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The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode, click here. To read the entire novel, begin here.

The big red-headed woman stepped up to the front entrance of the Dore’s house, clutching the carpet close to her side. She looked nervously about, and then peered through the sidelight window next to the cheerful green-trimmed door. So sweetly domestic, she thought. So blissfully unaware. She reached down and tried the knob. It was unlocked. “Aha!”

She started to enter, but just as she did, the door jumped off its hinges, folded in the middle, and began flapping about like a second grader’s drawing of a bird come to life. It dove menacingly at her, trying to snatch the carpet.

“No! You can’t have it!” The woman took off one of her gigantic shoes and hurled it at the door-bird. It swallowed the shoe, then started coughing violently, spitting out splinters–and then as quickly as it began, the incident ended. The door fell to the ground and twisted like a wash cloth ringing itself out. The woman gave it a sharp kick. It spat out the offending shoe, slithered toward the entrance, shimmied up the doorposts, and wiggled back into place, tame and sweetly domestic once again.

Meanwhile, Zack and Gina Dore were upstairs playing, or fighting. They were never sure just which. “Get off, Zack!” Gina grunted. It didn’t sound sincere because she was giggling when she said it; it was her angry giggle, not her having-fun giggle, but Zack couldn’t tell the difference. He had a wiry strength that belied his travel-kit size, and was now using that strength to keep his sister pinned down.

Gina was mad at Zack for everything he’d ever done—“I’m sick of your hair cooties, and I’m sick of your stupid spazzbot routine!”—and mad at him for things that had nothing to do with him—“And I hate cedar trees, and I hate furry animals, and I hate exams…”

None of this was true. She’d always loved cedar trees; and she’d ached to have a puppy or a kitten for as long as she could remember, even if they did make her eyes puff up like golf balls (unconsciously, Gina felt “the furry animals” had all gotten together and rejected her en masse); and, well, exams she could live without.

Zack did his killer cyborg impression: “Eeep-eeep-eeep! Gnar, gnar!”

Gina finally managed to throw him to one side, and roll away. “Get off!” she screamed.

“I’m off!”

“Yah! He vas on, but now he’s off,” a voice boomed in a thick Norwegian accent. The red-headed woman’s voice was, like everything else about her, big. She was well over six feet tall, and nearly as wide. She looked, smelled, and sounded like everywhere she’d ever been…

Which was everywhere.

To read the next episode, click here.

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Thoughts: Has anyone ever appeared at just the right moment and spun your life in a direction you hadn’t known it needed to go?