The nickel.

I am a woman now, but I was once a girl. And when I was a girl, a young girl, six, maybe seven, definitely not eight years old, an uncle I can now hardly remember gave me a nickel. And when he gave me this nickel, he told me something silly. You should never tell a young child something silly, because often they are unable to distinguish between the silly and the true. He told me that if I made a wish, swallowed the nickel, and passed it, the wish would come true. Predictably, I was spellbound. The endless possibilities astounded me.

It took me several days of rigourous investigation to figure out what it meant to 'pass' a swallowed nickel. I wasn't quite sure how you'd be able to give away a nickel you recently swallowed, but luckily I had to my disposal Timmy from down the street; Timmy was two classes up from me, and he knew everything. He told me what it meant. What he told me was gross, but not impossible. Endless possibilities.

So I started thinking about wishes. The weather had been bad all week, and that weekend mum, dad and I we were going to the zoo, so I wished for good, sunny weather on saturday and swallowed the nickel. It tasted metallic, which makes sense. The following day I took a pencil from dad's study, a long one, and went looking for the nickel. I didn't find it that day, but the next day I did. Saturday was a lovely day.

It went on like that for a while. Small-time wishes, nothing huge or life changing. I wished for the cat to stop throwing up, for dad to be home more often, for my tooth to stop hurting, for someone to find Emmy, my lost doll. And you know what? Everything happened. Every single thing. Which is when I started thinking big.

It was working, I was convinced of that. Enough wishes, however small, had come true for me to be convinced of the nickel's magic. So I gave it some long and hard thought; what would be really useful in the long run? I was too young to contemplate fortune, or fame, or love, so what it boiled down to was health. I wished for a long and healthy life, and swallowed the nickel. It no longer tasted metallic, it tastes kinda musky. Which makes sense also.

I was young, then. Six, maybe seven, definitely not eight. I am 37 now, and I will not live to see 40. I might not even make it to 38, which is only five months away. I looked for the nickel for a week, before I gave it up. I just thought I must've missed it, somehow. I was young, what did I care. Life went on. Turns out I never passed the nickel. It got stuck in one of the folds of my stomach, where the copper started corroding because of the gastric acids, slowly eroding away the lining of my stomach. I have gastric cancer now, which has spread to my bowels, my colon; the cancer is end-stage.

I've been giving it some thought, and I still cannot figure out whether somewhere buried in all of this is a life lesson about greed, or a warning concerning youthful innocence and corruptibilty, but I do know this: if someone ever offers me a nickel again, for whatever reason, I'll shoot them a dirty look and tell them to keep their goddamn nickel.