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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.

Zack and Gina Dore commiserated with one another over the fact that they would never be able to return to the magical world of Ismara.

Nearly two months had passed since school started and they were surviving. Sort of. In Biology class, Mr. Trippifel boiled a frog to death. It didn’t know it was dying because the temperature rose so slowly. That’s me, thought Gina. Except I know.

Zack wrote a story entitled “The Cloud Shepherd.” Mrs. Simonson gave him a C and told him to “write about real life.” So he wrote about trout fishing, and got an A. “See what happens when you write about real life?” said his teacher. He’d never been trout fishing, but dead trouts sounded real, and real was what Mrs. Simonson wanted. Indeed, his life seemed about as real as a dead trout.

But then one night, Ismara called to them as they slept:

Gina was at a table by a window, grading papers. She was a lonely, friendless teacher with bifocals and graying hair and a small life, so she never looked up. But she suddenly felt compelled to glance out the window, and there outside was a cloaked figure in a golden helmet.

“Please! I can’t!” the man screamed.

“Can’t what?” spinster Gina shouted.

The man gestured desperately for her to come to him.

“But the window’s closed.”

“Please! Now! Before…”

“Before what?”

And then flames rose up and engulfed him. Gina ran to the window, but he was gone.

Zack dreamed he was among a crush of children, struggling along the edge of a chasm. Some managed to find their way to a bridge that led across the abyss, but others were grabbed by demons. Just as Zack stepped out onto the bridge, the two largest demons, Zack’ ex-friends Casey and Michael, let out a hideous laugh and hurled him downward, jeering, “Tell us a story, Zacky!”

His fall ended not in the pit but on the Dark Tinkurs’ stone platform. Once again an ashen-faced man hovered over him. Only this time the man was trying to put something into him, something that glowed intensely. Despite the man’s dragon-hide gloves, the thing began to melt his flesh. Zack watched in horror as it absorbed not just the man’s body but his humanity.

And then he awoke in a pile of sweat-soaked sheets, looked out at the pre-dawn sky, and saw it. “Whoa! Gina! Gina!” he yelled. “The double moon is back!”

“Yes, young Zachaeus,” a voice called from downstairs, “we have observed the lunar phenomenon to which you allude.”

Both siblings threw on their robes and ran out of their rooms, shouting…

“Aunt Aloysia!”

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Thoughts: Have you ever had an “Aunt Aloysia?” A person who turned your life upside down and re-shaped your destiny?

To read the next episode, click here.