Things we do not wish on: milk teeth, sunflower seeds, paper dolls. Things we wish on: the classmates whose faces float up to the top of the candle, pooling in the wax’s liquid shine. We wish on individual eyelashes and chicken hearts, gel nail glue and burn scars bestowed by the comal. We wish on coins with rotting faces, dead presidents plated in copper and zinc, temporary tattoos that flake off on the shower floor. We wish on our dying cousins’ mall glamour shots—blue-black swirls and eyebrows high as a concrete overpass—and we wish most of all on the yearbook photos of our mothers with dark mouths and middle parts now out of fashion. We wish on cactus needles but not cactus paddles, we wish on each other’s dorsal venous networks and restless knuckles, we wish on bathroom mirrors our own and the school’s, we wish on scratch-off lotto ticket shavings and recurring sun motifs we see as signs of our own intrinsic light, we wish on our internet routers and the Santa Ana winds, we wish on pomegranates displayed on the dining room table, jeweled open like beads or blood or both, we wish on the baby angel’s baby hairs, we wish on rinds of stars but not on the stars themselves which we know to be indents of the days we endure, we wish on earring clasps and the pad’s sticky wings, we wish on everything but our own faces, too petrified to take the risk.
Elisa Luna Ady is a writer from Southern California. Her work has appeared in or received recognition from wildness, The Best Small Fictions, the Williams Prize in Literary Arts, and elsewhere. She is a current MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University, where she’s at work on a short story collection and a novel.
Twitter: tenderiswarmth
