prompt: detect, title: what you wish for in misc. flash fiction

Damnedest thing George Bailey ever saw. He’d been considering suicide atop the only bridge in town, tiny compared to what he could’ve built as the world-famous architect he dreamt of being, but there he was, upon that wholly-inconsequential span instead. Might not even be high enough to die, he chuckled. His attention was caught. however, by an odd man looking to plunge as well. George was kind by instinct, though, and attempted intervention. Perhaps a penultimate good act before a final sin. But then even stranger yet, a spout of flame suddenly scorched a gash through the jumper’s chest, leaving only tattered rags. “Poor Clarence,” a woman’s voice cut through the snow, “really thought he was doing you good.” She kicked at the smolder, determined, mournful. “Satan took God’s shape and told him if he convinced you your life was worthwhile, he’d finally get Angel Wings. Hopelessly naïve? But good intentions.” She looked like a pin-up girl from the war. Dark hair, every curve he could imagine, some he couldn’t, eyes flashing, pitchfork still-red with incinerating heat. As bat wings unfurled to match her onyx dress, she smiled. “Want to hear an opposition response?” George glanced at the freezing waters below. “Didn’t have any plans.”

“Good intentions? Y’know where those end up?” They then disappeared with one audible pop!

The angel/demon/woman, whatever she was, didn’t show George what the world would’ve been like without him, however, as Clarence would’ve. Instead, she unveiled how it would’ve been if he’d been the wild success of his childhood imaginings. The wonders he worked when he didn’t have to take over the family business or defend an entire town from its own stupidity. Oh, all the stamps on his steamer trunk from around the world. Did George detect sinister motives from the beautiful creature taking him on tour of this other more-wonderful life? Sure, he wasn’t an idiot.

But it erased so many of his burning failures that George found it difficult to give a single damn.

Until he saw himself returning home as a hero, preparing to demolish the old Savings-And-Loan so he could be paid very well to erect a monument to Mister Potter’s ego, a gigantic ugly casino, to carve the heart out of his town for fun and profit. George looked into the faces in the crowd as he raised a gold ceremonial shovel to dig them all their graves. A future for all his former friends and family, wading through addiction and confusion, new street drugs every spring, let alone the rise of the cartoonishly-corrupt President Potter on a wave of ill-gotten “sports’ gaming” profits.

He finally realized he did a lot more for folk as a good man than as a great man who burned this world down for glory and begged to recant because it’s the good folks who make life wonderful. Somewhere else, Clarence stood unharmed and handed the bat-winged lady her feathery reward.

“George,” Clarence smiled upon the newly-angelic brunette, “wasn’t the one being tested.”