Epilogue

It was Halloween again, and there had been three four births already, and the rest were due any time now. It had been an adventure, living with twelve women getting ever more pregnant. The births we’d had so far had been fairly easy, I had been told, though the nearly crushed fingers in my hands might quietly whisper otherwise.

Ellie and I walked through the park near my old house, and I pointed to the fountain and told her that was where I’d made the wish that had changed everything for all of us. She went and sat down on the bench, and began to breastfeed Diane, our infant. A non-descript fellow in a suit and raincoat walked up and sat beside us.

“Beautiful baby “ he said, in a kind of lemony voice, tart, and bit bracing.

“Thank you,” Ellie and I said, almost together.

“You were quite a surprise, you know,” he remarked. “I guess it was partly you, and partly this lady’s fault, and partly your ... second wife’s? Deb?”

I looked at him, and a memory niggled at my mind. “You ... you were here ... last year... ?”

“Yep. I like to check up on my projects. One in maybe a million and a half could have made that wish work well, and no one else like your little group did. Most folks, their lives would have gone boom. I did cheat a little bit, though, when you started to really make it work well.”

“Cheated?”

“The house, of course. No one makes houses like that! But everything else? That was all you. You, plural, I mean. But I just had to ... well, you know. It was going so well!”

“Uh ... thank you?” I stammered.

“Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure, it was nothing, really. But you two! Used the structure of my own wish and made it work for you! Heh, mandrake. And love! Who’d have thought in this day and age? Hell, who’d ever have thought!”

“So, you ... you granted my wish... ?”

He looked at Ellie and smiled, “I know he’s not normally this slow,” he said, “He’s just stunned.”

Ellie smiled and nodded back.

“I really love it when someone wins the challenge,” he said.

“Challenge,” I said.

“Of getting what you wished for, if not in exactly the way you expected,” he said. “Really, it’s time the shock wore off!”

Suddenly I was thinking very clearly.

“Do you do this a lot?” I asked.

“Oh, a few every year, to keep myself amused. No, I’m not God. Just someone who got what he wanted a long time ago and didn’t quite fail my challenge. Don’t wish for magic powers, my boy -- they come with a very high price. At least I can fiddle with the edges of wishes, if they serve making it come true. Like your family’s youth. You’ll all get older now, just like before, but we couldn’t have seventy and eighty year old women having babies, now could we?”