The community garden in Queens was a patch of green in a neighborhood that had forgotten what green looked like. Danny O'Brien knelt in the dirt, his knees pressing into soil that smelled of diesel and hope. Behind him, the apartment buildings leaned together like tired men sharing a cigarette.

He had planted the seeds Patricia gave him that morning. They were warm, and some of them had the dark, oily sheen of having been roasted. He planted them anyway. What choice did he have?

Three days passed. On the fourth morning, a single green shoot pushed through the soil. Danny watered it with water from his morning glass and stood over it in wonder. It was a sunflower, tall and straight, its leaves reaching toward the sky like hands asking for something.

A pigeon took it. A large pigeon, gray as the sky before rain, swooped down, snatched the sunflower, and flew east toward the Bronx.

Danny ran. He ran through streets where bodega cats watched him with indifferent yellow eyes, through subway stations where the rumble of trains vibrated through the soles of his shoes. The pigeon flew low, and Danny followed until his lungs burned and his legs trembled.

The pigeon dropped the sunflower in an abandoned park in the Bronx, a place where the grass grew tall and the swings hung motionless in the wind. And there, sitting on a broken bench beneath a tree whose leaves had turned brown in April, was a man.

The man was old and thin and smelled of wet cardboard. In his hands, he held a tin box.

The box was rusted, dented, and covered in layers of paint that had peeled and re-peeled until it looked like the skin of an old man. It was warm.

"You followed it far," the man said. His voice was rough, like gravel under tires.

"The pigeon took my sunflower," Danny said.

"The pigeon takes what it wants." The man held out the box. "This will not give you what you want. It will record what others want."

Danny took the box. It was warm. It pulsed, faintly, like a heartbeat.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

The man smiled. His teeth were yellow. "Open it."

Danny opened the box. Inside were hundreds of folded纸条, each one written on with a pen or pencil or crayon. He unfolded one at random.

*I want my brother to come home from Vietnam.*

He unfolded another.

*I want to be able to afford insulin.*

Another.

*I want someone to love me.*

Danny folded the纸条 and put them back. He closed the box.

"It records wishes," the man said. "But wishes come true in ways you don't expect. Always in ways you don't expect."

Danny took the box home. He put it on his kitchen table. He opened it every day and read the wishes. He learned that Mrs. Chen on the third floor wanted her daughter to stop working overtime. He learned that Mr. Petrov on the second floor wanted to speak to his wife again, but she had died three years before and he kept calling her name into the phone. He learned that the teenager in 4B wanted to be normal.

His stepbrother Mike stole the box one night. Danny found it missing from the table and felt a cold hand close around his heart.

He found Mike in a bar on Roosevelt Avenue, laughing and throwing money at a pool table. Mike saw him and grinned.

"Look what I found, brother," he said, tapping the box.

Danny said nothing. He walked out.

Mike opened the box and read the wishes. He found one that said: *I want to inherit money from a relative I never met.*

He wrote his name at the top. He put the box on his pillow and went to sleep.

In the morning, the phone rang. A lawyer from Philadelphia. Mike had a distant cousin who had died and left him fifty thousand dollars.

Mike was ecstatic. He bought drinks for the entire bar. He bought Patricia a diamond ring. He bought Danny a new coat.

But the box kept writing. New纸条 appeared every night, and they grew darker, more extreme.

*I want the lawyer dead.* *I want Patricia to leave Danny.* *I want Danny to disappear.*

Danny found the box on Mike's table the morning after Mike stopped coming home. The last纸条 read: *I want Danny's life.*

Danny took the box to the park. He built a fire in a metal barrel and burned every纸条. The wishes curled and blackened and turned to ash. The wind carried them across the abandoned swings.

But the last纸条 survived the fire. It floated down, unburned, and Danny picked it up. The handwriting was his own.

*I wish none of this had ever happened.*

Danny looked at the纸条. He looked at the fire. He looked at the sky.

He did not know who had written it. He did not know if it was the box or himself or something else entirely.

He folded the纸条 and put it in his pocket. He walked home. The city rumbled around him, indifferent and eternal.

In his pocket, the纸条 was warm.