=What if=

What if we sought out the marvelous in everything we did and said? These words pass through my mind on a breeze that rises out of nowhere. There they go, cartwheeling down the beach, taking something of me with them. What if I decided to chase them? What if the weatherworn bench on which I'm sitting were to become a great loping wolf, terrorizing the sunbathing crowds as it turns it's huge yellow-eyed head, open-jawed and slavering, one way and then another? What if the wolf carried me off, licked me between the legs with a tongue long as a man's forearm, and then mounted me? What if I were leaning over an empty window frame at the time, my elbows propped on the blistered sill of a one-walled house, gazing into an electric rain? What if all the houses around me were dissolving like aspirin? What if ghosts were pouring their faces into the trees?

What if an old man came to you one day with a key that could open the painful shackle that's been locked on your left ankle since the day you were born? What if he tells you "I have given this key to countless princesses just like you from the beginning of time and instead of using it to free themselves they have worn it instead on a delicate chain around their necks for protection against bad luck and evil until the day they died. On the night that marks the one-year anniversary of their deaths, I break into their graves. I snatch the key back from where it rests among their scattered bones and I give it to the next princess." What if you look down and see the key thunking against the rotted sill as the wolf is fucking the daylight out of you?

What if you get to say what happens next?

What if...?
What if...?
What if…?

Go ahead. Try it.

It's like making three wishes. Only better.