Note: To read The Wishing Map from the beginning, click here.

The Wishing Map

Chapter Two: Aunt Aloysia (continued)

Previously: Gina and Zack continued to obsess over the mysterious Map.

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Almost two months had passed since Aloysia had brought the Map, and things had gradually returned to normal. Which meant that life was moving at the speed of tree sap. Zack still went into Gina’s room every day to look at the Map. Gina swore she’d lost interest, but the truth was she got it out every night; sometimes she even cried because she “missed” Ismara so much. Both could have drawn detailed copies from memory. It was more than just another objet mystére.

Zack was swimming at the Gutmacher Community Center pool when he spotted it. Ninety seconds later he was pedaling El Furioso as hard as he could, struggling to stay on the seat in his still-dripping swimsuit.

He crashed into the mud-room, blurred past the kitchen, and shot up the stairs to Gina’s room. “Did you see? The double moon is back!” He pounded illegally hard. Nothing. He poked his head in. Empty. He went in and pulled the Map out from under her tall white bed frame.

Gina came in ten minutes later, sipping an iced latte from Middleton Mall where she and Missy Herbert had spent the day window shopping (with Gina pretending to be a Swedish foreign exchange student). She found Zack standing on the Map. He was positioned over a blue triangle-in-a-circle symbol on a snow-covered ridge high in the Northern Mountains.

“Did you see it?” he shouted.

“The double moon? Yeah. So?”

“So…when Aunt Aloysia…I don’t know…it just seems like there might be some kind of, you know…”

“Move it, dufus.”

“It’s my Map, too.”

“Zaaaaaaaaaack!”

“Okaaaay, okaaaaaay. It’s just that…”

“What?” Gina softened. She knew what he was thinking, what they were both thinking.

“I just wish I could go there.”

A loud WHOOM erupted in Gina’s face. It was as though a tornado had come to life in front of her. The air shimmered and whirled, and something like a blue flame swirled up from the surface of the Map. She fell back onto the bed, spilling her latte on her patchwork comforter.

The ends of the Map flew up as if it had been sitting on top of a giant fan. It rose several feet into the air and began spinning. The air vibrated and pulsed; all of the colors in the room, indeed the air itself, seemed to be rushing into the vortex at the center of the Map.

Gina pulled herself backward across the bed and fell hard onto the oak floor on the other side. There was a loud ssssszzzztttt! She peered over the edge of the bed just as the Map stopped spinning and began slowly drifting back to the floor. The edges shivered, as though the last bits of an electric charge were passing out of them. Silence. Only then did she realize…

Zack was gone.

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Thoughts: Would you still desire the future you’ve imagined if you knew it would veer wildly and irrevocably off course?

To read The Wishing Map 11, click here!