prompt: soar, title: what you wished for in "the next big thing" flash fiction

There was a bright flash of light, well, light and not-light, really. The realm of the lower angels is seen partially in the ultra-violet, according to Mitzi via Frank’s second-hand recollections, so the force of the magic was a burst of white and sharp lavenders and other colors humans don’t have any words for. Had Frank been fully conscious, he would’ve seen some of what Mitzi could not, as sasquatches can see further into what we define as UV, but he had not been lucid at that point. He was barely conscious, on the edge of coma, a handful of minutes from bleed-out and death.

When her vision cleared, the first thing she looked to was Frank who was indeed miraculously fully healed, not even scarred, all the tubes gone though still strapped to the slab. The pain was still leaving him, but he was no longer delirious or mortally-wounded, just grimacing as if just starting to rouse from a particularly fitful sleep. She exhaled a breath of deep relief and, in that exhalation, realized how different she too felt.

Her face felt wrong, her breathing seemed just slightly off. She spun to some nearby reflective surface and looked at herself. She no longer had her Ashkenazi nose, it had been smoothed out into something looking far more Anglo-Saxon. She felt it with her fingers and could pick up on some very faint scars, the kind you could only find on yourself. The magic had changed her too but not in her genetic essence, it had retrofitted a competent nose job upon her. And that was not all. She was now obviously thinner, perhaps thirty or thirty-five pounds thinner, the weight that exercise never helped with. Feeling her stomach under the shirt, she could barely trace lines from laparoscopic liposuction too. Shifting her body as such, she felt an odd numbness in both of her breasts, even though her bosom had already been full, the conjuration had given her two saline implants, taking her up from a C-cup to a D.

She understood now what those magics had “fixed” about her, it transformed her from her unconventional natural beauty into something that would be better suited to fame. Ever so slightly fake but conventionally appealing, like the slightly-less stunning best friend of the pin-up girl lead in a terrible but terribly-popular situation-comedy.

Worst of all, she could no longer feel her connection with the divine. The waves of her hands no longer traced sigils in ancient Hebrew, they just cut through the air. She could no longer hear the distant soar of angel wings on the higher planes. She could still see fuzzy auras of magic around the things that now were changed, just enough to remind her what she lost. The cost for saving Frank was becoming the thing she used to wish she could become. Y-H-W-H’s sense of irony, still and forever undefeated.

Still, it was nothing compared to how her final spell “fixed” the scientist.

Last updated May 31, 2022