I’ve always thought humans lived in their own personal microcosms—those universes of our own minds, the ones where we’re the gods of our own realities, where we imagine what our perfect worlds would be like. We all have different perspectives built from our lifetimes of experiences, our years of personal-belief systems, and our egos. It’s all too easy to relinquish a bit of logic and reason in order to allow what we want to be real to become that reality.

This is the story of a day when I suddenly wished I had three obscure and unrelated things. Through what many would describe as miraculous, in the course of two hours that day, those three wishes were fulfilled.

The first thing I wished for was a handheld carpet steamer. Last Christmas, my wife and I had treated ourselves to an Oriental rug for our living room. Despite vigilant vacuum maintenance to handle the challenges of six cats shedding fur and puking on it, we’d been considered a carpet steamer in the past couple of months. We wanted a handheld version because the full-sized steamers aren’t cheap.

The second thing I wished for was a power sander. I had a random orbit sander but wanted a larger model for some serious stripping. Unlike the steamer, I had been thinking about this one for a couple of months.

The third thing I wished for was a set of tournament chess pieces. Those are the large-sized chessmen typically used on large-squared boards during tournaments—as the name implies. I design games partly as a hobby, and in the previous week I had been mulling over a chess variant in my head. This particular variant required multiple sets of chessmen in different sizes, but tournament chess pieces are quite expensive.

As a frugal sort of fellow, I like to frequent secondhand shops. I like paying a lot less for things like rug cleaners and power tools and game pieces. So on this day, I was on my motorcycle, riding aimlessly around town just for the sake of riding. I decided to make the rounds of several area secondhand shops—not for anything in particular, but just to browse and see what treasures were to be found. But this day, as I pulled into the parking lot of a Goodwill store in Brewer, suddenly I had an idea in mind: I’d scour the secondhand shops that day in hopes of finding the handheld carpet steamer we’d been considering. This was despite not recalling when I’d ever seen a handheld carpet steamer in all my years of frequenting these secondhand shops.

But I walked into that Goodwill, headed for the back corner where all the goodies were stacked on shelves… and what do you think I saw first? Not just a handheld carpet steamer—a brand-new handheld carpet steamer, and a Black & Decker model at that—still in the box with the warranty card. It was dusty, as if it had been a gift someone hadn’t wanted that had found its way to an attic for a couple of years. And just ten bucks.

I was ecstatic. I took my prize up to pay for it, and excitedly told the checkout clerk that I had come in looking specifically for this, and had found it.

“Looks like somebody’s watching over you,” she said, rolling her eyes heavenward as if it was totally obvious to anyone that there was some sort of deity involved.

“Or I just got lucky and found a carpet steamer,” I responded.

She frowned and rang me up.

After some creativity involving the big steamer on my motorcycle, I took the steam home. I was quite pleased, so I headed back out, this time to the local Salvation Army Thrift Store. I hadn’t been there in some time. As I dismounted the bike in the parking lot, I reflected on my amazing fortune at the Goodwill. Could lightning strike twice? Could I score some great deal here? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be like the carpet steamer; after all, I had gone into Goodwill specifically looking for one and found one.

As I walked into the store, I thought about the power sander I’d been wanting for some time. I hadn’t seen one at any of the resale shops since I’d been keeping an eye out for them, but given my luck with the carpet steamer, who knew? I headed back to the racks filled mostly with junk and began scouring. Keyboards, TVs, microwaves, cables, joysticks, you name it.

No power sander—but I did find a handheld Black & Decker jigsaw for just eight bucks. Not bad! I plugged it in and tested it, and it worked fine. Maybe not a power sander, but it was definitely a good find. It had been on a a shelf that had another shelf just six inches above it, so on a whim I crouched down to look into the narrow cavity. And back there was something…

It was a power sander. Black & Decker. Fifteen bucks. Worked like a charm.

At the cash register, I again excitedly related my story—now of two great finds that I was looking for. I guess I wasn’t surprised—at the Salvation Army—that the clerk specifically put the blame squarely on someone.

“That’s the power of prayer,” he said. “God will provide.”

Not in the mood for any more of that, I simply replied, “I doubt it. I’m an atheist.”

He ran my card without a word, handed me my receipt, and said, “God bless.”

I thanked him anyway and headed out. I was elated: Two items specifically in my mind, and I found each just as I was thinking about it. With that treasure secured in my saddlebags, I headed across town for the second local Goodwill store, in Bangor, eager to see if I could push my luck. It was as if I had some magic power: Think of it, and it shall appear!

But when I got there and hurried across the parking lot, feeling like a game-show contestant on the verge of winning the big prize, for the life of me I couldn’t conjure up anything particular that I needed. So I went through that Goodwill, top to bottom, looking at everything, but never finding anything of note. All the while, I scoured my brain trying to think of something—anything—rare or strange or otherwise unlikely to find, just to see if I could find it. Nothing came to mind. I wasn’t depressed when I left, but it would have been nice to make it three for three.

I rode the bike up the street, deciding to head home. I was out of the usual secondhand shops anyway. But as I rounded the corner and headed past K-Mart, I suddenly realized I’d forgotten about the Hands of Hope religious thrift shop there. I’m not religious, so I don’t go in there very often; the religious radio station they always have on that alternates between cardboard gospel music and even more cardboard proselytizing deejays grates on me. To each his own, but I can only handle it in small doses.

But I decided to visit that day, and as I headed in the doors, I suddenly remembered the set of tournament chess pieces that had been on my mind the prior week. First, I mentally kicked myself, because I hadn’t thought about them when I’d stopped at the last Goodwill. No matter; I’m sure if there had been tournament chess pieces at the Goodwill, I’d have noticed them. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt to check Hands of Hope.

Now, power sanders are one thing. Carpet steamers are another. Both of them are the sort of things you’re apt to find at secondhand stores if you frequent them enough. But tournament chess pieces? They’re expensive and don’t often end up in secondhand shops. And while I’d seen a pile of chess sets at secondhand shops over the years, I’d certainly never seen a set of tournament pieces.

But as I neared the end of the first aisle of junk, less than thirty seconds after walking through the door, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was an oversized Ziploc bag full of tournament chess pieces. All thirty-two of them, as it turned out. And for just one dollar and twenty-nine cents.

As the gospel music trumpeted and a deejay began preaching away, I knew where the conversation would go with the clerk if I told my story. So I skipped it and headed home, happy with my luck. Four secondhand shops. Three of them entered with a specific item in my head for each, and each item immediately found. What are the odds?

Looking back at that strange trip, beating those odds is nothing short of incredible. I don’t cloud my mind with explanations of miracles. There was no divine intervention involved—after all, if there really were gods, I certainly hope they had better things to do than to hover over me and ensure that I’d find a handheld carpet steamer, a power sander, and a set of tournament chess pieces. If that’s the focus of the gods’ spare time, then the universe is in seriously deep shit.

Had I been a religious sort, I might have been thanking some god or other for answering my prayers and working such minor miracles. I might have looked at my stop at the Christian Salvation Army store and the religious Hands of Hope shop as signs from above. A religious person might look at this atheist’s experiences and assume God was merely trying to open a heretic’s eyes to His Divine Intervention and Secondhand Shop Item-Finding Glory. An agnostic on the fence between belief and disbelief might well have fallen onto the belief side after a run like that.

To me, blaming it all on deities just cheapens the experience. What happened was astounding, and it made for a great tale to tell. And even though I can accept it as a fun series of amazing coincidences, that didn’t stop me from making two similar rounds of the same shops in the next few weekends. Each time, as I headed towards the door, I dreamed up unlikely treasures that I hoped to find. Each time, I came out empty-handed. The miracles, it seemed, weren’t likely to repeat.

That’s okay. If that sort of thing happened all the time, it wouldn’t be very special and amusing. And if they did happen all the time—if every time I made the rounds of the secondhand shops, bizarre desires appeared on their shelves—then I might have to begin considering if there were an intelligence behind it. But even then I’d be more apt to consider that I had some sort of mental powers that had me subconsciously identifying these treasures before I walked in.

Barring that, I’ll just take those bizarre coincidences as they come: rarely, randomly, and non-miraculously.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.