Closure, and Other Impossible Wishes
Unfortunately, Sian had a talent not only for creativity but also overthinking, which meant that by the end of the second week she had a full list of possibilities.
1. He’d had a breakdown.
2. He’d been mugged.
3. He had a girlfriend.
4. He had a wife.
(4a. He had a wife and a girlfriend.)
5. He was lying unconscious in the hospital.
6. He was a serial monogamist who regularly got bored with women and abandoned them outside the Highgate tube station.
7. He’d lost his phone down the back of his sofa.
8. He’d lost his phone down the back of another woman’s sofa.
9. He was a psychopath who did this sort of thing for fun.
10. He’d suffered a serious bout of amnesia.
11. He was leading a double life which had finally caught up with him, not unlike one of those spy dramas you saw on late night telly. Or maybe Hollyoaks.
12. He was a Men’s Rights Activist and wanted to pay her back for the time she’d said abortion access was a vital healthcare right.
13. He was so afraid of intimacy that mere minutes before they were due to meet he had a panic attack, blocked her number, and moved to Uzbekistan.
14. He was a cunt.
15. He was an absolute cunt.
(This final entry had been scrawled into her mental notebook in red capital letters, circled, and underlined three times.)
It took another week of stewing (16. His dog had eaten his phone.) before she remembered her old housemate. It hadn’t been a romantic problem—that wasn’t sensible, workaholic, in-bed-by-nine Lydia’s style—but a hypercritical manager who patronised every woman in his team and insisted on over-explaining concepts that Lydia had done a full doctorate in. She’d been miserable for months. And then…
Sian had been on holiday at the time, but she remembered the way the living room had smelled on her return. Fresh and yet warming, exciting, the sweetness that hits when you step off the plane for a full two weeks’ holiday. The slight shimmer to the air that lingered for a month. And Lydia had grinned, looking more at peace than Sian had seen her in ages, and said simply that she’d called in outside help. The problem boss had been fired two days later.
It's easy, Lydia had said. You don’t even need a lamp, apparently that’s just for ceremonial occasions. You just call the helpline. She’d scrawled the number on the back of a postcard; it was still attached to the fridge, pinned there with a magnet from a work trip to Dubrovnik.
Magical contractors were unreliable, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Sian liked to resort to. But desperate times.
Sibylline Solutions, tell us how your life’s been ruined, the automated voice rattled off after the first ring in a nursery-rhyme drone. Following the recorded instructions she continued pressing the star on the keypad, and after thirty seconds the smoke started to billow from her phone’s charging point.
It bloomed out into huge, glossy whorls that danced over her worn carpet, and as it did so it took the form of waves, and stars, and of the smoke from the last bonfire of autumn. It shimmered with the shade of every blue of the ocean, and then changed to the neon pinks of candyfloss and lipstick, and from that to the colour of sunsets and rainforests and oil spills and rain on tarmac, to the colour of heartache and sleeplessness and anticipation and delight. It carried the scent of snow-crested mountaintops, and of fear, and of hot chocolate, and of the best rave of your life and the worst joint you’ve ever smoked. It billowed and it blossomed, and it filled the room, and when everything faded the air smelled of cinnamon, and the genie was levitating patiently in the centre of her living room.
“Ah,” it said, “you must be my five o’clock.”
Sian risked a smile back. The being's shimmering and quite naked form was almost translucent, the colour of dreaming—and certainly beautiful, though it would be difficult to explain quite why she found it so. Smoke wreathed it from head to foot, and it stooped slightly to stop its gargantuan head grazing the ceiling. She found herself wishing that her crappy living room was furnished with something other than discount IKEA pieces, or that she’d tidied away some of the post-breakup takeaway cartons. (Or even that she’d done the vacuuming.) “That’s me,” she said. “So is this a three questions deal?”
The genie shrugged. “That’s actually just something we put out there to manage the demand on our powers. You’d be amazed how many people are put off when they think there’s a limit.”
“So I can keep on asking you for anything?”
“You can ask. And I’ll keep granting your wishes until I feel like stopping. There are no guarantees when it comes to magic.” The genie stooped to idly inspect one of the throw pillows on the sofa with an air of polite anticipation.
“Alright. Well.” Sian took a deep breath. “There’s this guy...”
The genie’s expression suggested a good number of its wishes began this way.
“It was…good. You know? Only a few dates, but we’d been talking a lot. He walked me back to the Tube after every date, he was a real gentleman when we started, you know, getting intimate: he respected that I wanted to take it slow, and I liked that…I’m not talking about love or whatever, but I’d started thinking about him when I wasn’t supposed to, you know? And then,” she swallowed, hard, “he asked me over, we arranged where we’d meet, he texted me that morning to check if I was still coming, and then that evening I travel halfway across London, and… I guess you can see what happened next.”
“I try not to make assumptions.”
“He wasn’t there. I texted, I called, nothing. Waited for forty minutes like an idiot and then cried the entire fucking journey back to Brixton. And then a few days later I check my phone and—well, it looks like I’ve been blocked.”
She tried very hard to keep her voice from straining with puppyish hope, and then despised herself entirely when this failed.
“See,” the words turned quick, urgent, “I don’t know if you know this, but with the apps you can only tell if the other phone isn’t receiving your messages—which happens if you’re blocked, sure, but it can also be when the other phone is lost or the account is deactivated, and like, I’m pretty sure he’s chucked me, but I don’t know it, you see?” There was a quivering in the underside of her jaw. Sian jammed her hands into her pockets to prevent herself from once again checking her phone, on the stupid, ugly, million-and-one off-chance some rogue text had filtered through in the past five seconds.
Of course, if she’d been talking with another human they’d have deflected from her humiliation with hastily-constructed small talk. But the genie just continued to hang there. Watching her.
“Anyway, that’s the point. If he’d just blocked me I’d think what an arsehole and get on with my life. But going from Sian are you still coming round to tie me to my bed already to blocking me twelve hours later is weird—I mean, it’s weird, right?” Sian gave a sharp laugh, attempting to push down against the horrible vulnerability in her voice. She could hear the soft spots in it. “I waited for ages. He knew I’d be waiting. I know people can be careless or selfish or cowardly, but setting me up like that on purpose…that’s cruel.”
She paused, and then grimaced. “You think I’m an idiot.”
“I don’t experience human relationships enough to judge,” the genie said, with an excess of gentility that was even more painful than mockery.
“Ha! If you were human you’d know I’m an idiot. I’ve told so many friends this story—I’ve said it was strange, I’ve said it’s at least possible there’s another explanation—and no-one's ever been kind enough to hide their expression. And I hate that…I hate that I’m being that girl. That idiot, you know? And that’s the worst thing. I’ve always thought that most people were, at heart, pretty decent, and believing that now makes me an idiot.”
There followed a moment of silence, punctuated by the odd sound of snuffling.
“Alright.” The genie nodded with the patience of a consummate professional. “I think I get the picture. What would you like from me?”
“I want an explanation. None of that no answer is an answer bullshit; I want to look into his eyes and have him say what happened. I want something I can come to peace with.”
With a flick of a wrist and a pop! the genie pulled a scroll out of thin air and ran its finger down what seemed to be a long list. It began murmuring beneath its breath: “Simple conjuration, dimensional manipulation, memory casting—yes, yes, no problem there. And do you want him back at the end of all this?”
The pause was an embarrassing one. Of course, Sian knew the right answer. Of course not, of course I have more self-respect than to give a man like that another chance. If you think I’m that desperate, if you think I need a relationship that badly…
“I don’t know,” she admitted, through the brick resting in her mouth. “Can I say that? I don’t know.”
“Good. Honesty always makes it easier.”
The genie scrunched the scroll up, tossing it over its shoulder and into nothingness. Its smile was the warm yet businesslike glow of all service providers everywhere. “Right. Let’s get to work on your heart’s desire, shall we?”
Matt popped into existence with the sound of a champagne cork—or, unsettlingly, with the exact same sound of the opened prosecco they’d shared on their third date. He didn’t even look surprised to suddenly be in her living room. He just blinked, bemused, his dark hair rumpled and tie askew from what had clearly been another gruelling meeting over expenditure at Deloitte. (God, she hated that she could still remember his complaints about work.)
“Hi, Sian,” he said amiably. “How have you been?”
Sian drew breath. She’d planned to be indifferent; careless, even, in her carefully constructed—and humiliatingly frequent—fantasies of running into him again.
However: “You bastard,” she spat. “You absolute dickhead. What the hell is your problem? An hour and a half I waited—” she blushed, avoiding the genie’s gaze, “in the dark, in the cold. You were the one that asked me out, wanker, and then you don’t even show up? What the hell?”
Matt’s grin crumbled. Something in those sweet baby-blues positively melted with contrition, and oh shit, he really does have a nice face, doesn’t he? Sian squirmed, uncomfortable with the sudden, treacherous, and all-round antifeminist weakness in her knees.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit, I’m so sorry, Sian. I’ve been feeling awful about this, I can’t tell you how much…” He pushed a hand through his hair, causing his shirt to ride up over a sinfully flat stomach. Sian blushed.
“I had my phone stolen. I was at the footie that afternoon and some prick lifted my phone from my pocket: I spent that entire evening blocking my accounts and making a police complaint for the insurance. But I was thinking about you the entire time. I felt awful, knowing you were going to be stranded like that. And then I didn’t have your number, and I was trying to work out how to get in touch again—I was thinking of emailing through your work’s website, or visiting that coffee shop you said you liked, you know, on our first date?—but I didn’t know if it would hurt you more to see me. Honestly, I’m so relieved you found me, I was so scared you’d think I wasn’t interested anymore, and I’d do anything to get you back—Sian?”
Something cold had steeled in the pit of her stomach.
“Wait. Wait, wait, wait, shut up, stop talking.” She turned to the genie, who’d been watching with detached curiosity from across the living room. “This isn’t right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I remember the coffee shop you liked? I’d do anything to get you back? No one’s that perfect!”
“It’s what you wanted.”
“Oh please, I never get what I want. Of course I wanted him sorry, I practically wanted him on his hands and knees.” Out of the corner of her eye Sian could see Matt’s knees automatically beginning to give. “No! You see? No one’s like that outside the movies. Have you cursed him or something?”
Something guilty passed over the genie’s perfect face. “Ah. You mean you wanted this to be real?”
At her glare it twiddled its fingers.
“The thing is, you have to be careful with wishes. I want something I can come to peace with, that’s the emotion you brought to the table, right? Most humans prefer pretty lies anyway. As for abject grovelling, well, you can’t get much better than that…”
“Oh, stop it,” Sian snapped. Already the angry blush was filling her cheeks. “You mean everything he just said, all that concern, that was just bullshit and magic?”
She wanted to hurl herself out the window. For two seconds Matt had looked at her with those big blue eyes, and she’d actually believed… No. For God’s sake, she’d been stupid to believe it. Stupider to want it.
“I give people what they want.”
“Don’t give me that. That’s not even Matt. Just look at him.”
They both examined the young man standing in the middle of the room with bovine obedience, his gaze focussing placidly somewhere behind Sian’s right ear. Experimentally she jabbed a finger into his shoulder. Then his nose. Then pinched him rather hard on the neck. Nothing happened.
“The magic has him doing just as we instruct. I think it suits him,” said the genie. “And I can tell you’re enjoying that, by the way.”
“Shut up.”
Just to be sure Sian poked him again, hard, in the cheek. There was something supremely satisfying in seeing the tiny purpling bruise emerge, and Matt not doing a damn thing to stop it.
With a cough she tried to ignore the genie’s knowing look. “Look, I don’t want it if it’s not real. People want the real thing: they don’t just want some—some fucking scripted bullshit where they get to tailor-make the relationship themselves.”
“Hoo-ee,” the genie said, “now who’s lying?”
Blushing, Sian jabbed her weaponised finger into its face.
“Fix this.”
“We can start again, that’s no problem,” the genie said, “he won’t remember. But are you sure you want the full, ugly truth? I’ve had more than my fair share of complaints after granting that old chestnut. It might get ugly. You might find out every message from him was generated through ChatGPT. That he thought every picture he got from you looked like a hippo. That every time you got him off he was actually thinking about his ex-girlf—”
“Stop it!”
For weeks afterwards she would remember the pain of the blood thundering furiously in her ears.
“You said truth. That might be the truth.”
“Is it?”
The genie sighed. “You have to wish for it first.”
“Fine. Whatever, just...soften it a bit. Can you give me a truth that isn’t so...blunt?”
When the mist cleared from Matt’s eyes he seemed wholly oblivious to the tiny bruises dotting his face, and as bemused by Sian’s living room as if he’d only just arrived. She tried not to feel guilty that they had, in effect, restarted a human being as easily as you might restart a level on your PS5. “Ok,” Sian said fiercely. “The Saturday we were supposed to meet. What happened?”
Matt blinked, once, and then nodded. “Hi Sian. OK. Yeah. I remember there was...something. Something came up. A problem. Something that stopped me leaving the house. Or maybe I did leave and then changed my mind. Or maybe I just didn’t want to go. And then you messaged...but I didn’t reply. Or maybe I only think you messaged, but I can’t be sure. On account of losing my phone. Or breaking it. Or just not looking at it. There’s a lot of options. Take your pick.”
“You said softened!” the genie protested. “That was softened!”
“Alright. Give me the worst possible option. The shittiest of the shitty. Doesn’t matter if it’s true, at least I’ll stop thinking about him.”
Ten minutes later the genie trailed the smell of roses and car fumes through the flat as it floated to join Sian where she stood staring through the kitchen window. Her fingers gripped the peeling linoleum of the countertop so tight they were nearly bone-white.
They’d left Matt on standby in the living room, staring into nothingness with a gaze as cold as a knife. Sian could still hear his voice rattling on without emotion: “The truth is, I was fucking another woman because I didn’t even remember we had a date that night, and when I did realise you’d be stuck alone on the other side of town, I found it funny. It took me two seconds to block you because you weren’t worth the bother of an explanation, and after that I honestly never thought of you again. And really, the fact that you’re still thinking of me only shows how pathetic—"
“Is that what really happened?” she asked quietly.
“Does it matter? You said you didn’t want to think about him anymore. That should do the trick.”
Sian nodded. She looked miserable, she looked tired, but the one thing she looked above all else was unconvinced. Come on, she thought. Be that arsehole. Be every shitty male chauvinist stereotype in the book. Be awful enough to make me turn away right now, don’t give me...nuances. I can’t let them squeeze into my head.
Nuances were dangerous. They gave her permission to be weaker than she ought to be.
When the genie cleared its throat, the sound was, for the first time, almost human. “It’s none of my business, but do you actually know what you’re looking for here?”
She tried to avoid its eye.
“Can we go again?”
“Yes, I thought you might say that.”
Time...had passed.
(“—you reminded me of my ex, and that scared me—"
“—you didn’t remind me enough of my ex, and that repulsed me—”
“—that one time you couldn’t meet up because you already had plans put me off —”
“—you replied too quickly to texts—”
“—you should have been flirtier—"
“—you should have played hard to get—")
It had insisted on passing.
(“—I got fired that day and had a nervous breakdown—”
“—I’ve stood up dozens of women, you were just the latest—”
“—I was violently mugged—”
“—someone threw my phone under a bus—”)
Sometimes the question changed.
(“If you want me back I’ll expect you to grow your hair out, lose a stone, start wearing high heels—"
“If you want me back I’d only be worth dating after three months of decent therapy, both to explore my attachment styles and to start managing my underlying depression that was only ever dismissed by my parents—"
“What are you saying? I could never ask for you to change to get me back—")
The subtleties shifted.
(“Of course I enjoyed dating you; I just have a shitty memory and I forgot we had something planned—"
“Honestly, I never enjoyed our dates. I daydreamed through each and every one—"
“Yeah, I enjoyed spending time with you, but things change, you know?”
“Of course I did, I’m actually passionately in love with you—")
But for the most part they simply circled the same miserable issue.
(“—I had a bad mental health episode—"
“—my feelings for you scared me—”
“—you’re the fattest woman I’ve ever dated—”
“—you’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met—"
“—an evening jerking off at home was more appealing than you—”
“—I’ve been regretting standing you up since the moment I blocked you—”
“—I’ve never spared you a moment’s thought since—”
“—I’d kill to get you back—”
“—I’d kill myself before seeing you again—”)
Now Sian dug her finger into a hole of her sofa cushion, prying out wads of fluff and horsehair and rolling it into small, angry balls between her fingertips. Her cheeks were hot and damp. Her gaze didn’t leave the farthest corner of the ceiling—not to look at the genie, and certainly not to look at Matt.
If she was offered the opportunity to go back to that night and see for herself why he’d left her, she wouldn’t even believe the proof of her own eyes. She’d seen too many false futures to believe any kind of truth now.
But then it wasn’t as if anyone who’d been ghosted wanted anything as simple as the truth. You couldn’t rationalise away that itch remaining in the corner of your mind. All you could do was scratch like fury, examining every last detail, questioning and requestioning until you were driven half-mad—until the itch was obliterated, or some other misery rose up to take its place.
God, she had really wanted to be that woman who could walk away without a second glance…
“How many times have I asked him this?”
The sympathetic look sat oddly on the ancientness of the genie’s face. “It’s alright. He only remembers your most recent question; this isn’t hurting him.”
“That’s not why I asked.”
She had never been good at letting things go. She’d wanted to be. But then the genie had been honest from the start: there were no guarantees.
“Do you want to stop now?”
She snuffled and dragged a sleeve across her face. “No. One more time, please.”
This time when the mist cleared from Matt’s eyes he received two seconds’ grace before Sian’s fist connected with his nose. With the second punch he toppled heavily backwards into her sofa, scattering pillows like confetti.
“You know,” the genie said mildly, “if it turns out he did have a good explanation that might be an overreaction.”
“I guess there’s no way to tell, is there?”
Matt, who possibly felt his own predicament was not getting the recognition it deserved, groaned loudly.
“Please send him home now. And you,” Sian turned to Matt, “if you ever feel like growing a spine, you can tell me what happened. Properly. You have my number, I’ll hear you out, but grow the fuck up first.”
A second later Matt had vanished into the ether.
“I suppose we can stop now,” she said quietly. Relief eased through her—and with it a strange, sad acknowledgement that the matter was settled. But what good had there been on dwelling? She wasn’t that girl. And at the end of the day it had been unhealthy, to derive a disproportionate comfort in those few moments between question and answer, those few seconds of potential that this time the answer would be different, that she might finally be given a satisfying answer…
Her stomach squirmed uncomfortably.
“…but if I wanted to bring you back in a couple of weeks’ time and ask him some more questions, would that…?”
With a hand that could break down palaces and tie mountain ranges into knots, the genie patted her shoulder. “As long as you like.”
Editor's Notes
If there's one type of story that appeals to me as an editor almost instantly, it's when a fantasy premise is used as a mechanism for psychological excavation. In this case, when magic becomes a literalization of the obsessive post-ghosting spiral. Even better, when a genre story allows itself to have literary aspirations, in the sense that the story is honest enough to admit that no amount of "answers" will ever be enough.
The story's real subject isn't Matt or even the ghosting itself, specifically. It's the impossibility of closure as a concept, hence the title. Sian believes she wants an explanation, but what she actually wants is something no explanation can provide. That is, the retroactive ability to have not been hurt. The genie grants wish after wish, and each answer—whether cruel, sympathetic, or even absurd—fails to satisfy because the wound is existential.
Something else that stuck out to me with this was Shearer's prose and how it has real texture. The synesthetic description of the smoke (the colour of heartache, the scent of fear) walks right up to the line of purple without crossing it, and the grounding details (discount IKEA, takeaway cartons, the Dubrovnik magnet) keep the domestic reality so blisteringly present.
And the humor of it all works because it's deployed so strategically—the list, the genie's dry observations, the physical comedy of Sian poking Matt—without undercutting the emotional stakes. It's a story that knows exactly what it's doing and commits fully to its uncomfortable conclusions. And the fantasy premise earns its keep by illuminating something true about how we actually behave when hurt. Rather than how we wish we would.—Jon Negroni
Hannah Shearer is a British writer currently working in academia in London. Her work has been published by Bewildering Stories, Black Cat Weekly, and A Thin Slice Of Anxiety.
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