ld
a short story by Tom Lichtenberg
copyright 2014 by Tom Lichtenberg
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
"I knew everything about him," Marcus said, "but I didn't know that."
He paused for a moment, but one that soon turned into an awkward silence Marcus was seated at the head of a long gray Formica-topped table in the “free morning breakfast nook” of the Coastside Residence Suites. Gathered around him were the eleven official members of the Anti-Wish Brigade, who were in the midst of their fourteenth annual convention. Before Marcus had entered the room only minutes earlier, the membership was busy microwaving popcorn and gulping coffee while milling about waiting for August March to take control of the situation. They weren't much of a group, to tell the truth, hardly worth gathering once let alone annually, but each year on the second Saturday in January they duly made our way to that drab half-deserted motel to compare notes and swap stories. Most of them were simply fed up with the phenomenon known as “The Sparkles”, the mysterious but commonplace way that people's deepest wishes were arbitrarily granted to them willy-nilly by some unknown universal agency. Some of the members of the Brigade had a suspicion that life wasn't meant to be lived this way, yet this is how it was. Everyone in the whole world was unconditionally guaranteed to have one of their most precious wishes granted to them at least once in their lifetime. Of course, you could never know which wish it would be, or when or where this granting might occur, but everyone could see it happening all around them all the time. A person would suddenly be surrounded by The Sparkles, which were brightly colored flashing lights that lit up all around the body, sometimes accompanied by sickly sweety tinkly noises, but more often mute, but in any case there they were, The Sparkles, and within thirty seconds of that flashy showiness, the person so be-sparkled would be gone, in a twinkling you might say, just like that, just gone, their life irrevocably changed forever. You could never knew where they'd get to, at least not right away, and it was the custom to let them go, but there were some who defied the norms. They investigated. They pursued. Sometimes they got lucky. Usually they merely grumbled their disapproval of the whole scam, and these were the members of the Anti-Wish Brigade. They didn't like it, not one bit, but they were just the bitter few. Most everyone in the world was quite happy to go along with. After all, who didn't want their dreams to come true?
Marcus had been one of those. They'd all been among them at one time or another, even August March, who took advantage of the silence to look around the room at the meager collection of would-be dream-destroying avengers. He was the oldest at sixty seven years old and quite certain, although he couldn't begin to prove it, that the world had not always been like this. He claimed to have memories of a childhood in a world where people only hoped and prayed that their dreams would come true. It was probably his own dream, otherwise history and especially literature would have reflected such a world, would have left traces. Such a truth could not be so thoroughly covered up, could it? Even August was not so paranoid as to believe in a conspiracy as vast as that, but still he had his doubts, as did Veronica Pierce, the next oldest at sixty one. She said she'd originally come from a completely different continent entirely, across a vast ocean no less, when it was quite well known that there is only one Gaia and has always been only one, surrounded by the deep vast Oceania with no other land masses out there. Ships have sailed and proved it conclusively, at least those that returned. Makima Dukat was the other elder among the eleven, a pink-toned, pink-eyed, gray haired giantess known to have traveled on foot from one side of the land mass to the other in all directions in her day. She spoke the loudest, if not the most frequently, and it was she who prompted Marcus to continue.
“No one knows anyone's darkest secret,” she said, “not even their own. That's why no one can guess where The Sparkles will take them.”
“But it turned out he did know, all along,” said Marcus. “He knew it in his heart, if not his mind.”
“Then you did find him?” Dolly asked. Dolly Parker, at fifteen, was the youngest in the cabal, attending only her second convention. She seemed to have the great gift of forgetfulness, so that every story was new to her no matter how many times she had heard it. The other members liked that very much about Dolly. They all had their stories, their own very personal reasons for joining the group, and were always happy to tell their tales to whomever was willing to listen.
“Obviously,” Snake injected. Snake, who went by that single name only, was distinguished by an equally singular tattoo of the obvious creature which wrapped around his entire torso, up to and including his neck, where it grew taut and perpetually threatened him with strangulation.
“Only yesterday,” Marcus sighed, and lapsed again into reverie. Clearly the events he was trying to relate had troubled him considerably. On the other hand, it was always a pain trying to squeeze words out of that guy. Although he'd been a decent if relatively unknown storyteller earlier in his life, by middle age he'd tired of words and tales and would have preferred to type if forced to communicate at all. He usually lived holed up in a tiny apartment surrounded by blinking monitors displaying the inner status of the multitudes of systems he administered for various sleazy entrepreneurs. Marcus was a recluse by choice, but after The Sparkles took his younger brother, Ben, he emerged from his room and undertook the journey which eventually led him to that moment, to that clammy coastal breakfast nook. None of the group had ever met him until that very morning.
The convention had “begun” promptly at nine, when August and Veronica entered the lobby and taped up a bright green banner to the front door of the nook, which was shortly thereafter removed by the desk clerk. They had ordered a special breakfast buffet to be set up, where the rest of the membership had assembled soon afterward and were milling about when Marcus had entered the room looking lost and perturbed. George Spiros spotted him first.
“Hey, look,” George announced, “it's a new guy! Hey, new guy! How ya doin'?”
“I'm looking for the Anti-Wish Brigade?” Marcus replied uncertainly. He glanced around the room looking convinced he must be in the wrong place.
“Yep, that's us,” George beamed.
“How do I join?” Marcus asked.
“Take a seat,” August March said, coming over from the coffee machine and gesturing towards the one at the head of the table.
“Everybody, gather round.” he continued. “This session is now in order.”
Marcus sat where he was told, and waited while the eleven pulled up chairs and planted themselves around the table. August took the seat at the other end, flanked by Veronica and Makima, as the group arranged themselves more or less by age, so that Dolly and Snake found themselves on either side of Marcus, with the others filling in the gaps. All told there were six women and five men in the Anti-Wish Brigade. The oldest three had been the original members of the group, with several others joining the following year, then no one new was added for nearly a decade, until George, then Snake, then Dolly joined up at the rate of one per year. There were no rules or obligations of membership, no dues, no forms to fill out or oaths to swear. One merely affirmed one's membership by showing up at this gathering. Some did not even keep in touch otherwise. Some kept their participation a secret even from their spouses and closest friends. It was not the most popular thing in the world to be anti-wish. It was, in fact, an inconceivable position to most people.
“Tell us your story, then,” August said once everyone was settled.
“I lost my brother,” Marcus began, “to The Sparkles, of course, and then I went to find him.”
A murmuring of approval rose up around the table. Such quests were generally considered rude. Although few would care to admit their true feelin
gs of dismay at losing loved ones forever at the drop of a hat, most clung to the belief that the Sparkled had gone to a better place, even if they later found out that that “better place” turned out to be some stupid little house on a prairie somewhere. The sparkling was not to be questioned. And even the Sparkled themselves would never think of complaining about their new situation, even if it was not one they would have consciously chosen for themselves. The unknown and forever invisible Sparkler clearly had its reasons, had its “plan” for everyone, and there could be no denying that the Sparkled's new conditions could always be described as “improved” by one sort of measurement or another. Whoever had not been Sparkled had simply not yet been Sparkled, and so there was always the certainty of better things to come.
“Where did you begin?” August had to prompt Marcus again. Marcus didn't seem to want to come out with more than one sentence at a time.
“I knew everything about my brother,” Marcus re-iterated. “We'd always been very close. We were only children when our parents, you know.”
“Sparkled,” commented several members