By
Samantha Rhodes Mason
Oliver
Lomwright was a collector of junk antiques. Sometimes, in the various antique
shops around Coventry, he would find treasures that he could refurbish and resell
for profit in his own tiny store. It wasn’t much, but he was able to pay his
bills and live in a modest flat. His odd occupation, and thin frame, didn’t
attract the ladies, and so Oliver lived alone. Oliver was okay with this as it
allowed him to freely visit the neighbouring areas’ antique shops, as he was currently
doing.
While passing one shop, Oliver’s gaze fixated on a single
frosted vial in the front window. The swirled iridescent colours of the opaque
glass transfixed him: he had to have it. The small treasure was not even five
pounds—a real steal—and he couldn’t help but try and polish up the surface of
it as soon as he got it home. To his utter amazement, a glorious jinni emerged.
Her voluptuous body, long hair of flame, golden peach skin, and robes barely
covering her curves, rendered him incapable of almost any thought but
possessing her. Yet, one other thought
also excited him, for even Oliver knew that jinn—for surely that’s what this wondrous
creature was—granted wishes when freed from captivity.
The
jinni spoke, in an accented voice that promised exotic pleasures, “Thank you
for releasing me.” She stretched, fluid and sinuous as a cat. “I, Zara, am
permitted to grant you three wishes, but,” she hesitated, her lips curving in a
rueful smile, “they have limits. Firstly, the wishes granted to you are not
those you wish for yourself, but those that others wish for you.” Oliver grew
warm as her words flowed over him. “Secondly, since these types of wishes tend
to be vague in nature, if they do not have defined limits, such as a quantity
or duration, they will last for a year and a day, or until the next wish,
whichever comes first. None of the wishes will overlap.” She paused and glanced
coyly at Oliver, who hadn’t been able to pull his eyes from her. “The last wish
granted will not be limited thusly. Finally, no wish can be granted to you more
than once.” She paused again and looked directly at Oliver, “Is this an
acceptable gift for freeing me?” Oliver,
still flushed with desire, thought the conditions peculiar, and a vague warning
niggled in the back of his mind. However, when he tried to pull it forth, he could
only think of greeting card and special occasion wishes, which seemed to him to
be quite good ones to be on the receiving end of, and so the bargain was
struck. The jinni promptly disappeared.
Oliver
waited, not-so-patiently after several weeks went by, for the first wish to be
granted. He had no idea how he would know that one had been given, only that
his life was sure to change. The morning after his thirty-sixth birthday (almost
two months after the jinni’s release), on looking in the bathroom mirror, he
noticed that his dark hair seemed fuller and glossier, his grey hairs having
vanished. His eyes and teeth shone with alabaster brilliance. As he walked the
market streets that day, he felt lighter on his feet and didn’t even get winded
going up the hill from his flat to old Coventry. In the first shop he entered,
propped against the far wall, surrounded by musty books and aged-varnish side
tables, was the most fantastic painting he had ever seen. It seemed familiar,
and following his hunch, he snatched the find from the floor and paid the
proprietor the twenty-pound price. It was only when he was staring at his old
computer screen, his eyes shifting from the painting beside him on his antique
desk to an identical photo in faded shades of brown and beige, that he knew
which wish had been granted. Happy
Birthday Oliver. I wish you good health and much wealth.
Oliver’s
life changed after that first wish. The painting sold at auction for a small
fortune, the appraisers declaring it a genuine masterpiece long lost sometime before
the wars. With his renewed vigour, and new fame and wealth, Oliver collected—and
enjoyed—the attention of many women, but it was the intelligent, successful,
and stunning Jennifer Morey that managed to capture his heart. Their romance
was intense, the courtship brief, and the wedding inevitable. Oliver could
scarcely believe his good fortune, and his wedding day was the most splendid
day of his life. They spent their idyllic honeymoon amid tranquil turquoise
waters and expansive white sand beaches, in complete seclusion from the world. They
were in no hurry to return and luxuriated in each other for three blissful
months.
Jennifer
was pregnant by the time they returned to their recently purchased townhouse.
It was then that Oliver discovered that perhaps there was more to the wishes
than the jinni had intimated. The locks
to the townhouse had been changed, and an eviction notice taped to the ornate wooden
door. A panicking Oliver called his bank, and then his lawyer. The painting had
proven to be a cunning forgery, its sale invalidated. The entirety of his assets
had been seized when no one could locate him during his three-month absence. It
dawned on Oliver that the second wish must have been granted since a year and a
day hadn’t yet passed. He wondered, with some apprehension, what it was. Jennifer’s
ultrasound first gave an inkling, when it showed she was pregnant with
quadruplets. The wish was confirmed eleven months after that, when she got
pregnant again, despite Oliver getting a vasectomy after the birth of their
four daughters. Congratulations! I wish
you both a fruitful marriage!
Life
changed again with Oliver’s new family. Instead of collecting his antiques, it
seemed he was now acquiring children and copious grey hairs. Jennifer grew
increasingly depressed at having to deal with yowling infants, constant diaper
changes, no sleep, and the prospect of more babies on the way. Oliver tried to
help, but Jennifer longed to be out with her friends and working at her
lucrative sales career. They fought all the time. Oliver began to seriously wonder
if he shouldn’t have refused the jinni’s gift. It had seemed like a great blessing
at the time, especially after the first wish, but no longer. As the gulf
between Jennifer and himself widened, Oliver began to fear the final wish. Perhaps, he reflected, I should have asked more questions of that
damned jinni instead of lusting after her. Oliver wracked his brain,
desperate to find a way out of the contract. As each avenue he explored
washed-out, his agitation mounted, and his preoccupation increased. Oliver’s
state did nothing to help matters with Jennifer, who again tore into him one
night after having to deal with the babies’ bath without his help for the
umpteenth time. Her tired face, no longer so beautiful, wrinkled in anger and
disgust, and her normally coiffed hair whipped in synchrony as she shrieked
criticisms of his abilities as a husband and father. Oliver, who had heard it
all before, simply turned his back, retreating towards the small bedroom in the
tiny flat they now called home. She continued yelling even as he made his
escape. “I wish you’d just go to hell, Oliver, for all the good you do me! JUST
GO TO HELL!”
~~~~~~
Zara
smiled in satisfaction as the count after her name on the tally board in the
large office where she sat increased yet again. For the six-thousandth month in
a row, her name topped the list. In all the centuries she had been using the
jinn hook, no one had ever refused her gift; sex sells, after all. The magic of
the hook was, of course, that the granted wishes always played out the same. In
all the underworld, there was no collector better than she, and Oliver was a
fine
addition.
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