“Trash… Trash… Trash…” Jude muttered to himself, rummaging through the pile of items in front of him and readjusting the bag of pilfered goods hefted over his shoulder. He paused for just a moment to listen for any oncoming noise, but heard nothing besides the permanent low buzz his ears had long been affected by. Amidst the moth-eaten books and dust covered trinkets, he picked up the sad remains of a sock and grimaced. “Literal trash…”
There wasn’t much left to loot out of what once was a great castle. The area was overrun with monsters, and all the precious jewels, stones, even a legendary shield of all things, an old heirloom of this particular royal family, had long since been snatched by other ruin explorers. You were lucky to turn a lost earring under a rock, and luckier still if it weren’t just plain copper.
That wasn’t to say his half-filled sack didn’t contain anything of value. Even something as simple as looting the monsters’ pantry, or even just bringing out a stone to sell to anybody wishing to pretend to their friends they’d obtained some bragging rights, well, that was about a day’s worth of food.
Jude pulled his grappling hook out of his belt and solidly attached it to the window, preparing himself for a swift absconding out of the ruins. As he stepped through the window and turned himself to face the wall, he suddenly noticed a dusty crest above the fireplace on the other side of the room, hidden in plain sight by ages of decay! His hands tensed on his rope and he pulled himself back in, then dashed to the decoration on the wall.
It was a bit high and hard to reach, admittedly. Probably another point that had made the mildly valuable treasure survive until his eyes set on it. Still, once more, he pulled his grappling hook back towards him using the rope, then swung it around and threw it at the crest a few times until it finally latched onto it.
With a grin and a tug, the metal frame came right off the wall and fell to the ground, but not without bumping into the chimney, chipping off a corner of the mantelpiece and clattering to the ground some grimy items left on it with a discordant metallic noise.
Jude grimaced and walked to his hard-fought prize. He wiped a bit of the dirt away with his glove. The metal of the crest seemed to be of a silvery color, but he would have to ask a blacksmith for the exact alloy and its worth.
As he added it to the contents of his bag, his eye caught onto an oil lamp that had fallen amongst the rubble. Judging from its dark green color, it was probably made out of pure tin. Mostly worthless, though so light it wouldn’t hurt him a bit to carry it and sell it for spare material. He picked it up and inspected it quickly, only to find a gigantic crack adorning the side of it that collided with the ground. With another grimace, he rubbed his gloved thumb along the split.
And then the lamp started to quiver in his hand. It bounced a few times and then coughed. Jude dropped the lamp in shock and took a step back, his hand reflexively reaching for his dagger.
There were many things he wasn’t prepared for, and a lamp spitting out a full sized woman out of its tiny neck was one of them.
The girl, her skin purple as a plum and ears sharp as a dagger, collided with the ground face first, then tumbled a few times until she crashed into the wall. She rolled to her side, holding her forehead with a wince. “Ow, ow, ow…”
Jude kept his distance. His eyes darted to the window and his mind instantly evaluated how much time it’d take him to escape if the need arose. He turned his gaze back to the woman and contemplated the situation. Was she human or monster? Jude had never met a purple skinned woman, but she also didn’t look very monstery. Was she dangerous? Was she in danger? Was it worth putting himself in danger to check? What was the reasonable course of action here? In the end, he decided not to move an inch, but he did speak out a few words in a worried tone. “Are you alright, ma’am?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” the woman reassured, still clutching her head. She wobbled back to her feet, giving Jude a better look at her. She wore pants that puffed out from the waist to the knees and a red silk top. Her white hair was held up in a ponytail, her face was flat where her nose should be, and strangest of all, her eyes were but two softly glowing oval slits. She approached the lamp, observing it for just a moment before gasping. “There’s a crack in my lamp!” She turned to Jude. “You cracked my lamp!”
“I’m… sorry?” Jude replied, unsure about the gravity of the situation.
The woman picked up the tin artifact and stared at the split in the material. “So that’s a pickle and a half.”
“A pickle?”
“Hm mmh. And a half. Real stinker in my groove.” She looked up at his face. “It’s like rain on a wedding day.”
Jude hadn’t just been lost, he’d been dropped into a labyrinth. “So… a mild inconvenience?”
She crossed her hands under her armpits and shrugged. “Just wish at your own peril I guess.” After an uneasy silence from the both of them, she spoke up again. “You know? ‘Cuz I’m a djinn? I grant wishes?”
“Oh. Erm, no, I did not know that.”
The djinn smiled and extended two thumbs up in Jude’s direction. “Great, well now you know!” She clapped and rubbed her hands. “Point is: Hi, I’m Inab! I’m a disast— I mean a djinn, and I’ll be granting your wishes today. Well, if you plan to take the risk. Again, the whole crack in my lamp thing, you could want infinite money and end up speaking bubbles or turning into a potted plant as a side-effect, not ideal.”
As the realisation sunk in that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and that it was about to slip right through his fingers, Jude froze and felt a panic attack bubble up under his nonchalant air. He took a deep breath to calm himself and closed his eyes. “If we repair that crack, would that fix your… powers?”
“Yessee! I’d be good as a repaired lamp!”
Jude raised an eyebrow, but ultimately decided he would just have to get used to the djinn’s wording quirks. “Then I suppose our first priority should be getting out of here,” he started, turning his head back to the window—
“Wish granted!” Jude’s head snapped back to the djinn, eyes wide, right as she clapped her hands. A bassy pulse rippled all throughout Jude’s body. He felt himself stretch to infinity like his head was falling down some rapids faster than his feet could keep up with. He wobbled as he landed in his pantry, and leaned on his spice rack to avoid collapsing here and there. Once his heartbeat went back down to a manageable pace, he noticed the phantom buzz he had been hearing all his life had been replaced with melodious violins, pianos and flutes, which for the strangest of reasons felt like the musical equivalent of buying furniture. It was soothing and relieving. “I’d like to apologize,” he heard coming from the other side of the door, “I might’ve forgot to mention I have, erm…” Inab trailed off, apparently searching for her words.
Jude sighed. “No impulse control?”
“Sure, let’s go with that.”
With a second sigh, Jude shook it off, went through the door and headed into his small living room —nothing more than a table, a few chairs, a cooking pot and some decorations on the wall really— where he dropped his bag before taking a seat.
Inab gave him a few precious moments of respite, then spoke up once more, awkwardly swaying from leg to leg. “So, about repairing my lamp…”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. Just gotta pass by the blacksmith’s, couldn’t take too long—”
Inab interrupted him. “Only true love can mend it.”
Jude stayed silent, stunned.
She offered a smile, but that did little to mask her worry. “Magic is quite the double pickle spectacular, you know?”
He stared at his feet for a moment. So that was that then. He couldn’t exactly offer her… that. You couldn’t exactly pay for love. Wishes with dangerous side-effects, take it or leave it.
It didn’t help that he knew exactly what he wanted to wish for. He had known for basically forever. And he wanted it bad. Bad enough to risk even dying for it. He was ready to accept that risk, if that’s what it took. “Alright,” he spoke up, slapping his hands on his thighs, “I’m sorry again for damaging your lamp in the first place. Are we still good to make my wishes come true anyway?”
“I don’t have a say in it even if I wanted to!” Inab grinned wide.
Jude frowned and raised an eyebrow. “That sounds kind of sad.” Another awkward silence fell between the two. This lady had a surprising talent at knocking Jude out of his trains of thought. At this point, he was just plain concerned for her, and his stare told her as much.
Her happy smile turned self-conscious. “I appreciate the concern like, real bad, but I assure you that this is nothing you need to double-trouble yourself with. It’s the state of things with me, I’ve accepted it by now, alright?”
Jude relented. He breathed in a few times, thought hard about his wish… “I wish…” …and chickened out. “…that you would tell me what you’re hiding,” he completed to buy himself some time. “T-this isn’t a wish, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but… I want to help.”
Inab stared at him, mouth agape and head lowering. She brought her hands together and held them in front of her mouth, thinking for a moment. “Only if you blabber me yours.”
He considered the offer. It sounded scary, but maybe it’d be the slight pressure he would need to come forward with his wish. “Sure. Deal.”
Inab nodded and breathed out. “I might’ve been a teeny weensie little minute bit of a mean soul when I first came to be…” She paced for a moment, before sitting down floating in mid-air. “So, you know, eventually I came across someone that wished for me to be a blabbermouth so they could safely make wishes, because they could just ask first and I’d tell them whether and how I’d twist it.” She straightened up slightly and stared at the floor, a melancholic smile on her face. “But it helped, you see? It gave me the present of perspective. Now I too had something I wished to change about myself. Now I could understand the ‘selfish pricks’ I kept swiping down. Started to feel bad for what I did, until it became what I used to do. And now I don’t do it anymore and I had changed something about myself that was different from what I’d originally set out for, but it was happy baby by me! I still get sad about it every once in a while, but it’s still wine in the river,” she finished. “Mostly,” she actually finished.
“So it really doesn’t bother you?” Jude asked. “I thought you were sad about it…”
Inab gave him a little shrug. “The sad is more about thinking about the bad things I did than the current state of my me. Telling my story aloud helped me refocus my sad, too, so…” She gave him a teethy grin. “Thanks.”
Jude gripped his hands on his knees. “Erm… You’re welcome, I guess…”
The djinn straightened herself, her head closing some of the distance to Jude. “What about your whole skadoosh, then? What’s the deal with you, since I’m done telling mine?”
“Oh, it’s… It’s nowhere as interesting, really, I’m just, well, antiquarian would be the fancy word for it, but it’s more of a scrounging thing, and… and that’s not really the question you asked, I know.” Jude took a deep breath, wincing through his teeth. “My secret is what exactly I want to wish for.” With a chuckle, he continued. “It’s just weird, I’ve played scenarios like this one in my head a hundred times, ‘if I ever got to make a wish thanks to some divine intervention or something, I know exactly what I would ask’, but… It’s so different when I’ve got to actually tell someone about it. I’d need to tell you to get my wish, and I’m a bit scared.”
With a smug look on her face, Inab leaned back once more, resting her head on her hands. “I’m far past my judgey phase, I thought I’d cleared that up.”
Jude shook his head. “That’s not the judgement I’m scared about. I’m scared opening up about this would make it… more real. Like right now it’s still this fun hypothetical, this ‘what if’, but if I tell you… It becomes something I genuinely need to deal with, right? It goes from thought experiment to being right there, to being my life; that’s scary. What if I make a mistake? What if I end up not liking it, or if it comes with unforeseen or hard-to-handle consequences? You can’t tell me that’s not terrifying!”
“Hmmmh…” Inab flipped onto her belly, swinging her legs back and forth. “Well if it’s something your head goop came up with, it’s at least likely you want it, right? That risk’s worth believing in, or something. It’s not a ‘came up once or twice’ kind of thought, is it?”
“...It makes the rounds every month or so, I guess,” Jude admitted, not without self-consciousness tinting his cheeks.
“Sounds like your subconscious is passionate about this thing. If I were the judge and jury I’d say that’s pretty real already.”
“I hate that you’re right,” Jude winced. He turned to the table and rested his elbows on it, rubbing his face in his hands. After a couple minutes of that, he stared at the wall for about as long. His eyes looked at if he was studying the lime mortar, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Eventually, he found the strength to turn back towards the djinn woman. “I wish…” His gaze shifted to the side, to avoid eye contact. “When I’m home alone, or only with people I trust, when I’m alone in my bedroom… that I get to be a girl.”
“Aww,” Inab swooned. “Granted, that’s adorable!” With another clap of her hands, Jude felt his entire body poof out and back into existence, his whole figure redistributed and his clothes tailored to match.
He felt a surge of energy rise into his lungs. Suddenly, it was like his usually half lidded eyes had found a reason to fully open, and the world looked just that little bit brighter in response. He stared down at his hands, at his chest, at his hips, he stood up and wrapped his thumbs and pinkies around his left thigh and found he couldn’t even fully surround it. He started to breathe harder, his hands shaking in a panic — a good kind of it at least. “Wow…” he let out in a newly improved version of his voice. “Thank you. Just… thank you.”
“No problemo, Roberto!” Inab replied with a wink. “Honestly, I’ve dated my humble quantity of guys and it always felt like they were lacking in something. They were all so afraid to be in touch with their feminine side. But you just reach for the planets don’t you? It’s cute! I’d date a guy like you!”
Jude blushed. “Oh. Wow. Erm. Thank you, again. For the compliment.”
“Anything else you need from me?”
“No, that’s… That’s all for now. Thank you. Really, I can’t say it enough times—”
Inab shook her hands trying to get him to stop. “It’s all fine, I’ll go back to my lamp. You need anything, you give me a rub, okay? Toddle-bye!” And with a swoosh, she dove straight back in her dwelling, making it rattle with the impact.
Jude stared at the lamp for a bit, before going right back to happy-panicking about his appearance. It was real now. It was real now! And it felt so good! He had received a one in a billion chance at his wish, made it, received it, and it was everything he could’ve ever wanted! Bouncing from leg to leg, he started to rush towards the stairs, aiming for the mirror in his room…
…When suddenly, the lamp rattled once more, before its lid came right off, spewing Inab out with a dozen purpley pillows. She landed on her face, the rest of her body slamming against the floor a moment later. Jude turned back to her side. After getting back on her knees and shaking her head, she spoke up. “Well, seems like my lamp isn’t playing nice with that crack in its side, so… mind if I canapé-crash?”
Jude stared at her, worried.
“...In exchange, I’m doing your hair.”
“Deal.”
And after a few months, after discovering that the wish had had the side-effect of slowly changing Jude’s body with every switch back and forth… Both of them figured a few things out about themselves. And with a newly repaired lamp… Nothing truer than girl love.
Selenebun· Apr 6, 2021
