The wishbone (a flash story)

I’m writing this to spare others a bad experience.

See, I ordered a wishbone with three branches through a special e-mail offer that sounded too good to pass up.

The problem is that that wishbone takes your thoughts as wishes.

So, when I got it out of the box and noticed the putrid smell, I thought, “Gee, I wish this thing smelled better!” And it started smelling like a rose, because I had kind of imagined a rose in thinking of improvement.

Next thing I thought, “Wow, now that I’ve got this wonderful wishbone, I wish somebody could see me with it.” And, since I’d somehow thought of my dead mother right then, there she was, still dead as a doornail, but right there in front of me, and not a pretty sight.

I was scared shitless, and that’s when I thought my third wish, which was to have her sped back to the realm of the dead.

That also happened right away, but I had used up all three branches, which left me with a useless bone. I’d blown 495 bucks in a matter of seconds.

Never ever again, now that I know I can’t trust my own thoughts.

– James Steerforth (copyright 2007)

Note
I wrote this in a first-person style reminiscent of James M. Cain because it seemed appropriate to the subject matter. If he were alive (and read this), I think he would appreciate the e-mail/spam angle because he loved to introduce phenomena that were new or in vogue at the time in his novels (for example, frozen foods/tv dinners in “The Moth” in 1948).