Materialized
What happens when a girl meets the boy of her dreams but the feelings begin to fade?
(NOTE: The following short story is based on a writing prompt that I used. The link for the writing prompt can be found here)
I came into this world in a flash of white light. With my eyes burning, my heart pounding in my chest, and seemingly every hair on my body standing at end, I took in the sight before me: A brown-skinned girl no taller than 5’3, her long, dark braids accented with gold rings and purple streaks draped against her shoulders. Her hazel eyes filled with equal parts awe and hesitation, and her ruby lips slightly agape.
“It has been done,” a commanding yet feminine voice boomed behind me. I jerked and spun around to view a woman clothed in a tattered white robe peering at the both of us. She was wielding a wooden staff and had sparks of electricity crackling around her body. I later learned that she was known as Damona, guardian of the astral plane and ruler of Earth’s reality, meaning that every naturally occurring phenomenon in the world — to gravity, the ocean’s tide or even the morphing of a caterpillar into a butterfly — is influenced by her. At will, with the use of her staff, she had the power to turn rain into lava, concrete into gelatin, or even a statue into a human being, flesh and all. “With imagination, the possibilities are endless,” she had told the girl who wished me into existence.
The girl’s name was Zara. A high school senior who had stumbled across a book of ancient spells during one of her routine trips to her school’s library, she had gotten the book for little more than entertainment, basically. She knew that all of the “spells” that she skimmed through were complete bogus and on par with all of the new-age bohemian nonsense she had been embarrassingly obsessed with during her freshman year. And she was right. The “Grand Book of Conjuring” was filled with fake knowledge and even faker rituals. Except for one ritual: the ritual that brought me into this world.
A pinch of salt, three drops of blood, and an utterance of the phrase “Esir ho ssetseirp” was all it took. Damona swiftly appeared in Zara’s bedroom, telling the young girl that she would grant her three wishes as a reward for her (accidental) summoning. Zara’s first wish was to be one of the popular girls at school; she had spent her first three-and-a-half years there being nerdy and awkward, so she took advantage of her good fortune and made sure that her last year would be filled with invites to parties from the school’s social elites instead of taunts and sneers from the cheerleaders.
Her second wish caused my “birth,” so to speak, as she had wished for “the perfect boyfriend.” And things were perfect, at first. Naming me “Emmanuel,” Zara couldn’t have been happier. Everyday after 4:00 pm, once she returned home from school and I’d sneak into her bedroom window following a day of wandering around the city to make sense of the strange world I had been spawned into, we’d talk until sunset and fall asleep while watching her favorite movies. A couple months later, once we figured out the details, we managed to convince her parents that I was a new student at the high school that she was dating so we wouldn’t have to hide my existence anymore. Thankfully, her mother and father didn’t ask many questions about me personally, they were happy enough that she had simply found a boyfriend.
Fast forward three months before graduation and things took a turn for the worst. It turned out that Clarence Sendell, the boy-next-door that Zara had had a crush on since middle school, had professed his mutual feelings to her as she was walking home one day. It was like some sort of switch in her brain had been turned off. No longer was she the warm, caring person that I had known for a short while. She became cold, distant, rude — accusing me of being boring and even “too perfect.” Eventually things came to a head and she decided to take matters into her own hands: Zara planned to summon Damona once more to use her third and final wish to erase me from existence.
I’ll never forget that night. Her parents were out of town for the weekend, so we were alone. I had just stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my waist when suddenly the whole house began to vibrate and I spotted a yellow light pouring into the hallway through the bathroom door I had left cracked open.
“No,” I thought to myself. “Not like this.”
Nearly slipping on the wet floor as I darted into Zara’s bedroom, Damona stood in a far corner with a look of stoic calm. Zara turned around and locked eyes with mine. We spoke no words to each other. For a span of about ten seconds, our watery pupils and twitching eyelids replaced our voices, communicating that we both knew what was about to happen and that neither of us wanted it to.
Taking a deep breath, Zara turned away from me and spoke to Damona. She was still going through with it.
“Damona, ruler of the hidden realm, for my final wish…”
“NOOO!!” I screamed, diving across the room. I had to stop her. If not, my entire being was about to be erased.
“…I want you to make Emmanuel — GET AWAY FROM ME, PLEASE!”
In mid-sentence, I tackled her to the ground in an effort to stop her from erasing me, covering her mouth with my hands, the tears from my eyes staining the front of her shirt.
A pause, then a declaration from the cosmic being.
“It shall be done.”
A flash of white light, and there I was laying in a back alley of an area I later learned was known as Times Square. Zara had successfully wished me out of her life, but I made sure that she didn’t end my life. With no social security number or documentation of any sort, I joined ranks with New York’s neglected citizens, surviving in squats, half-eaten meals and the (often rare) generosity of strangers.
It’s been almost ten years since that fateful night. I mostly spend my days at the public library, ironically. I taught myself how to read after about two months of being on my own and have worked a series of odd jobs: dishwasher, janitor, the doorman at an underground fight club, you name it. Any job that required nothing more than a warm body I gladly took with no questions asked. Nowadays I alternate between park benches and homeless shelters to lay my head. It’s been a hard life, but it is a life, period. Which was something that was almost taken from me.
To the average New Yorker riding on the subway or power walking down the street, I appear as a bum, a common street urchin to avoid at all costs, little do they know that my story is one of a kind.
Last summer, I could’ve sworn that I had spotted Zara shopping on Fifth Avenue with a man and a baby that she was pushing in a stroller. The man was no doubt Clarence Sendell, clad in a sharp polo shirt and khakis; I’m sure he had probably become some hotshot trader on Wall Street. Both he and Zara were sporting wedding bands, burning my heart with the fact after I had been cast out of her life, she just simply moved on.
At that moment, I was rifling through a trash bag that had been left out on the curb in an effort to collect some cans to take to the recycling center for some spare change. As they walked past, I looked up at Zara’s face and saw nothing more than my own reflection in the lenses of the designer sunglasses she wore.
To this day, I like to believe that she recognized me.
