Illustration by Melinda Beck

“Hey, sweetheart, nice patoot,” says the sad-eyed taxi-driver sitting at the all-night-diner counter, a doughnut wallowing in his unshaven jowls. The waitress glares at him. She is fed up with being ogled, or else stared at in disgust, whenever she bends over to pick up a dishrag. “If a goat wandered in, they’d ogle the goat and say the same stupid things,” she complains to the old bag lady near the cash register, to whom she has offered a free bowl of hot soup. “I’m sick of it. I wish nobody could ever look at me.” The bag lady turns out to be a fairy godmother in disguise, and, in thanks for the soup, she raises her spoon like a wand and grants the waitress her wish, so that when she tries to hand the taxi-driver his check, his head swivels sharply on his bovine neck. Is he refusing it? The waitress moves over into his line of sight and his head pops the other way. “Jesus, that hurt,” he whimpers. She glances over at the bag lady, but the sweet old thing has vanished.

People turn away from then on—they just can’t stop themselves. Whisk, whisk, whisk, go their heads as she passes by. Sometimes they make little yipping sounds, which adds to her amusement. She likes to stroll through busy department stores, city parks, and railway stations at rush hour, watching the heads snap away in choral waves. Sometimes, just for fun, she takes her clothes off, remembering her thrill as a child undressing in front of her bedroom window, but then, catching sight of her reflection in a shopwindow (the mannequins stare icily, straight at her), she sees what a silly fat fool she is and stops that.

At the diner, her boss, head twisting away, hands her a few small bills and tells her she’s become a literal pain in the neck, the customers are complaining, she’ll have to go—which brings to mind all those cautionary admonitions about being careful what you wish for. So, jobless, she heads to a bar to get as drunk as she can on her cheapskate boss’s payoff, wishing she could find someone to tell her troubles to who wouldn’t turn away. Outside the bar, she comes upon a guy who does keep looking at her, a beardy panhandler, slumped against the building clutching a brown paper bag and a tin cup. Has the spell worn off? No, she guesses it at once: he is blind. She’s not sure, but maybe she has just used up a second wish, because, glancing over her shoulder, she sees the backside of the old bag lady, toddling away around a corner.

She takes the blind beggar home with her, as if he were something she’d won in a raffle, feeds and showers him, and they have a good time for a few hours. “Ample” is his favorable judgment after doing the Braille thing. But then she has to think about what happens next. She has no job now and two mouths to feed, two bodies to clothe and care for. His tin cup was empty, the bottle in his brown paper bag as well—his own career, like hers, has been going nowhere. Maybe that old homeless lady could help if she could find her. She may have used up two wishes already and, if so, has essentially wasted them both, but, if the legends are true, she still has a third. If she finds the bag lady, she’ll have to be careful, given the old dear’s wicked sense of humor. Wishing to live forever, for example, might be a nightmarishly bad choice. No need to wish for beauty if no one can see her, and perfect health’s no good if she’s condemned to poverty. So she decides to wish for fabulous wealth, and to keep on repeating it, so as not to blurt out something stupid and end up like that couple who wished their noses into sausages.

She checks the streets near the diner where she first saw her, wishing her money wish over and over, but the bag lady is nowhere to be seen. Finally, she gives up and heads instead to a liquor store to use up her last couple of bills in the best way possible, passing a bank where, by chance, a robbery is taking place. The heads of the thieves snap aside so violently when they rush out of the bank door toward her that they stumble and drop what they’re carrying, spilling it out on the street. There are sirens, the thieves are on the run, and the money’s there for the taking, piles of it. She wouldn’t even have to waste a wish. Then she realizes that, on the contrary, she has just used up her last one. Somewhere, the old bird is laughing again. If the waitress grabs up the stolen loot, she’ll be on everybody’s most-wanted list, but if she walks away the granting of her final wish will be recklessly wasted. She looks up and sees that the security cameras have snapped away from her and hang by their wires. A handful of the scattered bills would never be missed, but a handful is not what she wished for; if she pinched a little she might be in more trouble than if she took it all.

A couple of large grimy shopping bags come floating past on a sudden breeze, dancing to the tune of the wailing sirens. The bag lady is still taking care of her. Or teasing her. The waitress fills them, but there’s money left over. Her skirt and shirt and underclothes can all be tied into bags, so she takes them off, knots them, and loads them up, too. There’s more now than she can drag home on her own, but when she tries to hail a taxi the drivers can’t see her, for all there is to see. Luckily, she finds a guy snoozing in his parked cab. Did she wish for that? Looks like he might be the same unshaven yo-yo who was in the diner the night it all began. She heaves the bags of money into the back seat, crawls in beside them, and gives the driver, who wakes with a snort, her address. He tries to see what she has brought in with her, but his head keeps bouncing away. “Oh, oh,” he grunts, reaching for the door. “Wait!” she says, and drops some big bills onto the seat beside him. It’s probably more raw cash than he’s ever seen before. With an appreciative whistle, he pulls the door shut and asks for that address again. It’s not easy getting there. Other drivers’ heads, glancing their way, snap to the side, and up and down the street there are accidents. Her guy is ducking, dodging, cursing. “Hey, it’s a dangerous world,” she says, squatting down behind the front seat to make it easier for him, and he laughs sourly at that.

At home, she’ll wrestle the bags in somehow, then call up for pizza delivery and a case or two from the liquor store, put some music on, and she and the blind beggar will dance the night away. It won’t exactly be happily ever after, but the bag lady never promised her that. ♦