Billy's Wish

Gil sat down on the couch with an exasperated sigh. He picked up the remote and clicked through a few channels with each subsequent channel, his frustration grew. There was nothing on the T.V., every channel had those damn *Pokemen* or those *Adventurer Times*. There was nothing there for a sixty-year-old man to watch. There really wasn’t anything for anyone over fifteen years since the wish.

*Fucking Billy.* It had become his mantra for everything these past three years. He spat, “Fucking Billy!” Every time his boss gave him a raise in candy, every time someone broke into a spontaneous yet perfectly choreographed song that revealed their inner-most intentions, every time his wife wanted to make love and he had to mash his flaccid weenie (That was what they called it now. Jesus!) against her stomach. Billy was the cause of it all.

Gil hated that boy so much. He hated the fact that he was now king of the universe. He hated that Billy had over a gazillion dollars, which was now an actual unit of measurement. Most of all, he hated Billy for his first wish. No one knew how he got his hands on a magic genie lamp (or that they even existed), but everyone knew what his first wish was. Billy looked at the towering djiin that had sprouted from the lamp and said those damnable words, “I wish the world is like I imagined it.”

Ever since then, the world had been warped to his perception of reality. Storks carried babies to the houses of expecting parents. Fiendish anthropomorphic sea-life arose from the ocean, from what was once its home. (Where they had in fact once lived in a pineapple under the sea.) Sports teams were now populated with dogs who were professional quarterbacks, pointgaurds, and goalies. To say Gil disliked that eight-year-old boy was a massive understatement.

Gil angrily shut off the television and rose from his couch with a belabored groan. His back hurt from his long day at the fire station. There were only three types of occupation left in the world and he was too out of shape to be an astronaut and too uneducated to be a doctor. That left only fireman. Luckily most of his work today involved rescuing cats from trees and not running into raging infernos, but still, he missed his office job where he could sit on his ass all day and get paid for it.

He went to the freezer and pulled out another bottle of silly juice. It had once been whiskey, but Billy’s wish turned every type of alcohol into something called silly juice. *Fucking Billy.* He unscrewed the cap and downed half the bottle in a single slug. This would have been impossible with whiskey, but with silly juice it was no problem. Gil stumbled across the room, instantly affected by the drink. It didn’t make him drunk, it just made him dizzy, hiccup a lot, and hallucinate pink elephants.

Gil sat back down on the couch. He hoped that some part of his body or brain would remember the lingering response it used to have to whiskey and give him some long-forgotten buzz. It didn’t. That was a shame, he really needed some of the old liquid courage to help him with what he was about to do. Gil leaned over and picked up an old-service revolver that he had brought home with him from the war. It felt heavy in his hands and more than anything, he just felt tired.

He had nothing left. *Fucking Billy.* His wife had been taken from him. She had spent the last few weeks coughing. Gladys waved off his concern, telling him it was just a cough or maybe allergies. By the time that he managed to talk her into visiting a doctor, it was too late. She coughed viciously for a few minutes before pitching over dead. Doctors said it was the worst case of cooties they had ever since this side of the hemisphere.

Gil flicked out the chamber and counted the bullets. There were five and that was more than enough. He only needed one. He really wished the then-whiskey now-silly juice had lowered his inhibitions some. It would have been so much easier to put the barrel to his head if he was drunk beforehand. He wasn’t, but his mind was still made up. This was no longer a world for the old, this was no longer a place for the mature, this was no longer a world worth living in.

Gil paused for a moment as if decided what his final words should be. He chose them carefully. He smiled as he raised the revolver and put it under his chin. He fanned the hammer back and listened to the satisfying click. He took a deep breath, so deep his lungs expanded to twice the size of his body, and shouted out so the whole neighborhood could hear him.

“Fuck this happy horse-shit world of magic and wonderment!”

Gil squeezed the trigger. There was a bright flash and then pain. His death wasn’t instantaneous like he had hoped. He was disoriented and his face hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. Gil stumbled off of the couch and rushed towards the bathroom mirror.

He moaned, “Oh God no, oh God-”

He looked at himself in the mirror and felt a laugh bubble up from deep within him. He wasn’t laughing at the humor of the situation, but at its hopelessness. His face was covered in ash, his eyes were bugged out, and his hair was blown back like Daffy Duck in one of those old *Loony Toons* cartoon. Billy had even stolen the sweet reprieve of death from him.

*Fucking Billy.*

*Credited to EmpyrealInvective*