wish

You know now that things would have been much simpler had you never elected to speak to that leprechaun.

When it happened, of course, you had no idea he was a leprechaun. He was six-two if he was an inch, and the cargo pants and Darkness "One Way Ticket to Hell...and Back" concert t-shirt did not help to identify him. He stood outside Boots on the high street and tried, lazily, to get passers-by to accept the coupons he offered: "Free wish? Free wish from a genuine leprechaun? No? Free wish from a leprechaun? Free...Excuse me, free wish, yeah?" (No Irish accent even, it occurs to you now--Essex, from the sound of it). As with other hawkers of his ilk, he sought only incidental eye contact and carried himself as though immersed in the public and yet somehow ethereally not of the public.

You gave him a wide berth, or rather you wanted to. But a mum with twins in a side-by-side stroller and a crowd of pimply yobs-in-the-making wedged you in. You ended up practically bumping into him. No choice: had to take one.

"Yeah, cheers, mate. Good for a free wish. Redeemable at the address on the bottom. Rules on the back. Mind the small print. Coupon expires in a month. Right? Magic. Respect."

He turned to start pestering other people, but you're not stupid. You know how many of these things turn out to be scams. You asked to see his tattoo: shamrock on the back of his neck. "No two the same, yeah?" As is your right, you asked for a rubbing of the tattoo to verify it. Irritated, he pulled himself away from the blond nineteen-year-old with the navel piercing he'd just stopped and leaned down to give you access to his neck.

A quick stop at www.authenticleprechauns.org in an internet café and you knew he was the real McCoy. This put a whole different spin on that coupon.

You read the fine print, even though everyone knows it by heart: one wish, no wishing for more wishes. Wish to be expressed in 25 words or less; in the event said wish is expressed in over 25 words, only the initial 25 words will be employed in the granting of the wish. Neither the individual leprechaun nor the Great Leprechaun Charter will be liable for any misinterpretation of requested wishes nor for any ill-fortune resulting from granting of wishes. Deliberate disregard of wisher's intent should not and legally cannot be seen as malice aforethought. This coupon not valid when used in conjunction with any other offer. Void where prohibited.

So you had a wish coming. You thought of the obvious stuff: money, sex, power. But there were too many urban myths about these ones. The guy who wished for money and became a successful bank robber with Interpol on his trail. The girl who wished to be sexually irresistible to every man she met and turned into the porn world's biggest star. The guy who wished for power and woke up in Hitler's bed the morning of the invasion of Poland.

The only way to get away with a selfish wish was to keep it modest enough to leave enough words to cover all the caveats ("...dollars that are neither stolen nor bequeathed to me by a relative or friend who must first die..."). So that was a possibility.

But lying in bed that night, you really went to work on this. One wish. One opportunity to defy all the known laws of time and space. One twenty-five word blast of omnipotence. You're an intelligent person--certainly a sight sharper than a grown Essex lad who can't give up cargo pants and thinks "Respect" is still hip streetspeak.

So you consulted with an economist friend: what about wiping out world poverty? Your friend pointed out that, though it's a nice idea, at the moment the economies of too many countries rely on the poverty of too many other countries. Establishing fiscal stability in the developing world overnight would have terrifying consequences. You spent a long night with him eating lo mein and trying to figure wording to make this work--you even hit a few versions that might have made interesting possibilities. But in the end you realized it was too hard to marry economics and brevity.

A few days later a cousin had put you in touch with an ex-girlfriend who worked as an administrator for a non-profit global health organization. You asked her about the possibility of curing the world's diseases. She admired the ambition, but suggested you add a clause about making sure the cured had food, water and sanitation in order to stay healthy. Any attempt to work that in seemed to push it over 25 words; you gave up when she pointed out that with all known diseases gone, when someone ended up getting sick again (and someone would--evolution demanded it), there would be no one to help since no doctor would know anything about it. Curing diseases would render loads of medical professionals jobless and incompetent.

Still, you and she spent several days trying to see if there wasn't one disease or condition you could safely do away with: cancer? diabetes? tooth decay? hayfever? mad cow? ebola? You even bandied about the idea of your developing healing powers of touch, but quickly dismissed it: some pharmaceutical company would sue, or would kidnap you and lock you in a bunker in the Caymans, charging ten grand on up for prescriptions allowing people access to you.

Similar conversations with relatives, friends, and friends of relatives vetoed other wishes. Getting rid of illegal drugs would mean potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms and thousands of violent criminal psychopaths looking for other things to occupy their time. The end of racism could just as easily mean the end of racial diversity, if the leprechaun had a sick sense of humor. How do you request the destruction of nuclear weapons stockpiles without a loophole that allows them to be detonated? You could stop global warming, but might end up hitting the planet's peak temperature or succumbing to an Ice Age. Preservation of endangered species could mean the animals could get the know-how and thumbs they need to bear arms and fight back.

After two weeks, you began skipping work, losing sleep. You scaled back to simpler wishes: everybody in the world suddenly develops a professional-quality singing voice. But could you be sure they wouldn't wind up singing everything they said?

Every human gets one morning of the breakfast of his or her choice. Trouble with the cannibals, there.

Once a month, you're allowed to stop time. Could be difficult to get it re-started - or could mean you accidentally make it move backwards.

Your jeans have one pocket that's always full of cash. Laundry nightmare, mugging target.

Shoes for poor children? Leather and rubber crises.

With five days before the coupon expired, you found yourself able to shoot down any possible wish with breathtaking expedition. This being the case, you began making lists of the wishes you'd gone through, ranking them from least potentially harmful to most. Soon your living room walls were riddled with butcher paper, the words in black marker crossed out and rewritten over and over, arrows moving items up or down the lists. You started smoking again and promptly forgot why "make nicotine an essential vitamin" had ended up in the 500s. You slept in fits and starts, lying down and then jumping up to shift wish #46 to position #105. An hour later you'd put it back to #12.

The top ten - they were the most fickle lot. Like children on a long car ride, they simply refused to sit still. You had long stopped answering your phone, and the idea that you might have lost your job moved wishes #18, #239 and #781 into the top fifteen. The morning of the day the coupon expired, you threw out the lumpy milk from your refrigerator and fished in your jackets and sofa cushions for enough money to order pizza without having to go to a cash machine. Thinking you saw the glint of a 10p coin, you tugged at a loose bit of carpet behind the sofa until it came free. A carpet staple punctured your finger and brought you crashing into the realization of what you were actually doing. You collapsed, cross-legged, on the floor and held your head in your hands.

You wanted your life back. Your regular, old, pre-wish-coupon life. But you had to make a wish, lest you be consumed by regrets and what-might-have-beens. And at this point, making an altruistic wish was out the window. Like they always say on airplanes about the cabin depressurization masks and traveling with small children: you have to help yourself before you can be of any use to anyone else. Clearly, your wish would have to be for you first, others second.

You looked around the room at your walls, saturated with psychotic scribbling. Yours had become the sort of life that shouldn’t happen to a dog. Looking it over, you realized, at that moment, you didn't want pizza, you didn't want milk. You wanted a normal life back. And dammit, you wouldn’t let another innocent pedestrian succumb to your mania.

You sat at the kitchen table with a marker and a clean sheet of butcher paper: 25 words. For a few minutes, you stared at it, made a move to cross things out, stopped, stared some more. In the back of your mind, something niggled at you, plagued you - some wording that felt a bit funny. But exhaustion and obsession had left you fried and incapable of objective analysis. And little time remained.

You went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on your face, found the last few articles of clean clothing you had (didn't match, didn't matter) and left.

When you walked through the door at the address on the coupon, you were only momentarily surprised to find the leprechaun behind the counter. You took a number from the roll and sat next to a fat man wearing brown corduroy trousers and holding a sweat-stained lottery form. Other people waiting included an elderly couple with a border collie in one of those neck cones and a teenage girl who kept singing into her iPod.

"Twenty-nine." You walked up to the counter and handed over your coupon. "Yeah, right. What you want, then?"

You told him: “I want to be employed warning others about the dangers of wish compulsion and to have this posting support me comfortably for a long time.”

The leprechaun smiled a decidedly Shane MacGowan smile - "Pukka." He scribbled his initials in red pen on the back of your coupon and slipped it through a slot in the counter. He turned to a laptop behind the counter and began tapping keys.

At this point, you would have felt a tingling sensation and lost consciousness. In your last moment, you might have realized that working in the phrase “as a person” might have been a good idea. But the truth is, you would have really questioned where exactly you came up with the word “posting” - did you think he’d turn you into a spy or an ambassador or something? What the hell was wrong with a word like “job” or “career” or even “situation”? Well, situation might not have helped. For that matter, it may well not have made a quantum’s worth of difference what you did. The toothless reprobate would have found a way to mess you about regardless. Still, “posting”? You could kick yourself.

Assuming you still had legs, that is. Which you no longer did. They, like the rest of you, had been reduced to nothing more than a collection of pixels made up of electronic impulses being used to configure light emissions. Had you eyes to see and/or a brain to remember, you might have regretted not just taking your chances with #51. Even #436. And that was complete and utter rubbish - an excremental maelstrom waiting to happen. But no, you didn’t choose either of those.

Instead, you ended up on my blog.