prompt: close, title: a whole new world in misc. flash fiction

She wouldn’t mind it so much, if it wasn’t for the damn birds. Some would call it a blessing, she came to know it as a curse, but all in all, it wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the birds. She’d brought it on herself, but in her defense, when she asked for it, she’d only been a kid. Predicting unintended consequence is hard enough in adulthood, let alone at eleven, on that awkward cusp
between childhood and the terrible teenage years.

Her folks had taken her to Coney Island as a treat, a far cry from their northwestern New Jersey home, more bucolic Pennsylvania than blighted Bayonne. That afternoon, she saw an older man begging at a curbside no one else seemed to pay any mind, so she asked her father for a dollar to put in his cup. In a robust joyous voice that made no sense with his ragged visage, he said “Make a wish.” Her mind flashed through her boring middle-class exurbia and that terrifying fascinating giant city both, how neither quite fit, how the only places that made sense to her were in movies she watched when she was younger still. “I wish I was more like a Disney princess?” she blurted, just old enough for that to sound dumb even to her but nonetheless, the first thing out her mouth.

The man then disappeared as if he’d never been there but that seemed to be all, a frozen moment of strangeness in an already strange place. Later on, as they walked out of the arcades, however, she saw a rat carrying a pizza crust but instead of scurrying, it stopped, looked up at her and said “It’s a living” before absconding. She got her wish but would receive it in spades. What followed was a two-decade roller-coaster of beauty and terror and, most of all, stupidity.

She’d been married thrice, all handsome princes, one killed by wizards, one divorced her for an enchantress, one turned into a polar bear, the courts considered that an annulment. She’d killed four witches when there hadn’t been one in Sussex County since the sixteen-hundreds. At times, a Disney princess life had been thrilling but by her early thirties, it was simply just exhausting.

She was on her third date with a normal guy, no royal blood, picnic in a park, singing chickadees following her everywhere just like in the movies. Steve thought he was being cute when he asked “Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? Just like me do they long to be close to you?” “Steve,” she sighed, “it’s my curse.”

Just then, a flight of pigeons relieved themselves all over the gentleman caller, causing him to run away screaming, never speaking to her again. It’s a pity, she thought, she did like him but maybe it was for the best. Maybe it meant he wouldn’t be eaten by dragons like her last Tinder hook-up. Blessings in disguise and all that.