The Wishing Well
Fiction by Liam Smith
The air of the park smelled fresh and clean and almost nutty. There was a note of spice in the air, a tingling in the nostrils courtesy of rosemary and, perhaps, a curry plant. The sky was blue and the park was dry, but a shower the day before had brought lustre to the leaves and grass that might have started to wilt without the hydration. Birds—sparrows, starlings—whistled in the air.
Jamie sat down on the edge of the wishing well and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
It had been bad news then. The worst news. Everything would change now and nothing would be the same.
He fiddled with the cigarette box, turning it up and around in his hands as if it were a Rubik’s Cube. He opened the top, closed it with a papery click and opened it again. He didn’t withdraw a cigarette.
Jamie was twenty-six. He worked as one of three rotating bar staff at the Pail of Water, about a fifteen-minute walk from his flat. He didn’t live with his parents anymore, but he didn’t live with anyone else either. There was a girlfriend—possibly. It was early days. That might be all they would ever be.
The park was a quiet place, a place for getting a man’s head straight. Jamie liked to cut through here on his way to work and enjoy the peace.
He stopped playing with the cigarette packet and placed it on the stone blocks of the well beside him. It was an old well; he knew that. Medieval, one of the afternoon regulars had told him at the Pail: as old as William the Conqueror. Another had disagreed. Older than that. Bronze Age. Jamie had been mildly interested. He wouldn’t have gone to look up the well in a library but there was nothing wrong with learning a thing or two for free. Bronze Age, the doddery old drinker had insisted, kneading a crest of foam from his moustache. Been there since the druids.
Jamie had nodded. That’s why they came here, the old boys with no jobs and no living wives. They had nothing better to do than shuffle down the pub and wile away their days chatting about inconsequential stuff and drinking slow halves of bitter. Retirement must be wonderful.
Jamie sighed. Retirement. No point thinking about that anymore.
He reached into his jacket pocket, past old religiously-bought lottery tickets, and pulled out an envelope. It was already open; he had torn up the flap back in the GP’s office to see if its contents corroborated what the young doctor was telling him. Words on the letter had jumped out even as the doctor’s soft, accented voice washed over him. Words like small cell. Stage 2A. Words like—
Cancer.
Cancer of the lungs.
It was a devil of a thing.
The devil—now there was a story. What had the old boys back at the Pail been saying about the well?
It’s never been filled in, said one of them. Not since those druids dug it out before the Roman times.
Norman, interjected the other.
Older than that. Another mouthful of ale, another strain of the moustache. Older than that. They can’t fill it in because then the devil wouldn’t be able to hear your wishes.
‘Surely we should be sealing the devil in?’ Jamie had suggested.
No. The devil’s a fiery old snake. Like the inside of a pie. If you don’t put hole in the top of a pie, what happens?
Jamie couldn’t remember ever baking a pie.
It gets too hot. It blows up.
‘Like why you put holes in the plastic of a microwave meal?’
I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But that heat, that devil, he needs outlets. Pores, in the earth. To breathe. And to listen to the wishes.
Jamie looked at his envelope again and slid the twice-folded sheet of A4 from its tattered opening. There was a little flyer too: What Happens Next. Jamie put that one back in the envelope and unfolded the diagnosis letter again. He read it slowly, in its entirety. Then he put that back in its envelope and placed it beside the cigarettes on the wall of the well.
He hadn’t told anyone about the first time he’d coughed up blood in the storeroom of the Pail. It had given him a start, seeing the bright spatter on the back of his hand, already cooling after leaving the warm foamy nest of his lungs. What had he thought then? Scratched throat. Bleeding gums. A lung infection, at worst. He should have cut down then, down even from the five-a-day he still enjoyed. But he hadn’t believed it could be as bad as...
The doctors had discussed it, but couldn’t be sure without x-rays and tissue samples. It was rare in someone his age, even for a smoker. Could it be congenital? asked a doctor. Jamie had shrugged.
His parents. He would have to tell his parents.
Jamie picked up the packet of cigarettes and began to turn it again, clockwise, anticlockwise, over, under. They would be distraught. His mother would cry openly, hug him, tell him he would be okay. His father’s eyes would swim with tears that were forbidden to fall, and he would grip his shoulder and tell him they would help in any way they could.
They would talk about the treatment.
Jamie put the cigarettes on his knee and withdrew the flyer from the envelope. It detailed what he could expect: chemo. Medication. Surgery. As well as the side-effects—nausea and sickness, muscle entropy. Hair loss.
Jamie had a vision of himself, then. Crouched on the floor of his parent’s bathroom, frail limbs spidered beneath him, hairless skull shaking as he vomited out spitty strings of blood onto the white porcelain.
But he couldn’t not tell them.
The not-yet-girlfriend too. He would have to break it off. He wouldn’t want to burden her.
Jamie looked at his watch. He saw a glimpse of his wrist in a year’s time: bone-thin, his watch loose like a medieval manacle. He blinked the vision away. He was due at work in just over an hour.
He could call in sick. You couldn’t get much sicker. But no. He felt fine—that was the hardest thing. Knowing what he carried inside but feeling fine. A little short of breath sometimes. Exhausted occasionally for no reason. Bloody coughs.
The old boys at the pub—they’d made it to their seventies without any of this. It wasn’t fair. Even if the treatment was successful, the toll on his body would be too severe to grow old. He wished it were gone; wished the cancer had never touched him.
(listen to the wishes)
Jamie looked up. The park was bright, warm, fresh. The sun smiled down over full, bushy trees. He didn’t believe in the devil, nor in wishes. But he had found himself here at the wishing well, nevertheless.
Jamie pulled a cigarette from the packet and stood up.
The well did look old. It was not a fairytale well with a pastel-coloured roof and rustic pail. Nor was it a restored well, converted into a charity collection box. It was made of weathered grey stones, dry-fitted together. The walls of the well were about a foot and a half thick; thick enough to sit on, if you didn’t mind sitting with your back to the open shaft. The opening was about two feet across, just wide enough to fall down. The air above it seemed cold.
Jamie popped the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. He put the cigarette packet down on the well, next to the envelope. Then he fumbled in his pocket, extracting a fifty-pence piece. He removed the cigarette from his mouth, pressed it in his palm next to the coin, and held his closed hand over the well.
A wish? He couldn’t think of anything he wished for more, or would ever wish for more, ever again. He wished he had never started smoking. That whatever cell had first mutated and multiplied had died before it could split itself in two in the corrugated webbing of his lungs. That the tumour had never spread. That he had never coughed up the hot red wreckage of its poison onto the back of his hand. That he would never have to tell his parents that they might outlive him, or tell his not-quite-girlfriend that it was over, before he became a flayed, hairless creature with spindly limbs and vomit-corrupted breath. He wished he had not developed cancer and no cost was too great to reverse it.
Jamie opened his fist and let the cigarette and the coin fall into the mouth of the well. His ears strained for the sound of a splash in the water below, and he realised he had closed his eyes. There was silence. No birds tweeting, no leaves ruffling in the breeze. Silence, for too long. Then—
A splash. Faint, like it had come from the centre of the earth. It was borne on a sweep of cold air, as if the impact of the coin had sent a spiralling draught up the old stone channel.
Jamie’s eyes stayed closed. The cool air pried at his eyelashes, at his hair. He felt legions of goosebumps pop up on his arms and he shuddered. Like a child in bed at night, afraid of something lurking in the shadows, he kept his eyes closed. The air swept his face again, in waves, like breath.
Then hands touched his body. Cold hands, like fungus or seaweed, laid flat upon his chest. He felt the pricks of nails over his heart. And the hands were pushing, not against his skin but through it, through the flesh and cartilage and veins and bones, into the warm bubbly meat of his lungs, gripping them tight, squeezing them, choking them. He felt the tar melt away first, evaporating, so that all that remained was the tumour. He could feel it, ingrained in the forks and passages of his air tunnels, spidering through his core. It hurt as the cold hands pulled at it, extracted it from his folds and creases, released him from its hold.
And then the hands were withdrawing. The rhythmic air still breathed into his face, but he could not open his eyes. Whatever was there, holding the sticky black tangle of dripping cells… whatever it was, the sight of it would drive him mad.
He waited until the cool air was gone from his face, and the warmth of the sun had returned. Then he fell to his knees and opened his eyes.
The park was fresh and balmy. The trees swayed in the breeze, hosting parties of birds. He had caught his fall on the wall of the well. The stones were cool beneath his palms.
The cigarettes and the envelope were gone.
Jamie stood, slowly. He felt light and healthy. He breathed in the clean air, held it, and exhaled.
An image came to him, like a memory that had just been triggered. He saw the world as if at the end of a long tunnel; a telescope perhaps, or a well. The image came with feelings: he felt exhausted, beyond respite. Naked. Flayed. From behind him came the cracks of whips and the rushing of a thousand years.
Then the image was gone, and he was back in the park.
He looked at his watch: just in time to greet the regulars at the Pail. He started to walk.
Behind him, a faint splash echoed up the wishing well, as if something were sliding back into the cold water at its base.
About the Author
Liam Smith is a fiction writer and performance poet from the south of England. His work incorporates motifs of the historical and gothic, and has been published in journals. Two of his stories have been adapted into short films.
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Thanks for the opportunity to share this story 🦇