famine to feast. Salt water and fresh, barren dirt to fertile soil, somewhere, she knows, is the last wish she will ever need, one to burn at the center of her machine like the first star of evening.
But even she does not know everything. If she did, she would know that she has already found what she seeks in every gust of wind that ruffles her hair, when she travels just a little further to see the other side of the next mountain. The most powerful wish is spoken when she navigates by the stars and every time somebody breathlessly tells her that their wish came true.
Every embrace flung around her shoulders, every smile of disappointment.
The most powerful wish already burns at the center of the only furnace that matters: her heart.
