altruism
4/26/26 - NYC Midnight Short Story Round 1 Submission! Prompt was Political Satire / Panelist / Moral Compass. Admittedly, I don’t love writing in the political satire genre, and this was my third time being assigned to it LOL. Still, after a yearlong break from NYC Midnight challenges, it was nice to do a short term assignment again with such a tight turn around!! My focus this time around was zeroing into a moment, though I do think it meant my writing was particularly inefficient.
A whisper: “Are you ready?”
“Born ready.” Mai winces as the stage assistant whips their head towards her. Too loud. Her mouth is dry. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, Mai scrubs at residue–dead skin, flaking bits of lipstick, the lingering stale-sour smell of bile.
The interviewer–who actually never formally introduced herself to Mai, but who doesn’t know Melissa Messy?–squeezes her hand. For a moment, Mai’s clammy skin slides against a warm palm, lotioned in a sort of powdery-white-soap. Clean. Inoffensive. The lotion probably came out of a matte tube, which came out of an overly designed box made to look simple, which came out of a company with a mission statement like “Lotion but Better…For Everyone.” Y’know, because you were saving the world by buying it.
The image reassures Mai. Her own nails are bitten down to the rind. What does she know? With Melissa’s straight-spined self-assuredness, she must be in good (and lotioned!) hands. She’ll ask all the right questions so that Mai will say all the right things.
A jingle crescendoes through the auditorium. Melissa winks at Mai as she steps out, turning towards the audience. Full curls bounce behind her.
“Hello everyone!” Melissa says, perfectly timed with the fading tail-end of her jingle. “It’s great to see you again! Welcome! Welcome! Coming to you live, as always, from New! York! City!!!” She pauses, grinning, as applause and cheers fill the room. “Now, I know it’s not everyday that we do a panel of guests, but there’s so much happening this week, that we just had to squeeze in a few more. You know…”
Melissa’s eyes swivel towards the wings of the stage. They land on Mai. The weight of her awareness feels strange after it was just scattered and disseminated to a general public, now once again refocused on–on–
“Your cue,” Verity Cruz mutters from behind her, nudging her forward. “She said your name.”
Mai stumbles onto the stage.
“Mai Zhang!” More applause. Melissa joins in with claps that are tiny and enthusiastic, the palms and fingers rigid against one another, humming-bird quick. Suddenly, Mai is across the stage and finds her hands once again encased in the safety of World-Saving-Soap-Lotion. “The youngest scientist to ever save humanity!”
Mai blushes. “Oh, that’s not–”
“Joining us is, of course, Verity Cruz!” Melissa Messy’s attention sheds off Mai and reassembles itself on the actress now making her way across the stage. She’s statuesque, with shining brown hair pulled over one shoulder. Her silver dress shimmers, flush, against a slim waist. “Wow, looking incredible, babe. Verity is also playing a scientist who saves us all, but, more than that, she moonlights as a badass-kickass superhero too!”
Verity smiles at the audience as she sits. Mai, realizing she’s just been staring and standing like a bird, scrambles to get into her seat.
“And, to round us out, her co-star, Tom Cruise!”
Applause.
Melissa takes her seat. Mai is fixated on the errant strand of blonde hair that curls against the woman’s cheek, sticking to glossy, petal pink lips. She resists the urge to wipe at her mouth again.
“So.” Here, Melissa puts on a severe countenance. “Mrs. Zhang.”
“Miss,” Mai corrects, on instinct. Wincing, she adds, “I’m not married.”
“Oh.” A tight smile, that piercing full attention bearing down on Mai. “Of course not! You’re still so young!” Melissa laughs behind her interview cards, glancing at the camera as though sharing a private joke. She glances down at the cards again, gasping. “Seventeen! And, just last week, you found the cure to everything!”
“Technically, not everything.” Mai chuckles nervously. “There’s still so much–”
“We’re so lucky to get the full scoop from you now, before you get all PR-trained like the other young celebrities. Isn’t that right, Verity? Remember when you were seventeen, freshly cast in your first big franchise film? Interviewing you was a delight.”
Verity Cruz giggles. “I was a mess. I was just scrambling to say something meaningful, or anything that would make me seem wiser than I actually was.”
“Girl, I’m still doing that now!” Melissa fans herself with the interview cards, putting on an air of self-deprecating acceptance. Everyone laughs with her.
Tom Cruise says something funny. There’s more laughter.
“Now look at you! I’m so proud of you, Verity.” Melissa leans over, past Mai, to put her hand on the actress’s knee. Verity covers that hand and nods sympathetically. “We’ve come so far!”
“So far,” Verity agrees.
Melissa leans back, wiping at her eyes with the edge of her sleeve.
“Just to get us back on track…Mai, your discovery is incredible. We can solve world hunger, war, anything.” Mai nods, for lack of anything better to do. Should she correct her? But the moment passes, and Melissa steamrolls on, saying, “Verity, if your character were in that position too, what would they wish for?”
Verity crosses one knee over the other, the silver perfectly draping over her legs. She primly interlaces her fingers as she answers, “Well, obviously, the imminent danger in the film is the galactic overlord. I think…you know, being realistic, it’s for a way to defeat him. Wishes have to be specific and all that, right? It’d be out of character for her to wish for everything when the root of all her current problems is…you know, him.”
She takes a deep breath and looks down at her lap, telegraphing introspection. “For her, it’s not about solving all problems. It’s about facing her demons so she can save the world. And that’s all any of us can really do, right?”
A slow clap from Melissa, which is then joined in by the rest of the crowd. Verity ducks her head good-naturedly, and adds, “Of course, that’s my character’s answer. I wouldn’t be able to do something so selfish. My moral compass wouldn’t allow it; you know I’m an ENFJ.”
“Speak for yourself! I’m an ESTP!” They laugh together. Tom Cruise joins in.
“So what about you, Mai? What would you wish for?” Melissa asks, as the audience’s applause dies down. She says it teasingly, riffing on Verity’s answer, “Any demons we should know about before you save the rest of us?”
Mai opens her mouth–
A week ago, Mai had found the wishing well by complete accident.
She’s a scientist in name only, the news having taken the incident and running with it. After all, how could a random girl from Texas have found something so mystical, so sought-after, that had eluded the world’s best scientists for months? It would be easier to call her a prodigy than it would be to admit that their most exalted academics failed to predict what counted most when it came to miracles–the possibility of being struck by pure, dumb happenstance.
It wasn’t a meteor crater, like most theorized. It wasn’t even a magical, restorative spring. Mai had stumbled on a well where it shouldn’t have existed. Overnight, right in her backyard, an old stone well had appeared in the tulips.
Her parents were out of town that weekend. Mai did the one thing any teenager would do with her bright, youthful arrogance and investigated the well herself.
The summer sun had been a swollen, heavy thing in the sky. Heat had penetrated through her thin tank top. Looking down the barrel of the well, directly at the water’s placid, dark surface, Mai saw only the sun and herself.
It was instinctual, the wish. The same sort of compulsion that inspired humans to toss coins into a fountain, rub gold statues, pattern match for lucky numbers. Superstition and faith sustain us while we wait for miracles, those blinding and random strokes of lightning. Mai had stared at her own thin face, blinking owlishly at her reflection, and thought, man acne sucks. She closed her eyes, clasping her hands together.
Her first wish: I wish I could look different.
Her second wish, upon seeing her reflection ripple before her–features popping out into fuller lips and enlarged eyes, face contorting to a size that was abnormal on her teenage body, straight dark hair unfurling out into blonde curls–was panicked: Wait, undo that, ew.
Mai hurled herself back as soon as the changes took place again. She landed hard next to the well, panting. Hurriedly, her hands patted the sides of her face, the skin still shifting. She felt for the familiar, shallow slope of her nose. The bone, which had jutted out into a higher bridge, settled back into place, with a neat little pop!
All she could hear was her own pounding heart. Possibilities darted through her mind. The magnitude of the well dawned on Mai.
This…this was beyond her. It thrilled her. It scared her.
Mai was a good kid. She did the first thing she could think of, redistributing the weight of that decision to the only higher power she trusted – her parents. Then, her parents, thinking the same, had dialed 911. Then, the police called higher up the chain. So on and on until the decision was no longer Mai’s alone, now carried by people more important and smarter and wiser than her. Before long, her house was seized and quarantined by the government, and that was that.
She could sleep peacefully. Mai had done the right thing, the responsible thing. It was a stellar story: backyard teenage scientist turned altruist, giving her wish to the world.
(In Mai’s dreams, the well stands alone. There is no sun in her dreams. The well says nothing, for it is not sentient. Still, there is no better way to describe it besides that it stands, existing and expectant, waiting for her to peer into it again.)
Back on stage, Melissa’s attention is still on Mai. It is patient, like a prison guard’s sweeping glance through a panopticon, or a lifeguard’s searching gaze across the pool, or an angel casting judgement. Thousands of eyes. Looking for a critical misstep. The pressure builds, not just from Melissa, but everyone through the screen.
When nothing comes out of Mai’s mouth, the question is repeated, softer: “What would you wish for, Mai?” Melissa also, as luck has it, finally realizes that there’s a hair stuck in her lipgloss and tries to subtly pry it out while she waits for Mai’s answer.
Mai takes a deep breath.
She thinks: You can do it, Mai.
She thinks: You can say the right thing, just once, as long as it is true.
She thinks: There is no wrong answer here, because I know my heart is in the right place. I found the well because my compass, my heart, is mine.
Mai says: “I…I don’t know. Really, I don’t think I’ll actually get a say. Like, sure, I found it, but if we only get one…one really good wish...that just feels like a lot of pressure on me? It has to count. If we can do something, we should, right? But how can we do everything? Is it fair for me, or a group of people, to use that one resource for the rest of us?
“A wish changes reality, so we’re kind of getting philosophical here instead of scientific, but what would be the objectively right thing to do? I think we can try to answer that until the end of the world anyway. So for me to make a decision...that seems kind of unfair. Like, that’s a lot of power.
“Maybe to wish for non-existence? Or something? So we don’t have to make that decision in the first place.” Mai shrugs. “Sounds the most painless.”
Silence. Melissa puts her hand up to her browbone, as though moved and shielding her tears from the audience. Mai’s heart sinks. From her angle, she can tell that Melissa Messy is rolling her eyes. Verity picks at a hangnail on her thumb, peeling the skin around a manicured nail.
Then, Tom Cruise breaks the tension with a joke. Good-natured.
The crowd laughs, and Mai relaxes
