Want for Nothing

[Synthetic-Rose]

“I wish you’d just understand.”
I did understand. Sandra was having a rough day, as usual. John, our boss, wasn’t helping her set up the boutique, even though it was just the three of us. He’d just finished mentioning her slow pace as he’d sauntered by us, and Sandra was taking to heart like always.
Sandra’s task was to dress the displays, and she was nowhere near finished. It was her problem; not mine. I understood her perfectly; I just didn’t care.

“Would you hurry up? My God, we’re opening in ten minutes and you still don’t have these mannequins dressed! We go through this every week Sandra, get going!” he groused irritably as he passed us by.

Sandra rolled her eyes when she was sure he wasn’t looking. “Why doesn’t he ever yell at you for not having the mannequins dressed by the time we open? Besides, this would go so much faster if he actually helped…”
I didn’t say anything as we continued to work. I mean, it wasn’t like John had explicitly called her out or anything, so I wasn’t going to stick my nose into the mix of things.
By the time our fearless leader unlocked the front door and opened the store, Sandra still wasn’t finished with her task. I loitered near the front window as John slithered up behind her; seemingly stalking the poor girl like a lioness stalks her prey; his shoulders hunched forward, steps silent and deliberate – it wasn’t a stretch to assume Sandra would be getting a verbal beating.

“What is taking you so long? Get up and move over; this should have been done fifteen minutes ago. Go help Jennifer at the window if you’re going to be this slow,” he stated in a slightly sarcastic tone. I was more than just a little perplexed when that was all he said to her as he lightly shoved her to the side and actually began working himself for once.
Sandra, despite his passive aggressive behavior, looked as though tears were beginning to form in the corners of her eyes as she walked over to me; her hazel orbs looking darker, almost chestnut as she approached. She was a sweet girl, but she really needed thicker skin.

“I wish he’d just zip his frickin’ lips shut and lose the darn key,” she whispered darkly, almost hissing the words when she reached me. Sandra didn’t swear; the different substitutes she’d come up with were both endearing and annoying all in one. I was almost disappointed with the lack of originality this time around.
That was when our day really, truly began. Sandra heard a noise and turned just in time to have John grip her shoulders and start shaking her violently; her head whipping back and forth like a bobble head on an old jerky roller coaster. He was making incoherent noises, and both Sandra and I realized why when he stopped shaking her enough for her head to stop spinning. His lips were, quite literally, zipped close. On the right side of his face there was a closed lock, and the key was nowhere to be seen.
Sandra screamed. The image was just too much for her to take in; John’s lips appeared to be fastened to metal teeth that hooked together, and whenever he tried to open his mouth they would pull and bleed. It was almost like they were sewn on; stitched by some dark humored deranged doll-maker with nothing better to do but torture his creations.
Sandra’s screaming caused John to panic anew, and the door to his little shop flew open to him once more shaking the living daylights out of her. A man from the sidewalk ran in and pulled John away from Sandra, thinking him to be some crazy guy from the street. His wife, girlfriend, lover, or whatever she was followed in after him, and started screaming when she saw John’s face. It was rather cliché, actually.
The woman called the police after she calmed down a smidge, and by the time the rather confused officers arrived at our shop, it had turned into a tourist attraction for all the Sunday shoppers crowded at our window.
I was invisible as Sandra was interviewed, and was completely ignored when John was taken to the hospital. I didn’t mind though.
The police mentioned something interesting before they left Sandra and me nearly an hour later; they said that the call to our store had been their fourth mysterious happening that morning. They received another radio call right as they left; some little girl was allegedly flying in circles over her back yard.
Sandra and I stayed and kept the boutique open; the obsidian headed train-wreck stayed because she was too shaken to deviate from her daily routine, and I stayed because I simply did. Sandra sat with me in the front window, and we watched the televisions in the RadioShack display across the street from us. Sandra needed the company, and I didn’t complain.
The televisions were set to a local channel, and soon the only thing playing was the news.
There was a story about the flying girl first, but then more and more odd occurrences flooded the screens. There was one about a man who suddenly inherited over ten million dollars from some obscure relative he didn’t even know existed. There was another about how Cleopatra’s missing tomb was discovered in Egypt, another about a little boy who’d been chased by a monster supposedly from a Goosebumps book, and still another about a three month old baby who had come back to life after drowning in her bath while her sitter was on the phone.

Sandra’s eyes were glued to the televisions as she spoke. “Jennifer…what is going on? I don’t get it,” she uttered, after flapping her jaw silently for a moment. I didn’t answer. I didn’t have one to give.
Suddenly, past our window flew a lithe crimson dragon, at least as long as a bus and as wide in the gut as one too. Sandra screamed and ducked under the window, but I didn’t move. It had flown right down the street, and didn’t look to be coming back around.
My jumpy companion peered back over the ledge out the window in time to see a stereotypical knight in shiny steel armor ride down the street on a snow white stallion, presumably chasing down the flying lizard that had only just preceded it.

The poor girl only shook her head in thunder-struck awe as money began raining from the sky above. “I know you don’t care Jennifer, but this is so bizarre…”
She was right, of course; I didn’t care in the least. My eyes were glued to the televisions across the street again. There was a reporter speaking with the British Prime Minister, and according to the captions at the bottom of the informative screens, he’d just lost ‘The Game’, whatever that was.

Sandra held her head in her hands and moaned. “I wish the people running around out there would just pick up some of that money flying around and come and buy something here; that way I could focus on something normal…”
The boutique was flooded with customers within seconds. Sandra yelped in shock as they all rushed in, but made haste in getting to the register when she saw that they were looking to buy. At least John wouldn’t be able to call her lazy when he got back from getting his zipper removed.
About an hour later, business was still booming. I was glued to the RadioShack display once more, trying to figure out exactly what was happening. Every time Sandra had made a wish, it had come true. Could that explain what was happening all over the world? Were the strange occurrences…wishes?

“I wish I had time for a ten minute break.” Boom, Sandra’s wish came true. Again. Our little shop was suddenly empty, and even though Sandra looked relieved, I had a feeling things would pick up again in about ten minutes.

“Huh, would you look at that,” Sandra muttered as she walked up behind me to rest in the front window, “All of the banks in China are reporting missing money...do you think there’s a glitch in their computer systems? I mean, how does every single bank in a country suddenly notice that all of their funds are gone?” I stared at the money-rain still falling outside, and I had a pretty good idea. I idly wondered of some guy had put on his blue jeans this morning and noticed a zipper missing too.
I could have rolled my eyes when a kid walked by with his mother, playing in the falling money. He had the audacity to say something relevant to his age when his mother told him to stop.

“I wish it would rain cats and dogs instead of money; you’d let me keep one of those!”
At this point, I think if I could have screamed, I would have out of reflex. As it was, Sandra, the little boy, and his mother did enough screaming for twenty me’s when the money stopped falling and cats and dogs of varying shapes and sizes started.
It was a massacre. Little Chihuahuas splattered on the sidewalk, Siamese kittens crashed through car windshields, Dobermans were impaled on streetlamps, while Russian Blues knocked everyone too slow to get under a roof out cold.
Sandra, in the first display of bravery I’d ever seen from her, ran out the shop door to grab the boy and his mother and pull them inside. She’d managed to usher the traumatized child in, but was unable to save his mother. When Sandra made to push her inside, a collie landed on her, sending her body forcefully to the concrete; the dog still on top.
I don’t think either Sandra or the kid would ever look at ‘Lassie’ the same way again.
They sat there, on the floor just inside the door. Sandra had slammed it shut so that the little guy didn’t have to see his mother’s innards mixed with a dog’s on the street. She had him in her lap, and they were both crying, serenaded by the heavy howls, mews, barks, hisses, and the tell-tale sounds of flesh splattering and bones breaking against a hard surface.

“I-I wi-wish it’d stop…” the boy sobbed between primal screams of anguish. I think I should have tried to coax Sandra into getting him to wish for something specific; because the slaughter continued outside despite his heartfelt desire.

Sandra and I never were on the same wavelength. “I wish it would stop raining, forever…” she cried brokenly, desperately wanting it all to end. I couldn’t blame her, but her wish made me think of a barren and completely desert infested future; unless someone had the sense to wish for rain at some point.
At least the falling animals had stopped. I think this was when Sandra had her big epiphany, because her eyes got really huge when she noticed the sun shining and the dead silence outside. She moved her mouth, as if trying to form words, but no sound came out. After a minute or so of this, her face became stone; her jaw was squared, her eyes empty and emotionless, and all her color drained.
Yeah, she’d figured it out.

“So,” she began, trying to act normally, “how old are you little guy?” The boy was still crying, but he managed to answer her.

“I-I’m six and a half…” Sandra stroked his hair, trying to help calm him as she tried to come up with a plan.

“And what’s your name?” The kid burrowed his face into her shoulder, needing comfort, and for someone to make it all better. Sandra had the heart for the task, but not the brains.

“I’m John.”
Sandra looked like she was about to break. Not only did she now realize what was happening, but she’d also realized that she was the one who’d hurt our John earlier. Come to think of it, why didn’t she figure it out sooner? I mean, how else would one explain our boss suddenly having a zipper sewn to his lips with a lock at one end? Honestly, it should have struck both of us sooner.

“Oh God…” Sandra choked, and she cradled the boy tighter to her, needing to hold him as much as he needed to be held.

After nearly forty-five minutes of clutching one another like an oyster its pearl, Sandra pulled away and pointed to me. “Go sit next to Jennifer for a moment, would you? I need to go make a phone call. Our boss had to go to the hospital earlier and I want to see how he’s doing, okay?” Little John nodded, and Sandra stood up. She swiftly made her way to my window, ignoring me, and lowering the blinds. She turned them so that it’d be impossible to see outside unless someone was exceptionally curious, and then motioned LJ over. Once he was situated next to me comfortably, she knelt down in front of him.

“Now, I need you to make me a very big promise. I need you to promise me not to make any wishes, okay? It’s really important,” she stated pointedly. LJ blinked back tears, remembering the last wish he’d made, and nodded.

“I won’t.”
Sandra was apparently alright with his commitment, for she stood up and walked back towards the other end of the store, where the offices and bathrooms were. LJ leaned against me, needing comfort still, and I offered it to the best of my ability.
Then, about five minutes later, I fell.
LJ yelped when I landed on him, and after a moment’s worth of struggling, I was able to roll to the side. After uneasily sitting up, I examined my legs, moving them this way and that to see what was wrong with them.
Then a strange feeling came over me, and I stood up with much effort. I motioned for LJ to remain where he was, and carefully, painstakingly slowly, made my way to the back where Sandra had gone. Something was off.
When I reached the back, I had to go through an empty bathroom and the break room before I managed to locate her in John’s office.
Sandra was laying, face down, on the floor, John’s office phone in her hand.

“Sandra!? You *****! Did you hear me?! I wish you’d ****ing die! When I get outta here I’m gonna ****ing kill you!” It seemed someone at the hospital had managed to unlock John’s zipper lips, for he was screaming through the phone effectively enough. The damage had already been done, so I carefully bent over and took the phone out of Sandra’s hand. I hung the unlikely murder weapon up on the receiver on John’s desk.
I knelt down carefully to check for Sandra’s pulse, in an attempt to confirm my suspicions, but felt nothing. Then I rolled my eyes, an odd sensation to be sure, and stood back up. Of course I wouldn’t feel anything; what did I think I was, a doctor?
She was most definitely dead though. She wasn’t breathing, and when I nudged her with my foot nothing happened. At least, her being dead would explain what had happened, in a weird sort of way.
After locking the office from the inside and shutting the door so that LJ wouldn’t find dead Sandra if he decided to explore the store, I made my way back to the boy with a little more ease. When I sat down next to him at the window ledge, he looked at me critically.

“Why are you moving…Jennifer, right?” he asked, thoroughly confused. I lied as I looked down at my plastic hands, bending and flexing my fingers experimentally.

“I have no idea.”
LJ and I called his house, trying to get hold of his father to let him know where to pick up the boy, but there was no one home. LJ didn’t know any of his neighbors’ phone numbers, which was made more difficult for us when I found a phone book, since he also didn’t know any of their last names.
We tried 9-1-1, something else Sandra had been too distraught to think of before she was wished dead by our vengeful employer, but the police and paramedics were too busy dealing with injured people in the city to deal with dead ones and a little boy stuck with a walking, talking mannequin. Poor kid was stuck with me, and I honestly didn’t care about him, so it was a pity.

“Jennifer, do any of the other fake people have names?” I shook my head.

“No, Sandra only named me, for some reason. Our boss, John, started using my name to frustrate her after he heard her talk to me once.” LJ pouted.

“But you weren’t real then, so why did she talk to you?” he questioned curiously. I shrugged.

“Maybe she just needed someone to talk to back then. I don’t know why she picked me to start pouring her life story and all her grief out to, but she did.”

LJ curled up in a ball and put his head in my plastic lap, something I hadn’t expected. “Jennifer, how come all this bad stuff is happening? Do you know?” I remembered seeing Sandra run her fingers through LJ’s hair when he was nearly hysterical earlier, and I imitated the motion, thinking he may be needing comfort again.

“Wishes; people are making wishes and they are coming true for some reason. But when a wish comes true, something else happens. When someone wished it would rain money earlier, a country on the other side of the world lost all of the money in all of its banks, for example. The means to make each wish happen seem to be coming from somewhere else,” I explained, piecing together the little knowledge I’d gleaned from watching the news across the street all morning and most of the afternoon thus far. If I was indeed on the right train of logic, then perhaps my new ‘life’ was caused by Sandra’s death. Life had been extinguished in one thing, and ignited in another.
I wondered absently if someone had been made dumb when Sandra had wished for my understanding that morning.

LJ’s eyes welled with tears then. “So, all those animals out there…all the ones I wished would rain…they belonged to people? They were pets?” he asked, his heart breaking in his eyes. No, he would most certainly never see Lassie the same way again.

“Most likely,” I admitted, not feeling shame in being so blunt, “they had to come from somewhere.”
LJ stayed there a long time, silent. I continued to run my plastic fingers through his hair; he appeared calmed by the human gesture of comfort, so I decided it was a ‘good’ thing to do. It was something Sandra had done; after all, even if she didn’t have the brains to soothe the boy, she did have the heart, and that was what I was lacking.

Finally, he spoke once more. “Jennifer, if I wished my Momma back to life, do you think someone else would have to die?” I nodded immediately.

“If I’m correct, then yes, someone else would have to die for her to live.” LJ gripped the pants I’d been modeling all day tightly as tears streamed down his puffy cheeks.

“Then…then I’m not gonna wish her alive again. It’d be mean if someone else’s momma died because I wanted mine.” I didn’t reply; I didn’t have a good concept of what was bad or mean, unless I counted our boss John, but I wasn’t sure if he was mean or if Sandra had just been too easily flustered. But then again, he had wished her dead.
We sat like that for a while before a loud noise resounded in the little boutique. I carefully peeled LJ off of my lap and crept over to the blinds. I peeked through them, mindful that seeing all the death would most likely be ‘bad’ for LJ.
Buildings were disappearing, as were the streets and signs. Green things began growing, taking their place, and I sighed a breathless sigh as I got off the window and pulled LJ into my arms, being sure to push his head down against my shoulder and shield his eyes as I was positive Sandra would have done.
When the boutique disappeared, everything inside it remained. Only the building vanished. Concrete turned to fertile dirt, trees began growing, and grass, and wildflowers as well. Someone, somewhere, must have wished for urbanization to reverse.
No, that guess was wrong. I was still there, after all, as were many other items that had been mass produced somewhere and were unnatural. The wish must have been on the environment itself, or some other wish of the like.
So intrigued by my new surroundings as I was, I didn’t notice LJ lift his head and look around. I didn’t notice until I heard him crying. I turned to see what he’d seen, and saw for the first time to full scope of his mother’s dead body beneath the would-be Lassie. If I were human, I knew I’d have been weeping as well.
The dead were everywhere, even more than I remembered seeing before Sandra had shut the blinds of my window. Animals and people alike; all dead, and all around us.
Then we heard the first sickening plop. It seemed that whatever was delegating how to grant these wishes, it had a morbid sense of humor. Humans fell from the sky where their buildings had been. Some from second story heights, some from tenth, and some from fiftieth stories into the sky; they fell. LJ screamed, his cries of fear and emotional agony so great I, who felt nothing, very nearly did the same thing. I clutched him to me as Sandra had, knowing that not only would LJ never again want to see Lassie, but he would never even desire to see period. What child would desire to observe the corpses of animals and humans littering what was once streets and buildings? From my very little experience with them, none would.
It turned out I was right. As the last of the corpses dropped around us, LJ gripped my chiffon shirt so tightly I thought he’d tear it. He howled, and screamed, and cried, as I was certain any child probably would. And then he yelled.

“I wish there were never any more wishes!”
I stroked his head lightly, knowing the futility of it even as I continued the mindless gesture. I walked him over to his mother’s body silently, and pondered my day. My first real day existing, as far as I was concerned.
I laid LJ’s body next to his mother’s, thinking he would have wanted to be close to her. I saw a bird twittering in a tree where the Doberman had been impaled, and nodded to it knowingly.
LJ, and the over six billion other humans in the world, died that day. His wish for there to no longer be any wishes had taken the very thing that held desires and created wishes out of the equation. Humanity was no more.
I walked through the former streets of New York City, alone. It didn’t matter, because even now, this long while later, I want for nothing.