Laura nearly shrieked when she saw herself Tuesday morning. She had been expecting her regular old face and her regular old body. Who wouldn’t? What she got was something similar but distinctly...prettier.
“Oh my god!”
Her eyes were bigger, brighter and bluer. Her hair was gorgeously wavy and a little lighter. Her skin was blemish free. It was a miracle.
It was…”My wish!”
“What’s going on?” Janette intruded on her sister’s excitement. Wondering what all the commotion was. “Woah, you look great today!”
“T-Thanks. It’s uhh. My new makeup I guess”
Laura wasn't sure why she had lied. As she was fairly certain that only magic could have caused this phenomenal change in her face overnight. But she needed to be absolutely sure that was the case before she started talking about it out loud. She didn’t want to sound crazy.
“Whatever you’re doing you look gorgeous. Give me the number of your stylist, jesus christ”
“Thanks! I gotta go to work. Have a nice day, Janette!”
“Ok, bye”
-
Laura smiled brightly as she sat on the bus. She’d felt like dressing up a bit and gone with a work appropriate button up blouse. To her surprise the changes had not been limited to her face. Her old clothes were fitting quite poorly now because her hip to bust to waist ratio had changed dramatically. No longer could she be described as something akin to an ironing board. She was actually pleasingly, femininely curvy. A real hourglass.
People were nicer to her too. Everyone seemed to want to say hi and men stood to offer her their seat on the bus.
One particularly confident young man even had the nerve to ask her for her number. Normally, that kind of thing would have made her totally uncomfortable. But somehow it seemed easy enough to just laugh it off and take a compliment today.
She was just so positively giddy. Magic, as it turns out. Was real. And something wonderful had happened to her. Though she did find that she now regretted not taking Circe seriously. She could have wished for something other than being the pretty version of herself. Not that she was complaining.
She skipped out the door as the bus came to a stop in front of her workplace.
“Thank you!” She chirped to the bus driver. Who seemed very pleased to have such a pretty girl paying attention to him.
-
“There’s something different about you” Manuel seemed totally fascinated with her today. Which was just another welcome change.
“Nope, same old Laura” She winked.
“Hmm, no. That’s not it. I know! You died your hair”
“You guessed it!”
That was untrue of course. But Laura couldn’t exactly come out and tell him that she had wished to be prettier. That would have sounded absurd. And it was close enough to the truth that she didn’t feel too weird about saying it.
Manuel’s tone was somewhat different today. Gone were the little jabs at Laura’s expense. Instead, they were replaced with questions. He asked about where she was from and her favourite movies and stuff. It wasn't quite flirting, but it was something like it. And Laura knew from experience that guys were often interested in that kind of conversation for distinctly flirtatious reasons.
Whatever was going on here, she loved it. Manuel was probably being nice. Probably. She might have had a pretty substantial attractiveness upgrade recently. But she still wasn’t quite on his level. Not far off though.
-
Once again, Laura busily cleaned the kitchen while looking out the window. Hoping perhaps that Circe would appear once again. She had said something to the effect of ‘see you soon’. So it wasn’t impossible.
As Laura flipped the last of the barstools. Circe seemed to materialize without warning. She sat, cool and seductive at an unoccupied booth. Already halfway into her ubiquitous cigarette.
“So, do you believe in magic now?”
“Circe! Oh my god. You’re back!”
“Indeed I am, darling. How have you been enjoying your wish?”
“It’s wonderful. Thank you!”
“Hm hm” Circe laughed just a bit. “Happy to help”
Laura skipped to sit next to her new friend. She was extremely excited to talk about the prospect of new wishes. Holding back only because she didn’t quite know what the social dynamic was here and she didn’t want to ruin a good thing by being too pushy.
“So, uh. How was your day?”
“You don’t want to ask about my personal life. Trust me”
“Oh, umm…”
“You want to ask me about more wishes, don’t you?”
Laura simply could not hide her giddy grin. It overpowered her entire face until it was her only discernible expression.
“Yes!”
“There’s just one thing that you should know. When you said you wanted to succeed in a man’s world? Well, I made you prettier. But also less intelligent, darling. Sorry I forgot to mention that earlier”
“What?”
Laura’s smile came crashing down. There was a catch to this after all. A fairly significant one as far as she was concerned. Had she just been too happy to notice that she wasn’t as smart today as she was yesterday?
“So…?”
“So what? You got what you wanted, right?”
“Y-yeah. But I wasn’t even sure what I was wishing for”
“Tell you what. I feel so terrible about all of this. I really do. So I can continue to give you this wish in little increments. How about it then, would you like to be just a little prettier?”
Laura was beyond apprehensive. She was already so gorgeous now. And she felt no less intelligent than ever. What would a little more even look like?
“O-ok. Make me a liiiitle bit prettier”
“You have to phrase it as a wish, darling”
“Ok. I wish I was a bit prettier. Just a bit”
“Done. See you soon”
A rainbow light flashed from within the sorceress.
Thu May 20 19:52:28 2021