# Shabada Labada Bish Bang Bing

Published: September 12, 2026


A wizard came to town on a Tuesday and set up a stool in the square beside a woman selling roasted chestnuts. Her cart had belonged to her mother, and to her mother before that. The wizard sat down and said:

"Shabada labada bish bang bing!"

He said it the way a man announces a number; as though music ought to follow, and would, if one had the taste for it.

The chestnut woman looked up from her fire. "What?"

"Shabada labada bish bang bing!" He swept his hand like a man presenting a cake. "The incantation, my dear! Say it and get what you want! That is the whole thing!"

"What do you mean, get what I want?"

"Exactly what I say! You say the words, you get the thing! The spell! I am teaching it to you! Free of charge! No catch! It is, if I may say so, a tremendous bargain!"

The chestnut woman, whose name was Hana, had wanted a second cart for years. A cart that faced the other direction, to catch the afternoon crowd coming down from the weavers' quarter. She had saved for it and borrowed for it and prayed for it, in that order, which is the order in which these things are typically attempted, and in that same order she had failed. She opened her mouth.

"Shabada..." She stopped. "That can't be it."

"But it is!"

"It sounds like nonsense."

"Well, of course it sounds like nonsense! It is nonsense! It is also a spell! The two are not mutually exclusive, you know!"

She tried again. "Shabada labada..." Her face went hot. The baker was watching from his doorway, arms crossed. The cobbler had stopped mid-stitch, needle suspended in the air like a small accusation. "I can't say this in front of people. They'll think I've lost my mind."

"Have they minds to lose?" The wizard leaned forward on his stool, genuinely curious. "That is the real question, isn't it!"

By noon the whole town was in the square. No one believed the wizard. Nobody could stand the idea that someone else might try it first. For years afterward, the town would talk about the thing that happened that one time with the wizard without anyone quite admitting they'd participated.

The baker went first. His name was Tomáš and he wanted a wife; not a specific one, because he'd been specific before and it had not worked out, and the specific one had married a cooper from the next valley and they were, by all accounts, happy, which was worse. He wanted someone who wanted him back, which he had found was the harder thing to arrange, the wanting being easier than the being wanted, and the mutual version seeming to operate by rules he could not deduce from any available evidence.

"Shabada labada bish bang bing," he said. He flinched afterward, like a man who has jumped into cold water and is waiting for the shock. Nothing happened. Or rather: a woman from the next town took a wrong turn looking for the cobbler's shop the following Thursday, and she bought bread, and she came back the Thursday after that, and they have been together since. Tomáš never connected the two. Nothing *felt* different when he said the words. He expected the world to confirm what he'd done, and the world did not.

The cobbler wanted his back to stop hurting. He was forty-seven and his spine had the opinions of a much older spine and he had been living with these opinions for six years, which is long enough for pain to stop being an event and start being a place; a country he lived in and knew the customs of. He opened his mouth, looked at the wizard, and said: "There has to be more to it than that. A ritual. A preparation. Something I'm supposed to do with my hands."

"My good man! You could put them in your pockets! You could fold them! You could clap! It makes no difference whatsoever!"

"Then what's the catch?"

"There isn't one! That's what I've been telling you! The catch is you! You're the catch! You always have been!"

The cobbler did not say the words. He went home and soaked in a hot bath and his back hurt the familiar amount, which was at least familiar, and the familiar, when you have been without it, can pass for comfort if you do not examine it too closely.

A girl of fourteen wanted to fly. She'd wanted it since she was six, which is when wanting things becomes possible and before self-consciousness makes it expensive. She said the words without hesitation, loud and clear, and the wizard winced, because he had been hoping, as wizards often hope, that someone else would test it first.

"Marvelous!" he said. "That was the spirit! Or near enough!"

Nothing visible happened. She went home disappointed. That night she dreamed she was flying over the valley, and when she woke she could describe every house from above, including the cobbler's crooked chimney, which she had never seen from any angle that would account for the detail. She decided it was just a dream. That was the available explanation.

The town council held a meeting. The council met in the back room of the public house, which is where town councils tend to meet when the matter does not seem to warrant the formality of the municipal building, and this matter did not seem to warrant formality, although it would, by the end of the evening, have deserved it. They agreed the wizard's spell was dangerous. Not because it worked; they were not at all sure it worked. Because it was too easy. If getting what you wanted was simply a matter of saying words, then what was all the struggle for? What was the point of being careful, of being prudent, of being afraid? Fear was at least a position. Fear meant you'd considered the thing from every angle and found it wanting, or found yourself wanting, which amounted to the same thing, and was, in its way, a kind of architecture; a structure you could live inside, with doors that closed and windows that faced away from whatever it was you did not want to see.

"Shabada labada bish bang bing is not a dignified way to pursue one's desires," the council chair said. Nobody laughed. Several people nodded. They wrote a resolution forbidding the words in the square on account of public order and tradition. Really, saying them meant wanting something out loud, and that was the part nobody could stand.

The wizard stayed three days. On the first day, no one said the words. On the second day, a few people tried them quietly, in private, the way one tries things that are embarrassing precisely because they might work; in a whisper, at night, into a pillow, as though God could hear you but your neighbors could not. On the third day, a child said them in the square, loud and clear, because she wanted a second chestnut, and Hana gave her one, and that was that.

"See?" the wizard said to no one in particular. "It works every time! The trick is wanting something! Most people are too polite to manage it!"

The wizard left on Thursday. No one saw him go. He left his stool next to the chestnut cart. Hana kept it. She does not know why.

The words stayed in the town the way a song stays; everyone knows them, nobody sings them. At night, sometimes, someone whispers *shabada labada bish bang bing* into the dark, then stops, embarrassed, as though they've said someone's name in an empty room and the room heard. It would work. That is the worst part. They would get the thing and have to live with the fact that it had been available the whole time. The only thing between them and it was the sound of their own voice, which they could not bring themselves to make.