Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet North Carolina poet Jill Crainshaw in her flash fiction debut. “a penny for your wishes” describes a wistful moment of kindness and connection between a little girl and a senior woman at a wishing fountain. As the girl, enchanted by the shiny coins, reaches for their brightness, her mother rebukes her.
‘“don’t take those coins,”…
so many wistful faces watching up through the water—a nickel to pass tomorrow’s math test, a silver dollar to see daddy one last time, a dime for snow this christmas, a quarter for the violence, all of the violence, to end (just a quarter?).
“who wants to carry any of that home?”’
Feeling chagrined, she notices the silver-haired woman looking through her purse and decides to redeem herself by helping this woman. We wonder what made the woman stop to make a wish and why she is so intent on making it. What is her need? The girl’s gesture is a small kindness, but even small kindnesses have an echo of the heroic. Jill reminds us that no one is too small to support another’s hopes or to practice regenerative empathy.
Jill is a natural at flash-fiction, which is just a hop, skip and a jump from narrative poetry. Her delivery is minimal, eschewing capitalization, which creates a delightful intimacy and transparent quality. “a penny for your wishes” is magical, and its magic is the everyday kind we can all access with a little effort.
Read “a penny for your wishes” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jill Crainshaw is a poet and professor who lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. When she is not teaching at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Jill and her two pups, Bella and Penny, look for poems in their backyard. Sometimes, Jill writes them down.