![]() ![]() Now, if Hailey had possessed a stronger sense of the subjunctive case, if she had already seen a speech pathologist to help with her lisp, and if she had not been sobbing, she would have said: “I wish you were a wishing well.”īut the wishing well did not hear “I wish you were a wishing well.” It heard “Wish you well wishing well.” Perfectly understandable, considering that most creatures have several years to grow into their sentience the wishing well had approximately three seconds. It was aware also of a fading echo of words. The timing of the wish, plus Hailey’s own furious toddler will, conferred the decorative fountain with sentience and transformed it into a wishing well in one fell swoop.įor the first time, it had awareness, and that awareness was of its disturbed waters as a small metal disk spiraled past soggy bread and globular cheese to settle on its floor. And when wished at points of rarity- traditionally times of confluence and magic-their power increases. Wishes wished strongly enough have power. She did so at the precise midpoint of the longest day of the year. She hiccupped, stretched her hand out over the water, dropped the coin, and said, “Wissyouwissingwell!” Shaking with the force of her sobs, Hailey brought herself to accept the quarter from her mother. “No, but it is a wishing fountain! You can still make a wish! Take the quarter, Hailey, and make a wish!” In desperation, Hailey’s mother offered her a quarter. But Hailey latched her little fists onto its ledge with a force better suited to Hercules, and her mother could not wrench her free. So she attempted to drag Hailey away from the fountain. Hailey’s mother hated for people to misunderstand what an excellent mother she was. Hailey’s screams attracted the attention of fellow mall-goers. She knocked her Pisa Pizza meal into the fountain, where the pepperonis slipped from the cheese and drifted to the bottom of the pool to join the collection of quarters, pennies, and nickels. The realization that the decorative fountain was not a wishing well destroyed Hailey’s faith in the universe. “Hailey, aren’t you hungry? Eat your pizza.”Īgain, Hailey pointed at the fountain, rather more emphatically. How Hailey managed to extrapolate the concept of the wishing well and apply it to a decorative fountain with a defunct fish is a matter of speculation best left to the sages. Hailey’s father had been reading her fairy tales at night. ![]() But she was blissfully unaware, so she and her daughter sat on the edge of the fountain to eat. If the mother had known the number of people who had spat, bled, and, on three sadly memorable occasions, urinated in the fountain, she would have seized her purse, her daughter, their Pisa Pizza, and run screaming for the Unsanitary and Unfit tables in the food court. However, the pump often became clogged with various forms of detritus, causing it to break down, and eventually the property owners decided the monthly repair fees were not worth the cost and so allowed it to remain inert.ĭespite the state of the fountain, the mother, having reviewed and declared the available tables in the food court as Unsanitary and Unfit for herself and her daughter, chose it as the best spot for the consumption of Pisa Pizza, under the circumstances. It featured a stone goldfish with quartz scales, which perched on its tail in the center of the fountain, and was meant to spout water from its pursed lips. The fountain had a basin less than a foot deep, and a diameter of less than ten feet. On one summer solstice, a mother and her toddler stopped by the decorative fountain in the middle of Longview Mall, a middling shopping center located in a middling town in middling America. The way these three unusual things came to be is this: ![]() In point of another fact, it was sentient, all of which is most unusual for either a decorative fountain or a wishing well. ![]() In point of fact, it started its existence not as a wishing well but as a decorative fountain. The wishing well discovered its meaning in existence only through a case of mistaken semantics. Theme music is “Appeal to Heavens” by Alexye Nov, available from Promo DJ or his Facebook page. ![]()
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