No, I didn't make a wish. That's the part nobody believes, so I'll say it first and get it out of the way.
My aunt Rosalind left me a storage unit in Elyria, unit 214, rent paid through August. Inside was mostly what you'd expect. A broken sewing machine. A box of Christmas ornaments gone brittle. A rolled-up rug that smelled like a basement, and a biscuit tin with a Scottish terrier on the lid, wedged behind the water heater she'd apparently also been storing, for reasons nobody explained to me.
Taped inside the lid was a typed sheet, yellowed, five numbered rules. I want to write them out exactly as I found them, because the way they change matters.
The box will grant one wish per person, once. Do not ask twice. It does not forget who has asked.
Whatever you wish for, something of equal weight leaves your life. This is not negotiable and it does not tell you what.
Do not wish for anything you cannot picture the absence of. If you cannot picture losing it, you have not thought hard enough.
Do not wish at night. The box answers faster then, and faster is worse.
if it starts talking back dont answer dont answer dont ans
That's where the typing stopped. The fifth line was typed over itself four times, the letters sitting on top of each other so thick the paper had gone shiny with ribbon ink. Under it, in pen, someone had written the same three words in a hand that got smaller each time, like they were trying to fit more of them into less space before something stopped them. I assume it was Rosalind, though her handwriting had never looked like that in any card she sent me. She used to sign her Christmas cards with a little drawn holly leaf instead of a period, every year, and I don't know why that's the detail that's stuck with me since.
I didn't wish. I want that clear. I put the tin in a shoebox in my closet and told myself I'd sell the unit's contents at the flea market behind the Tractor Supply on Route 20 come spring, tin included, and forget about it.
My husband found it in October.
He'd been laid off in July. We were three months behind on the mortgage by then, and I think he read those five rules the way you read a warning label on a ladder you're already climbing, one rung at a time, telling yourself the label is for someone else. He didn't tell me he'd opened it. I found out because the tin was sitting on the kitchen table instead of in the closet, lid off, catching the light funny. Two days later his father called to say Denny, my husband's younger brother, twenty-six, the one who still lived at home and mowed their mother's lawn every Saturday without being asked, had been in an accident on 20, right by the Tractor Supply. He said the settlement, once it cleared, would be more than enough to cover what we owed the bank.
My husband hasn't spoken since the funeral. Not a word, not to me, not to his mother, not to the priest who tried twice.
I keep the tin in the freezer now, wrapped in a plastic bag inside another plastic bag, buried under bags of frozen corn we never eat and probably should throw out. Some nights I hear the freezer door seal itself shut on its own, that soft rubber sound, like something inside has just finished settling.