Wish by Dayna (good summer reads txt) 📕

Rhythmic whooshes of air pulsed through the damp well as a penny somersaulted forlornly to its final resting place. No light had time to flash along the coin’s surface before it plunged into the lifeless gloom. Metal hit rock and the penny ricocheted once more into the air, flipping end over end in a final attempt at escape, before flying uncontrollably into a wide crack and lodging itself firmly between two walls of unyielding stone. Its fate was sealed.
A middle-aged man sneered down the dark, gaping mouth of the decrepit well. He strode on by, a bony hand caressing the crisp hundred dollar bills tucked safely away in the inside pocket of his pristine suit. It was as though the penny had never existed; to him it had no more value than the dust that cowered from his polished shoes.
He didn’t even bother to make a wish.
Within the crumbling interior of the ancient well stretched a vast expanse of underground caves. Hundreds of varying coins that spun the tales of many decades covered the floors and filled the shelves of these caves. Most of them had lain in the cold, damp dark so long that they had been glued together with the cement of time and the calcified minerals that slowly dripped from the ceiling.
One of these frozen pennies was a bit more scratched and abused than the majority of the rest. Its head had been smeared beyond recognition so that it gazed sightlessly and wordlessly into nothingness. This was probably for the best; the burdensome wish it carried hovered at its core like a jet-black, tainted heart.

The cool reassurance that seemed to emanate from the shiny, well-kept penny put Caleb at ease. He stroked the metal’s smooth edge with a soot-stained thumb. His lucky penny. It had been faithful to him for over two years now. Unlike most two-year-old pennies, the raised contours of Abraham Lincoln’s head and the miniscule print surrounding it were as prominent as they had been when it was first made.
A finger jabbed itself, hard, into Caleb’s shoulder blade.
Caleb turned around instinctively, only to find himself staring into the flashing amber eyes of Jordan, one of his classmates. Not far off to his left stood Alex. Caleb smiled, flipping his penny into the air and catching it before hopping off of the table he had been sitting on.
“Do you need help with something?” he asked, looking from Jordan to his buddy and then back again. He picked up a welding helmet from the table. His penny was launched into the air once more with a hard flick of his thumb, flashing brilliantly as it flipped up. It was there, and then it was gone.
Jordan grinned, weaving the penny through his fingers. “This is a pretty nice penny,” he commented, his voice carrying a hint of mockery.
“It brings me luck,” Caleb said with a grin, though his eyes followed the path of his penny warily. A grinding whine came from a corner as a whirring blade slashed through a piece of iron. Fiery sparks flew from its teeth, into the goggles of the student operating it. There was a loud metallic clang as the two halves of iron fell to the floor, cut cleanly in two. The glinting blade retreated.
“I bet you polish it every day,” Jordan sneered, inspecting the penny. He glanced over at the roaring metal cutter, and he and Alex shared a glance.
Caleb was certain he knew what had just passed through their minds.
“Come on, guys, what have I ever done to you—“ he protested, right as Jordan chucked his well-kept, lucky penny at the gaping jaws of the growling iron-cutter. The coin sailed straight into the razor sharp blade. The sound that resulted was, for Caleb, the equivalent of someone raking their nails across a chalkboard. A horrible grinding followed as the penny was sucked into the pull of the furiously rotating disk of wickedly curved teeth.
For what seemed like hours the beast chewed, before the penny suddenly came shooting back out. It soared over Caleb’s head with the speed of a bullet before hitting the far wall of the vast garage with a reverberating clank. Jordan and Alex guffawed openly, awarding each other a high-five. Caleb stood frozen for a second, as though he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened, before launching himself in the direction his precious penny had flown. The metal-cutting saw continued its dull growling, indifferent to what it had just done.
Maybe the thin wisps of smoke curling up from his penny were a figment of Caleb’s imagination; but the scratches weren’t. One blackened edge of the beaten penny curled upward, and two yawning, jagged gashes ripped down its center, right through Abraham Lincoln’s neck. A huge chunk of its shining surface had been shaved off as well, making it appear as though Lincoln’s face had been savagely scraped off.
Caleb, crouching, reached for the tattered remains of his penny with a trembling hand, fighting away the tears that had gathered at the sight. Upon contact with his faithful friend, the coin stung him sharply, still searing hot, as though it was snarling at Caleb to leave it be in its miserable, pitiful state. The pain reached deeper than Caleb’s burned finger. But he would not leave his friend lying on the floor like just another scrap of unwanted metal. He waited for the penny to cool before touching it again, lifting it gingerly and setting it in the palm of his hand. Caleb stood and turned around to see that Jordan and Alex were still watching, elapsing into even bigger fits of laughter at his show of sentiment towards a penny.
Eyes smoldering, Caleb glared at the two with such malice that if looks really could kill they would have incinerated on the spot.
The remains of the decrepit wishing well rose above Caleb on a nearby hill as he sat on a bench mourning his lucky penny. He couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, but he also couldn’t bring himself to carry it around every day, a cruel reminder of what it had once been.
Caleb slowly raised his head with a deep sigh, gazing out at the surrounding park. The remains of his penny still sat in his palm. This was when the well caught his attention. He had never really noticed its presence until now… and what better place for his penny to spend its last days than where it belonged. Pushing himself to his feet, Caleb made his way towards the well, trudging up the steep slope with leaden feet.
The mutilated face of his penny stared up at Caleb blankly as he gazed at it for the last time. This was a wishing well, after all, so he should probably make a wish, but it had to be something great, something worthy of this penny that had brought him so much luck. What to wish for, though? Caleb lifted his penny with two fingers, and the coin bit him once again, this time drawing blood when Caleb’s thumb slid against its jagged wounds.
As Caleb watched the blood ooze from the tiny slit in his thumb, a spitting flame rose in his eyes once more. He felt an overwhelmingly powerful wave of anger surge through his veins. He knew what to wish for.
“I wish those creeps would drop dead,” Caleb growled through clenched teeth. He tilted his palm ever so slowly, hand shaking, until the penny finally lost traction and slid off into the darkness, no longer flipping.

“It’s a wishing well!” Ben heard his mom exclaim excitedly, “I haven’t seen one of those in ages!” As she raced up the hill Ben inconspicuously sidled closer to a nearby trashcan. Unfortunately, his dad saw him.
“Don’t you dare throw that away!” he called sternly over his shoulder as he climbed up the hill after his wife. “Eat it! It’s good for you!”
Ben sighed in defeat, glaring down at the bright orange carrot that sat innocently in his hand. He and his parents had just finished a picnic in the field below. He hated carrots with a passion.
Carrot clutched in one fist, Ben hurried up the hill after his parents, who were fawning over what he perceived as an old, crumbling structure overgrown with weeds and crawling with moss that should have been torn down ages before. A halfway decomposed bucket leaned against a pile of fallen stones.
“Do you think there’s still water in there?” he heard his mother ask. Ben rolled his eyes as his dad ran back to the van to find a cup and some rope. He happened to look down, spotting a dirt-encrusted penny by his shoe. Stooping, Ben had to pry the penny from the dirt with his fingernails. When he had finally recovered the coin, he inspected it before shrugging and stepping up to a side of the well.
While his parents were messing with the container and rope his dad had retrieved, Ben gazed down into the dark abyss of the well. The carrot he still held in one fist had begun to feel slimy and had taken on a brown tint from his hands. He scowled.
“I wish vegetables had never been discovered,” Ben muttered, casually dropping the penny over the mouth of the well.

“What is this?” a small voice asked.
“It’s a wishing well,” her father replied, crouching beside his three-year-old daughter. When she tried to peer curiously into the well her hands just barely reached the lip of stones that ringed its opening. Her father, smiling, lifted her onto his shoulders so that she could see.
“Can I make a wish?” she asked. Her father’s smile faded.
“I don’t have any money,” he told her, suddenly overwhelmed with the shame that he didn’t even have a penny for his daughter to throw into the well. She didn’t seem upset by this news. Reaching with a tiny hand into a small pocket of her dress, she pulled out a penny that she had picked up earlier. It wasn’t extraordinary in the least, not too shiny, not too dirty; just a regular penny.
“What are you going to wish for?” her father asked, staring at the coin his daughter clutched in amazement. Gazing at a raggedy patch on her dress, he felt he knew for sure what she would wish for. The girl frowned, her nose crinkling as her brain struggled to think of something.
Finally an idea seemed to present itself, and the girl reached out her arm, the penny held tightly between two fingers. Her blue eyes sparkling with the purest kind of innocence, she proclaimed,
“I wish that everyone else’s wishes would come true.”
The penny fell.