A Consequence of Wishes
Here's a short story I wrote before the election as an exercise in therapy.
KT walked her daily walk along the beautiful ocean beach, ignoring the surf and the surfers and the sand castles and sandpipers. She thought only about the dozens of things making her scared and miserable. She couldn’t stop thinking about how the grocery checkout clerk kept calling her sir, or the hateful stare she got from that guy at that place that one time, or how fascism was coming to America. She stopped, spying an odd object sticking out of the wet beach face. Curious, she dug around it and pulled out an old-fashioned teapot-shaped oil lamp. Wow, she thought, then she smiled. “Get me,” she said to no one, “I’m summoning a genie.” She rubbed the lamp against her shirt.
“Oh, shit”, she yelped as the lamp emitted a stream of rainbow colored smoke which resolved into an androgynous humanoid. (KT watched a lot of Star Trek).
“I am the genie of the lamp”, the being said. “Who summons me?”
“I’m kuh, KT”, she stammered, weirdly wondering if the genie would know that wasn’t her “legal” name. The genie looked at her placidly. KT didn’t know what to say next. “I, that is, my, um, pronouns are she/her.” Feeling foolish, afraid of offending this ethereal creature, she asked, “What should I call you?”
The genie gave a delighted smile. “I am Aesir and my pronouns are fae and faer. Thank you for asking. Most mortals don’t bother.”
KT relaxed a tiny bit. She wanted to ask faer about the mix of Arabian, Norse, and Celtic mythologies going on, but decided not to push it.
“So,” said Aesir, “you may be granted one wish.”
“Oh,” said KT, surprised. “Not to be ungrateful, but isn’t it traditionally three wishes?”
“It used to be”, fae explained.”but we have no control over the tragic outcomes that result from foolish human desires, and that was taking quite a psychological toll on my kind. Plus with your sitcoms and your Twilight Zones and whatnot we were getting a really bad rep for being angry and vindictive. So we established a new process in our last union negotiations.”
Unions? Sitcoms? “You know the Twilight Zone?” she finally asked. “So you’re not…”
“Cursed? Trapped in our bottles for eternity? Nope. The lamps and bottles and so forth are merely summoning devices. We actually live very comfortable and fulfilling lives in our plane of existence.”
“Huh. Well good for you,” said KT, her head spinning a bit.
“Just this morning, In fact, I had a lovely game of Alquerque with the Spirit of the Forest, who told me…” Aesir stopped, looking sheepish. “But we’re not here to talk about me.”
“So,” said KT, “this one wish thing…”
“Of course. To business. Here’s how it works. You may ask for three wishes, and for each wish I will tell you the ironic consequences. After that, I will grant the one wish you choose, which can be any of the three or something entirely different, consequences unknown.”
“Wow,” said KT.
“I know,” said Aesir. “Pretty cool, huh? We call it the Consequence Clause.”
“Do I need to sign some sort of waiver, or…”
Aesir shook faer’s head. “You may proceed.”
KT, unsurprisingly, had given a potential situation like this a lot of thought over her life.
“Okay.” She licked her lips. Her voice shook. “Wish number one. I want to have grown up as a girl and be a healthy, intelligent, beautiful cis woman.” Even after being in transition for five years, saying that out loud felt extremely scary.
Aesir gave her a warm smile. “Lovely wish. And the result, sadly for you, is that you end up a terfy trad-wife, screaming at school board meetings about ‘those people’ grooming your kids.”
KT looked stricken. “Your system sucks,” she said tearfully. “I suppose no matter how I try to phrase it I’ll still have a shitty life.”
Aesir looked down. “I’m sorry. I really don’t have any control over it. Do you want some time to collect yourself?”
“No.” Bitter, KT considered her next wish. She almost impulsively wished to be invisible, but she knew she already *was* invisible, in a way. She also thought about wishing to never have been born, but she knew she didn’t mean it, couldn’t imagine any consequences for anyone she cared about, and realized she would just be wasting an opportunity.
“Okay, fine,” she said, finally. “How about wishing for the power to make anyone who hates me and people I care about, or tries to be mean to us, or intends to hurt us, feel that fear and pain only doubled.”
“An understandable desire,” said Aesir. “And the outcome would be that you wouldn’t feel any better. I mean, you would. At first. But eventually not. You wouldn’t make bad people any better because they’re already acting out of pain and fear and ignorance, and some of them choose to be that way and enjoy it. And you would find that adding more pain to the world would eat at your soul.”
KT harrumphed at mention of a soul. She sat on the damp sand and hugged her knees. And then she thought about how she felt when she had first transitioned, how it had felt to come to work as KT and be welcomed by her colleagues, how the crippling fear had melted away as she saw there were no pitchforks and torches coming after her, and how she had briefly been filled with kindness and good will towards her fellow humans. It hadn’t lasted, though. The pandemic and Trump’s refusal to go away and the moral panic over trans people had eaten away at her good feelings about herself and others.
“What if,” she ventured, “I could touch people and make them better, less afraid, less hateful, kinder, more joyful.” She instantly felt foolish over such a saccharine wish. Her face reddened.
Aesir smiled gently and put a cool, misty hand on her shoulder. “That’s a lovely wish. You have a good heart. Consequentially speaking, though, you would get nailed up within a year.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Well, that’s it then.”
“You can still choose one of those three wishes, or wish for something else, consequences unknown.”
“And how exactly am I to know what to wish for?”
Aesir floated down to “sit” with her.
“I’m not supposed to do this, but may I make a suggestion?” fae asked, surprising KT.
“Okay. Sure.”
“Look around you. Think about what you want for yourself. Right now.”
KT took a breath. She looked around. The ocean stretched away. The surf rolled in and out. Someone in the distance flew on a parasail, towed by a speed boat. Down the beach, a mom helped her kids make sand castles.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve never been what you would call a joyful person.” She did finger quotes around ‘joyful’. “I don’t know if it’s because I inherited trauma from my mom, or if it’s the gender stuff, or the way I’m wired, or some combination of all that, but I can’t just *enjoy* things, like these people all around me. I can’t go on a trip without stressing out over planning ahead of time and once I’m away I’m counting the hours until I get back. I worry about *everything* and I wake up every day feeling dreadful.” She looked at Aesir. “I mean, literally. As in ‘full of dread’. I can’t stop thinking that life is terrible and the world is ending and I can’t do anything to make it better.”
“And?” Aesir prompted.
“So what I want right now, what I would wish for is the ability to just… chill. Be in the moment, or whatever. Enjoy being alive. Enjoy my life.”
“Is that your wish?”
“I mean not 24/7. I don’t want to stop caring, or be toxically positive.” She gave faer a sharp look. “And I don’t want to be turned into a baby or a pet cat or something.” Aesir’s mouth quirked up in a smile. “I just want to be able to take a break from all the shit.” She nodded. “Yes, that’s what I want. That’s my wish.”
“It is done.”
KT closed her eyes, expecting some seismic internal shift or sudden euphoria, but she didn’t really feel any different. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She felt the sea breeze on her skin and smelled the salt in the air. She looked around. What a lovely day, she thought. She felt awake. She felt alive. She smiled.
“This is nice,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome. This has been an unusual pleasure.”
“One question before you go?”
“You can’t use the lamp again,” said Aesir.
“No, not that,” KT laughed, then turned serious. “Now that I’ve made the wish, can you tell me what the consequences will be? Does a safe fall on me?”
“There is one consequence you should know about,” Aesir said, smiling. KT braced herself. “You have to go and actually live your life.”
Copyright 2025 by Kassandra R Sharp