The Wishboard Between Us

The board was heavier than it looked. She had to brace one knee against the floorboards while she lifted it, and when she finally hooked it onto the nail, the plaster gave a small, complaining crack.

“There,” she whispered.

The board occupied the only clear stretch of wall above her desk. It made the room feel different - not larger, exactly, but expectant. Like a door pretending to be furniture.

Wanda climbed onto her chair and straightened it. The cork brushed her fingertips.

Warmth spread through her hand.

She jerked back.

For a moment, she blamed the radiator. Then she touched the board again. The heat remained, gentle and steady, like skin warmed by sunlight.

“Old wood,” she muttered, though the board was cork and the warmth had come from its center.

She turned to the pile of images scattered across her bed.

Some were clipped from magazines. Others she had printed at the library, carefully choosing photographs that made her chest ache in a hopeful way: a couple walking through a misty pine forest, their hands linked between them; two figures dancing beneath fairy lights in a living room; a wooden dock vanishing into a pink dawn; paper lanterns rising over a dark field.

At the center lay the picture she had been most embarrassed to print.

A man stood in profile against twilight, his face hidden in blue-violet shadow. He was tall - six foot four, she had written in the margin - and broad through the shoulders without looking cruelly carved. His hair brushed the back of his neck. One hand rested on the waist of the woman beside him.

The woman was only a silhouette, but Wanda had imagined herself there so often that she could feel the shape of her own smile.

She picked up a gold star sticker and placed it beside the image.

“No games,” she said. “No pretending to care. Someone who loves people when no one is watching.”

She pinned up a handwritten card.

Laughs easily.

The pin slid into the cork with a soft, satisfying click. Wanda added another.

Will choose gentleness when anger would be easier.

Then another.

Curious. Brave. Loves wild places. Notices small things.

She paused over the final card. The words had taken her longest.

Stays.

Wanda’s fingers tightened around the paper.

That was the part she could never explain without sounding foolish. She did not need a grand romance that made everyone jealous. She needed someone who would not disappear the moment she became inconvenient, sad, complicated, or real.

She pinned the card beneath the twilight photograph.

The cork warmed again.

This time the heat traveled up the pin and into her fingertip. Wanda gasped and dropped the tack. It struck the desk, bounced once, and rolled beneath a book.

She stared at the board.

Nothing moved. Rain whispered against the window. Somewhere in the house, a pipe clicked.

Wanda laughed shakily. “Fine. Dramatic.”

She knelt to retrieve the pin, but when she rose, the twilight image had shifted.

Not much. The man’s hand seemed to rest lower on the woman’s waist. The angle of his head had changed, as though he were looking toward Wanda instead of the horizon.

Her breath caught.

She leaned closer.

The image was still. Ordinary ink, glossy beneath the lamplight. Yet she could have sworn the man’s shoulder had moved.

Wanda reached for the corner of the photograph.

The moment her nail touched it, a sharp sting pierced her thumb.

She pulled away. A bright bead of blood appeared.

“Oh, come on.”

She pressed her thumb to her lips. The taste of iron spread across her tongue. The board’s warmth faded, leaving the cork cool and rough beneath her hand.

For several seconds she stood perfectly still, thumb tucked against her palm.

Then she looked at the photograph again.

The man was facing away.

Wanda told herself it had been the rain, the dimness, the desperate tricks of a lonely mind. She had spent too many evenings inventing conversations with strangers she saw on buses. She had built entire futures from a smile exchanged at a bakery counter.

But she did not remove the picture.

Instead, she added more.

A Polaroid of a laughing couple went near the top. A photograph of intertwined hands beneath golden sunlight went below it. She placed the image of a greenhouse beside the words loves living things, then tucked a tiny paper ocean beneath the twilight scene.

On a blank card, she wrote, Love is not a cage.

Her pen hovered.

After a moment, she added, But it is a promise.

The board seemed to absorb the sentence.

Wanda stopped breathing.

The ink glimmered once, so faintly she wondered if she had imagined it. A thread of gold traveled along the letters, then disappeared into the cork.

She stepped backward and struck the edge of her bed.

The mattress springs groaned.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The question sounded absurd. She had no one to ask but the board, and the board had no mouth.

Still, the room felt less empty than it had before.

She gathered the remaining photographs. One showed a couple sitting on the hood of a vintage car beneath a sky crowded with stars. Another showed a cottage door veiled in roses. Wanda pinned them carefully, arranging the images so they formed a path toward the twilight silhouette.

At the very center of that path, she placed a small antique-looking card she had made herself. A silver moon, a ring of stars, and two words written in dark blue ink:

Destined Harmony.

The last pin was shaped like a tiny star.

Wanda pressed it into the photograph.

The board shuddered.

Not the wall. Not the nail. The board itself.

A pulse ran beneath the cork, lifting the photographs by their corners. The fairy lights around her mirror flickered on without being touched. Blue light spilled across the room, turning the rain-streaked window into a sheet of trembling glass.

Wanda froze with her hand still on the star-shaped pin.

The man in the twilight picture moved.

His head turned.

Only a fraction. Enough for the line of his cheek to catch the violet light. Enough for Wanda to see that his skin was olive-toned and his hair fell in dark, loose waves to his shoulders.

His eyes remained hidden in shadow.

But his hand tightened around the woman’s waist.

Wanda made a small sound and stumbled away from the wall.

The movement stopped.

The room returned to its ordinary dimness. The fairy lights went dark. The photographs settled flat.

She stood with one hand over her mouth.

Then she crossed the room in three quick steps and grabbed the star pin.

It would not come out.

She pulled harder. The metal bit into her fingers. The photograph tore slightly beneath it, but the pin did not shift. Wanda braced both feet against the desk and tugged until her shoulder burned.

Nothing.

“Let go,” she whispered.

The star grew warm.

Pain flashed through her thumb, sharper than before. Wanda cried out and released it. A thin red line appeared across her skin, as if the pin had kissed her.

Beneath the photograph, something had appeared in the cork.

Letters.

They were so small she had to bend close, her hair sliding over her shoulder.

Not printed. Carved.

Wanda traced the first word without touching it.

Bound.

Her mouth went dry.

The rest of the inscription curved beneath the image, half-hidden by the frame.

By wish, by image, by heart - The final words vanished under the photograph.

Wanda lifted the edge carefully. The paper resisted, tugging against the star pin as if the board itself were holding it in place.

She could have torn the picture. She could have cut it free. She could have taken the board from the wall and smashed it against the floor.

Instead, she left her fingers resting on the man’s shadowed face.

The warmth returned.

This time, something answered from inside the image.

A breath.

Barely audible. A soft exhale, close to her ear.

Wanda snatched her hand away.

The photograph showed only the couple beneath the violet sky. Yet the man’s face was no longer turned toward the horizon.

He was looking at her.

Fear should have sent her running. It should have made her rip the board down and carry it outside into the rain.

But beneath the fear, something tender had opened - something dangerously like recognition.

Wanda swallowed and leaned closer.

“Are you real?”

The man in the photograph did not move.

The star pin shone faintly between them.

Wanda glanced at the bedroom door. Beyond it waited the ordinary house, the ordinary night, the life in which no one had ever stayed long enough to become hers.

When she looked back, the stranger’s shadow seemed darker, deeper.

A question formed before she could stop it.

“If I keep wishing,” she whispered, “will you come out?”

The star warmed beneath her gaze.

And somewhere inside the corkboard, something knocked once.

End of chapter one. 19 more chapters in the full book.