The well at the edge of the property had been dry for longer than anyone could remember. Moss softened the stones, the wooden crank had split down the middle, and the bucket hanging from it had rotted until only two iron bands remained. People still tossed coins over the rim from habit. Pennies, nickels, the occasional quarter disappeared into the dark with a faint metallic scatter, though nobody bothered making wishes anymore.
Far below, where centuries of coins had formed a dull, uneven floor, something waited for intention. Metal alone was useless to it. A coin needed to arrive carrying desire, regret, envy, hope, or some other human pressure strong enough to give the old mechanism something to work with. For decades it received only loose change, children testing echoes, and adults indulging traditions they no longer believed.
Eventually the thing below became inventive.
Coins began shifting during the night. Pennies gathered into crude hearts. Silver pieces formed arrows pointing toward the center. Once, after a storm, every visible coin had arranged itself into a spiral that seemed to turn the longer one stared at it. I noticed that pattern last spring and leaned over the rim to study it. Without thinking, I said aloud that I wished I understood what I was seeing.
The well could not answer questions about itself. Its rules were older and narrower than curiosity. It searched instead through everything attached to me, feeling for some buried want that resembled the sentence I had offered. Somewhere among all the abandoned ambitions and half-formed fantasies, it found one close enough.
By evening, my life had changed.
I came home to a house I had never bought, a spouse who knew me intimately, two grown children who carried my face in altered proportions, and photographs documenting decades I had never lived. Everyone was relieved when I stopped insisting something was wrong. They said stress could produce strange episodes. They showed me birthdays, holidays, graduations, vacations, an entire biography apparently constructed around a wish I once entertained briefly and forgot.
Months later, I understand what happened more clearly than I wanted to. The well had starved so long that precision had become irrelevant. It seized the nearest usable desire and spent it lavishly. What troubles me now is that I have begun loving parts of this life, and every few weeks another memory arrives that seems to belong here.
I no longer know whether the well is still granting the wish, or whether I am finally becoming grateful enough to finish making it.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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