Billy Come True - Winner of a 2025 Bronze Pot for Good Citizenship

Billy Dart didn’t believe his one wish was real. The soup can had emptied like a burp, and from the hollow tin, the genie whispered. Softly through lumps of leftover clam chowder like blocky teeth. One wish. Not three. One wish is what you get, Billy Dart.

To which Billy Dart believed that the can, like most people he interacted with throughout the day, was deceiving him.

“I get a wish?”

He read the revolving label, the normal value brand, with its regular nutritional scores.

“Any wish at all.”

“Why am I so special?”

“There’s hardly ever been a man as much in need of a wish as you.”

“Sure.”

Billy held the can high. In place of an expiration date, its bottom was stamped with an unintelligible cypher.

“Anything you desire, Billy Dart. So many different wishes that can change your life today. To be understood. To be beloved. To be seen. You’ve been saving for a new car but wish bigger. There’s a surfeit of fortune before you. Near infinite paths to happiness. Go ahead, pluck a feather from your golden goose,” said the empty soup can.

And confirming the can to be dishonest by the fact that one couldn’t even trust its expiration date, Billy—instead of asking for an exciting career or friendships or to be loved by Olivia—made a fake wish, as throwaway as the can itself, following the whim of his hand as it slapped a mosquito on his neck.

“I want to be able to kill any bug around me. Just an instant zap. Say anything within thirty feet, poof, falls dead. All I want to do is think, and delete.”

“Oh, Billy, it really is hopeless.”

And the can crumbled away as if crushed by a car and Billy didn’t feel any different. He shook his head and ate his soup because it was so difficult to trust anyone now days and apparently that included trash pretending to be God.

Later, however, while he watched television, a fly buzzed past Billy’s head. It tapped against the window, buzz, tap, buzz, tap, buzz, tap. Attempting to ignore the insect only made its incessant buzz-tap more frustrating.

I’m going to kill that thing, Billy thought, on his way to grabbing a piece of toilet paper.

He returned to the window, eyes narrowed in search of the fly. He looked left, right, up. He listened for the nuisance. The buzzing, the taps were gone. Looking down, Billy spotted a quivering speck on the carpet! A crashed fly, its wings in the final flickers of life.

He snatched it into the toilet paper and deposited it into the toilet, where he noticed in the corner of the bathroom a number of dead water beetles. He unspun more toilet paper and flushed them too. And there, as he went to wash his hands, from the lights above the sink, several deceased moths, fallen out of the air like planes with failing engines.

The fly. The beetles. The moths.

The wish! Fortune was his!

He left the moths to turn to dust.

A whole new social life was opening for him, through French doors to the patios of new friends and important people, hosts of game nights, graduation parties, political meet-and-greets. Billy Dart, a fixture of any local event. The hottest invite in town. A party staple like good dip.

Bring your own beer but don’t worry about bringing your own bug spray because Billy will be here!

Yay! Billy’s coming!

Keep your gathering high-class and leave those cheap tiki torches in the shed.

Think of the women, impressed by his coolness, his composure, when he winks in their direction and brushes a gnat from their shoulder.

Off Olivia’s shoulder, as Billy dreamed bigger, with the backs of the tips of his fingers, sweep-sweeping the flies from her blouse. Driving her about in the used car he’d been saving to buy, cruising on the interstate, going all the way from here to there with the beauty of the sun and the blue sky through the spotless windshield, its shiny glass unsmeared by a splattered bug, radiant Olivia smiling at him in the unblemished sunlight the whole trip.

Olivia worked with him at the shipping warehouse and they spoke every business day.

“Hi, Olivia.”

“Hello, Billy.”

“How are you today?”

“Doing great, Billy, how are you?”

“I’m doing pretty great.”

Which he said even when he wasn’t doing pretty great.

Like right now, the weekend, living in this apartment with all these dead bugs. Flashing his power at the slightest insect provocation, Billy hadn’t realized the number of bugs actually around him. In the air, in the walls, under the mattress. They hide well until they all fall dead. Billy was living in the aftermath of a constant bug bomb. After zapping a cockroach, he found the windowsill covered in belly-up ladybugs. Overhead light fixtures became mass graves where the corpses piled, their shadowy outline like an eclipse between the bulb and opaque glass. Within hours it seemed, he’d become the man who lives in self-made squalor, in this apartment of dead bugs.

Of course, Billy realized, this was the so-called genie’s trick. A trick that was also a lesson. The double-edged blade. Wish for more hair and it all goes to your pits. Wish for more money and you’re indicted for tax fraud. Wish to be loved and you’re given a dog. Wish to fly and you end up having to flap your arms.

Be careful what you wish for – a wise man.

You’re telling me! – Billy Dart

Billy had specifically used the word “delete.” Of that he was sure. Yet here were crispy bugs rotting all around him.

Now he was cursed.

Determined, however, not to live his life in such filth, as well as undermine the genie by mastering his curse, Billy hatched an idea, and began annihilating ant colonies.

He started with the tiny hill in the closest crack on the block. A single thought wiped them out, along with every insect in Billy’s thirty-foot sphere of influence. He surveyed the sidewalk, crossed the block, kneeled at the next active ant colony. The ants swarmed a sugary flake from a waffle cone. Billy tried to concentrate on just one. Again, he curled the whole colony, legs to antennas. He stood up and walked to the next. He kneeled and concentrated on a strong ant, carrying a leaf quadruple its size in its jaws. This herculean died one and for all with the rest of its family, and Billy wandered down the line. Across eleven blocks, he cleared a substantial part of the urban ecosystem.

Until finally, instead of complete annihilation, half the ants were left skittering about.

Then a few dozen.

Then less than ten.

Billy, knees on concrete, hands in the dirt, eyes close to the tiny hill, found a single ant to focus on, quick and brown, carrying stolen eggs back to the base. The ant snapped in agony, lost its eggs, and died. The rest of the colony continued as usual. Another ant took the eggs.

He practiced further, closing his eyes, feeling the ants in thought one by one and zapping whichever he desired. Enough were zapped throughout this experiment to starve the colony, and Billy finished the rest with a mercy wave. As he strolled home, there wasn’t a buzz in the air.

The day after becoming a master was Monday. Shifts at the warehouse started around sunrise. Kurt, his direct supervisor, approached Billy just as Billy was locking away his backpack.

“Don’t be taking the boxes out to the truck unless me or Steve signs for it. Make sure you’re checking the labels.” He gave every order from a position of anger. “Make sure it has a label. I don’t want any boxes—on any trucks—without a label—that I didn’t sign for.” Each stunted phrase was like a finger jabbing Billy’s chest.

Such points began to fill Billy with an odd sensation.

“I want to see you on the floor all day today too, no sneaking off.”

“I never do,” said Billy. Kurt though was frequently absent.

“Where were you last Thursday when the Goldman truck came in?”

“I was at the truck.”

“I’ll ask Jimmy.”

“Jimmy wasn’t there.”

“Jimmy was there, and I’ll ask him about it. Take your break at ten.”

Yes, it was a very odd sensation Billy was feeling; he detected more than misguided anger in his boss today.

“Sir, I did have a question,” he said, “I’m glad you came over.”

“What?”

“Who’s the company’s exterminator?”

Kurt looked at his phone.

“It doesn’t matter, Billy. Get to work.”“I think I know someone who can do it cheaper.”

“You’re not eligible to make deals with the company. You work for the company. If you want that job, you can quit shipping and apply somewhere else. Until then, the job is shipping.” And Kurt droned on and on about what he needed Billy to focus on, and that was checking the labels, and getting his signature, and it was while Billy was focused on Kurt and his thick brown mustache that he detected in this very instant that his direct supervisor was some sort of insect person. He could feel Kurt the same way he felt an annoying mosquito. The mustache twitched like a wing. With a thought he tried to kill Kurt and nothing happened.

“Do you understand?” said Kurt.

Billy concentrated hoping to see a nosebleed.

“Billy, I need a nod.”

Billy nodded.

Kurt walked away, and Billy could feel Kurt and people like him all over the warehouse. Insect people worked everywhere, driving trucks, logging boxes. Billy watched them throughout the day. Many loaded beside him. Some in ties and cuffs and polished shoes came down to the floor to look around and not say a thing.

And a world that hadn’t made sense before slowly began to piece itself together.

Take, for instance, Max, Brendon, and Jacob, chatting away while they passed boxes in a three-man fireman line.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Max. “Linda makes me hate coming home. She’s a time-bomb.”

“You ever seen that movie with Lynda Carter?” asked Brendon. “I forget the name. She’s bad. She’s a real bad gal.”

“I watched the new Olivia Lorraine movie last night. It was good,” said Jacob.

“Did you see Olivia’s sweater today?” asked Billy.

A question to which no one answered but now it made sense! Billy’s non-sequiturs dammed these already disjointed conversations because he lacked the proper pheromones! That was why he never seemed to be able to communicate properly. That’s why it had seemed like Kurt couldn’t understand him. Why he thought others were deceiving him so often. Why their mixed-up words came so easy to them. The men in ties didn’t say a word because they didn’t need to. They were emitting. No wonder Billy never got a promotion, why they didn’t know his name. They were emitting the right pheromones and he wasn’t.

“And now Julie wants to go to a movie—in public—and it’s all going to shit,” said Max.

“She’s a real bad lady, that Lynda Carter,” said Brendon.

“This one was okay,” said Jacob, “I liked her last movie better.”

The pheromone was the reason nobody told Billy there were donuts. It was the reason he didn’t receive an invite for such teambuilding camaraderie as fantasy football. It was why the good-natured ribbing never seemed so good-natured to him.

And it was probably responsible for his declined PTO.

The three men holding three different conversations laughed together at a crude joke and Billy laughed that he finally got it all too.

“Like you would know, Bill,” said Max.

Billy’s laughter tumbled into nervousness and after trying to zap Max with his power, he kept quiet for much of the day, relearning what he knew about life. At home, he searched for food or a shampoo that would cause him to release the pheromone from his body to find better rapport with the bug co-workers, but so far had been unable to discover any meaningful science regarding specific scents.

As far as detection went, it wasn’t as easy as sorting out men from women. Many of the women in the warehouse said things that would have only made sense to Billy if he had a literal antenna, as he thought of it now, an idea which comforted him.

Not Olivia, though.

“I really like your sweater, Olivia.”

“Thank you, Billy.”

She wasn’t a bug person. He detected something beautiful within her quite unrelated to his powers or his wish. What must’ve been a human brain and not an insect one. Felt beneath the composed round nose and professional red lips. Her golden ponytail swished as she walked away. She was carrying a clipboard and doing a safety-point check.

“Oh,” she turned around, “Billy make sure you’re lifting with your legs.”

He proudly straightened his form.

But hardly that or new shampoo would allow him to better communicate with Olivia. There was still no clear explanation for why he couldn’t express himself to her.

“Do you ever feel like it’s hard to get a message across to someone?” he would ask.

“All the time,” she would say.

“I wonder this a lot, but why is so hard for a person to be honest, and say what they mean to others, and be fully understood?”

“I wish everyone said what they meant. And I wish everyone didn’t misinterpret it.”

“That would have been a smart wish. It’s hard being a person. Harder for me than anyone, I used to think. But it’s not your fault, okay? It’s because they’re bugs, and we aren’t. It’s not even the same language, Olivia.”

Then, glancing around for spies, he’d zap a roach, and show her his confidence.

“They don’t have to be honest the way we do,” Billy would say.

The truth may scare her. It would be normal for Olivia to be afraid of a warehouse full of bug people. Were they too big for his power? And how might he master his power’s next stage? If he’d been able to narrow its focus, then perhaps he could increase its intensity.

“You can do it, Billy,” Olivia would say.

That was the kind of clear conversation he wanted to have.

Instead he was stuck talking to his supervisor, Kurt.

“Billy, do you see my signature anywhere on this piece of paper?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why is that truck loaded?”

“I didn’t load it.”

Kurt’s mustache twitched and he suddenly had two pupils in each eye. Then four. Then eight. Then sixteen. And each of his eyes like a goopy sack of frog eggs.

“Don’t start with any of that. Jessica saw you.”

“Jessica probably loaded it.”

Kurt’s pupils multiplying, the whites being dabbed out, while the globes of the eyes themselves began to expand out of their sockets like pinched grapes, until they were two round domes of lenses, like the eyes of a fly.

“Jessica always gets my signature,” said Kurt.

Billy saw himself reflected hundreds of times through the many eyes of Kurt and felt as if he were undergoing some form of hypnosis.

“Do you need it unloaded?” asked Billy.

“No, it’s being shipped. It’s supposed to be loaded. The point is, I hadn’t signed for it yet.”

“Okay, sorry, sir.”

“So you loaded it?”

“I just want to unload it, if that’s my job.”

“I’m shipping it! It’s supposed to be shipped!” Kurt’s many lenses narrowed. “I want to know did you load it?”

“I didn’t load it. I would have loaded it if I’d been told to load it.”

Kurt shook his head, and pointed at a semi-truck, recently backed into the warehouse.

“Unload that until lunch.”

“Okay, sir.”

Kurt left rubbing his many eyes.

Max and Fetcher had so many eyes too, unloading the same truck as Billy before lunchtime. Their mandibles extended and they drooled over the boxes.

“How many violations do I have to make before she pulls me into her office?” asked Fetcher, his hundred eyes on Olivia as she spoke to a maintenance man.

“Tell her you’re looking for a safe socket to plug your personal belongings into,” said Max. “You can always pretend you’re talking about your phone.”

While those two handed off boxes to one another, Billy worked alone, listening, watching. Throughout the warehouse, more eyes bulged out of their sockets and caught Olivia’s form in each of their thousands of lenses. Mandibles twitched one insect man to the next in acknowledgment. An infestation of countless eyes unmoving yet staring as Olivia crossed the warehouse to examine a forklift.

Billy ate a cold sandwich of meat and cheese at lunch. He sat alone, surrounded by tables of those pincer-like jaws, thinking of the ant and the stolen eggs. He drank soda from a can and checked the expiration date, stamped for May of the following year.

Ravenous insect men shredded through chicken and apples and leftover lasagna.

Billy threw away his trash, determined to make a change.

“You know,” he started, approaching Olivia from behind, near a stack of wrapped pallets, “I found something I think in this place that’s very dangerous. I think our immediate safety is at stake.”

“What is it, Billy?”

“Your immediate safety is in the most danger.”

“Billy, don’t say things like that.”

“I’m being direct. I’m being clear. You are in danger. Is there protocol for that? For your safety?”

“Billy, are you threatening me?”

“Me? No, no, I can’t do that. I couldn’t do that. I’m trying to tell you that you’re in danger. I’m going to help you.” Then he said to himself, “Damn that we can’t just have pheromones for talking like they do.”

“Hey, Max!” Olivia called out. “Hey, Max, come over here!”

The much larger insect man Max joined Billy and Olivia and Olivia said, “Billy has a safety issue, I’d like to know if you have any thoughts about it. Go ahead, Billy.”

Billy stuttered a moment. Max sharpened his antenna through his teeth.

“I think we should start filling out daily safety sheets.”

“And that was about my immediate safety?” she said.

“For our immediate safety. The whole team.”

While forcing out this uncertain, unsteady deception, Billy was wishing for another wish from the so-called genie to break the antenna from Max’s twitching mouth, to make it real in this moment, to crush the shell of his insect skull and shatter the lenses of those insect eyes.

“Okay,” said Olivia. “And I would need to make these sheets, print them up, distribute them, and check them?”

“We don’t need them,” said Max, his unshattered bug eyes bearing down on Billy. “There’s a safety check every quarter.”

“Okay, then, thank you, gentlemen,” and she walked away.

“Daily sheets? What were you thinking?” said Max, pincers pointed in nightmarish reprove. “Kurt wants the Wyndham log done by two. I have to go help a new guy.”

Billy nodded hoping Max would drop dead. When Max left, Billy went to his locker. Swiftly, secretly, careful of the many eyes. Hoping the sweat running down his temple wasn’t secreting the pheromone of fear. He needed the gun he’d brought into work, smuggled in his backpack, brought in case Billy required his power to do something that his power couldn’t do. Logically, the gun was the natural extension of the curse he’d been granted. If his bestowed power wasn’t great enough to kill some larger insect, it was Billy’s supernatural right to utilize whatever tools necessary to make the so-called genie’s curse true.

He unzipped his backpack and slipped the gun into the front of his jeans, tucked his deflated shirt over the handle.

He hurried through the warehouse as if under surveillance by a security system that operated in every eyeball, inspecting him from every angle, capturing his reflection in every lens. That was the problem with bug eyes: they were watching you, even if it seemed they like weren’t, as it did now.

Oblivious Olivia, wearing a blue hardhat over her golden ponytail, was pointing at some vent in the high ceiling. Rather than look where she pointed, the bug beside her measured the shape of her hardhat with its antenna.

Billy grabbed her hand as he ran past. He drew the gun from the front of his jeans and fired at a bug, missing and hitting steel. The bullet plinked and Olivia screamed.

“I have to get you out of here! They’re after you!” shouted Billy, dragging her through the warehouse as the bugs scurried about, startled by the gunshot like roaches frightened by light. “They’re planning something. They mean to kidnap you!”

“Please don’t hurt me!” cried Olivia.

“No one will hurt you while I’m here,” said Billy, dragging her down a flight of stairs. “I promise, Olivia. That’s truth. That’s the honest truth, do you understand? I love you. You have to come with me.”

He shouldered open a door.

“My car’s over here!”

“Help!”

A squadron of insect co-workers had already fled outside and Billy fired his gun into the air, causing them to scatter further from the parking lot.

“Leave us alone!” He pointed the smoking barrel and Olivia shrank away, her ponytail fallen loose in the commotion. “They aren’t like us, can’t you see?”

He dragged her along by the hand, weaving through parked cars, ducking from those all-seeing insect eyes. Peering over hoods, dashing across the lane, toDart the old beat-up car in which he’d never dreamed Olivia would be riding beside him.

He opened the passenger door as sirens wheeled into the parking lot. Police cars shining red and blue skidded to block the exits. Officers stepped out, guns drawn on Billy, yelling for him to let the woman go.

All these police officers—wings under their uniforms, wearing bullet-proof shells, their many black eyes glinting like great big round sunglasses, antennas jolting through their blue hats, mandibles hissing into a megaphone.

Billy threw Olivia into the passenger’s seat and hid behind the door. Through the sharp scent of sulfur and ammonia, he could still smell the intoxicating aroma of Olivia’s pear and cocoanut hair. He tossed her the keys. She flinched as they landed in her lap.

“You have to get out of here!” he shouted.

He looked through the window; the lot had become a silent standstill aside from Olivia’s whimpering. Billy Dart pulsed his power one final time. All the bees, and the flies, and the wasps fell dead in the silent air. The insect officers still aimed their guns.

Bug people. Bug people, and more bug people everywhere, and the cursed exterminator turned to the damsel and kissed her recoiled hand, and with a flourish, stood up and opened fire.