Picnic blanket sprawled under her, a dark veil sparkling with glitter above, the night was perfect. At least that’s what Anna thought when she leaned against her beloved boyfriend’s shoulder. Caspian had spread a picnic below the stars for two. She grabbed his arm, identifying a silver streak catapulting across the sky. A shooting star! It was time to make a wish. Not that she believed it would come true.

“I wished I was the only person in existence,” She thought. Of course, she meant herself and Caspian. As if the star had granted the wish, it twinkled before fading into nothingness, a sight that brought the two lovers closer together, huddling in the night breeze. Candlelight flooded the surrounding air, a warm summer night’s breeze wafting through. Anna sat there, listening to her boyfriend’s heartbeat, attempting to match her breathing to his.

Shattering the moment, a phone wailed, eager to interfere. It was Anna’s curfew time, they had to get back. Being neighbors, it was a short walk home from the park. Usually, this trail was quite uneventful. Today it wasn’t.

Deep in conversation, it took a longer time than it should have to see the large red and black lump sprawled across the sidewalk. Finally, Anna glanced up and saw it. Caspian, still gazing at her kept wondering, why the shocked face? Her hands began to shake before she let out an ear-shattering scream of absolute terror. The light of her cell phone highlighted the grotesque shadow of a dead body, coating the sidewalk with pools of deep red blood. Unlacing their shivering hands, the lover’s panicked faces stared in shock at one another.

Fingers trembling she dialed 9-1-1. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. Flashes coated the night sky. What was this ocean of panic trimming the edges of sirens? Red and blue warped into pulsating purple, black and white police cars, men in uniforms babbling into walkie-talkies. The dead man. She knew him. This was a kindly old man who lived across the road from her, whose wife always baked cookies for neighborhood children. She heard small sections of conversations bursting from the area where police officers swarmed.

“… third one tonight ”

“-…unknown cause of death.”

“Very strange…”

“-…in the last twenty minutes ”

“ Mass unknown deaths,”

Questions swarmed her head. This was too much to take in. A police car escorted the couple for a meager few blocks to their houses. Crashing into her bed, Anna was ready for the day to end, losing consciousness in a split second once her head brushed against the pillow. Tomorrow, maybe it would no longer be real.

People dropped dead all around. Anna kept flashing back to when she made the wish earlier, her shooting star flinging back and forth across the sky, a ping pong ball possessed by this universe. An unknown creature crept up behind her, whispering in her ear.

“Reverse your wish. You can do it. Each one you make will come true,” By the time she had swung her head around to see who was saying this, they had disappeared.

She was the only one left, trekking through abandoned towns, forlorn cities, lonely without inhabitants. Piles of bodies on either edge of the road, cars stopped in the middle of the streets, some still running. Looming senses of responsibility for this mass extinction of human beings weighted down on her conscience. But how was that possible? She didn’t do anything except avoid death. And of course, make that wish. But how could one wish on a shooting star change anything? It was just a joke all along.

Rousing from her nightmarish slumber the following morning, Anna couldn’t separate reality from dream. All she knew was the horrors wouldn’t fade from her memory. Turning on the news was a huge mistake. Was she still in her dream? There was no way to tell. What had played out in her nightmare was becoming a reality.

“Over half the population is now dead due to mysterious circumstances” claimed a news reporter.

Anna needed to take back her wish. This couldn’t happen. If any events were her doing, she had to turn them around. Going back to where she had sat the previous night, she caught the ping pong ball the universe used for its games, begging to it.

”Please stop the killing. Nobody else can die. Please." Like before, the star twinkled its way to grant her wish. One last person had faced his demise, and his corpse lay, pale, cold, and bloody right next to her.

Caspian.

“No! No! Noooooo!” she wailed, breaking down in ugly sobs. Dreams from the night before recurred once more, but the annihilation of humans had ceased.

In one last desperate attempt, she returned to the site of unintentionally granted wishes once more. “Revive everyone! Please just do it! Make everyone come back,” was her final request, delivered through tears. Just like the murder of Caspian, she knew this wish too, would come with a price, and she was right.

The price was her life. She only found this fact to be true as her vision went black, erasing her reality from Earth. A price worth paying to wipe the past few day’s events from existence. She would forever be forgotten by humanity, but if she hadn’t been, she would be known forever as the wish maker.