It was hard to wrestle the boxes open, so I just wished they’d open up. We each climbed into a box. The burger came up to about my waist, and by leaning forwards and spreading my arms I could just about touch both sides. I saw Evan was tearing chunks out of the bread and then pulling out fistfuls of burger to put in them – effectively making mini-burgers, which turned out to be the only way we could eat them. Even then it wasn’t easy. We couldn’t eat the sesame seeds, they were far too big and hard, so we had to pull those out and throw them away. The sauce and mayo and stuff inside, well, there was such a lot of it, buckets of it, and it got all over my clothes, adding to the grease stains the chip had already left there. The lettuce was thick and fibrous, like giant raw cabbage leaves. And the meat was coarse and gristly and fatty.

It was fun, because it was so weird. But it wasn’t particularly nice to eat. Soon I felt sick and had to stop. Evan battled on gamely for a bit, but eventually even he had to give up.

We lay on the grass – I wished for a miniaturized patch so it would be more comfortable – and sipped on glasses of Coke I’d wished for – micro-sized, like us, otherwise the bubbles would have been too big to swallow.

And I tried to work out, in my head, what exactly having all these wishes meant and what I was going to do with them. I mean, so far, all I’d done was mess about. Was I going to carry on doing that? Well, maybe. It was pretty spectacular messing about, after all. But . . . it might get boring. No, not even boring, that wasn’t the right word. More sort of . . . unsatisfying. Like just playing at life, instead of actually living it. Because when you can have whatever you want, without any effort at all – did anything actually mean anything?

‘Sam?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You could wish for anything, couldn’t you?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘No limits?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well . . . I wonder if . . . you could . . .?’

‘What?’

‘I was just thinking . . .’

‘What?’

‘You know.’ He looked at me with a kind of hopeful, pleading expression.

‘What?’ Maybe you’ll think it was pretty dumb of me, but I couldn’t work out what he was trying to lead up to.

Just then, a distraction occurred. ‘Hey, look at that!’ I said.

A line of ants was marching up the side of one of the burger boxes. And another line was heading for the discarded fry. But when I say ants, you have to realize that, from our perspective, these really were big, bad boys. Each one was roughly the size of a lobster.