"Do you have an appointment?" said the woman at the front desk.
"Of course I do," said Graeme.
"I don't see any appointment listed here," said the woman. "Do you know who it was with?"
"Oh," said Graeme, "I wrote it down on..." He reached into his back pocket where he had written down all the information about the appointment. It was gone!
After several minutes of arguing, he had no choice to go home. He got in his car and drove to his house, but when he arrived something seemed wrong. There was a light on in a room upstairs that he had been using for storage. From it came the sound of loud music. There was mud near the front step, as if someone had been walking directly to the front door and not using the path. One privet bush was missing, replaced by a bed of flowers.
He got out of his car and entered the house.
"Hi, honey," said Carol.
"Hi, Dad," said a boy coming down the stairs. And Graeme knew what had happened. The boy was around 15 years old, and his facial features looked like he really could have been the child of Graeme and Carol... who had been together for, well, 16 years.
"Hi..." he said.
"Dad, are you feeling good?" asked the boy.
"I... I don't know," said Graeme. "I think I'd better lie down." The wishing well had done exactly what he had asked... made him fertile, and changed things so that he had always been that way. And if he had always been that way, he could have had a child years ago. So now Graeme had a son, who remembered a whole life with him that never existed and that he didn't remember. And the existence of a son changed a whole lot of little things... the room, the mud near the door, even the bush--maybe he accidentally uprooted the bush when he was 10 or something.
Graeme thought about it as he lay in bed, and finally decided to go back to the well. He had plenty of change. Graeme got up and prepared to leave....
