Author: Paul Burgess

My first two wishes have gone exactly as intended. The debilitating vertigo and dryland seasickness have cleared up instantly. I’ve escaped the month-long perceptual funhouse, not the least bit fun, of the appropriately named labyrinthitis, and as far as I can tell, there are no monkey’s paw-style “be careful what you wish for” consequences resulting from my first wish to end the dizzy spells and unreliable perception or my second one to have enough money in my bank account to cover this month’s rent. “If I were in a cautionary tale, I’d have died instantly or gained the horrifying power to shape the world to match my warped sensory processing,” I think silently.

I’d worried less about the wish to cover my rent because I hadn’t greedily demanded the obscene wealth of an American tycoon but rather the modest $1,500 needed to compensate for the work that I’d missed due to labyrinthitis. However, I still call to check on my mother immediately after receiving the funds because I want to make sure that the windfall has nothing to do with life insurance; I’m desperate, but I’d never sacrifice my precious mother. She is mildly surprised by my sudden concern but certainly alive.

Tariq is not blue, more of a light bronze, but the dread has been purged from the blend of dread and hope I’d felt when he popped out of the thrift store oil lamp I’d bought as a conversation piece and potential prop in a video. Having decided that he’s less of a horror anthology genie and more of a Disney one, I’m eager to make my final wish, set Tariq free, and give him a figurative five-star rating.

He’s interpreted the spirit rather than the letter of my first two wishes, so I tell myself he must be joking when I’m instantly transported into a cramped, dark space smelling of old oil and brass. I call out to him, but he doesn’t answer. My increasingly desperate shouts of “Tariq!” are thrown back at me as mocking echoes.

Was finding a new captive for the lamp a condition of his freedom, or was my request for a new “forever home”, free of mortgage payments or rent, worded too carelessly? I don’t know if I can grant wishes or not. “Assuming I’m now a genie,” I tell myself, “I’d never, as Tariq had done, purchase my own freedom at the expense of another’s captivity,” but I wonder how many years or even centuries he’d told himself the same.