A hundred birds of fire ascended into the skies as the creek water began to boil.
September Tale
MY MOTHER HAD A ring in the shape of a lion’s head. She used it to do small magics—find parking spaces, make the queue she was in at the supermarket move a bit faster, make the squabbling couple at the next table stop squabbling and fall in love again, that sort of thing. She left it to me when she died.
The first time I lost it I was in a café. I think I had been fiddling with it nervously, pulling it off my finger, putting it on again. Only when I got home did I realize that I was no longer wearing it.
I returned to the café, but there was no sign of it.
Several days later, it was returned to me by a taxi driver, who had found it on the pavement outside the café. He told me my mother had appeared to him in a dream and given him my address and her recipe for old-fashioned cheesecake.
The second time I lost the ring I was leaning over a bridge, idly tossing pinecones into the river below. I didn’t think it was loose, but the ring left my hand with a pinecone. I watched its arc as it fell. It landed in the wet dark mud at the edge of the river with a loud pollup noise, and was gone.
A week later, I bought a salmon from a man I met in the pub: I collected it from a cooler in the back of his ancient green van. It was for a birthday dinner. When I cut the salmon open, my mother’s lion ring tumbled out.
The third time I lost it, I was reading and sunbathing in the back garden. It was August. The ring was on the towel beside me, along with my dark glasses and some suntan lotion, when a large bird (I suspect it was a magpie or a jackdaw, but I may be wrong. It was definitely a corvid of some kind) flew down, and flapped away with my mother’s ring in its beak.
The ring was returned the following night by a scarecrow, awkwardly animated. He gave me quite a start as he stood there, unmoving under the back door light, and then he lurched off into the darkness once again as soon as I had taken the ring from his straw-stuffed glove hand.
“Some things aren’t meant to be kept,” I told myself.
The next morning, I put the ring into the glove compartment of my old car. I drove the car to a wrecker, and I watched, satisfied, as the car was crushed into a cube of metal the size of an old television set, and then put in a container to be shipped to Romania, where it would be processed into useful things.
In early September I cleared out my bank account. I moved to Brazil, where I took a job as a web designer under an assumed name.
So far there’s been no sign of Mother’s ring. But sometimes I wake from a deep sleep with my heart pounding, soaked in sweat, wondering how she’s going to give it back to me next time.
October Tale
“THAT FEELS GOOD,” I said, and I stretched my neck to get out the last of the cramp.
It didn’t just feel good, it felt great, actually. I’d been squashed up inside that lamp for so long. You start to think that nobody’s ever going to rub it again.
“You’re a genie,” said the young lady with the polishing cloth in her hand.
“I am. You’re a smart girl, toots. What gave me away?”
“The appearing in a puff of smoke,” she said. “And you look like a genie. You’ve got the turban and the pointy shoes.”
I folded my arms and blinked. Now I was wearing blue jeans, gray sneakers, and a faded gray sweater: the male uniform of this time and this place. I raised a hand to my forehead, and I bowed deeply.
“I am the genie of the lamp,” I told her. “Rejoice, O fortunate one. I have it in my power to grant you three wishes. And don’t try the ‘I wish for more wishes’ thing—I won’t play and you’ll lose a wish. Right. Go for it.”
I folded my arms again.
“No,” she said. “I mean thanks and all that, but it’s fine. I’m good.”
“Honey,” I said. “Toots. Sweetie. Perhaps you misheard me. I’m a genie. And the three wishes? We’re talking anything you want. You ever dreamed of flying? I can give you wings. You want to be wealthy, richer than Croesus? You want power? Just say it. Three wishes. Whatever you want.”
“Like I said,” she said, “thanks. I’m fine. Would you like something to drink? You must be parched after spending so much time in that lamp. Wine? Water? Tea?”
“Uh . . .” Actually, now she came to mention it, I was thirsty. “Do you have any mint tea?”
She made me some mint tea in a teapot that was almost a twin to the lamp in which I’d spent the greater part of the last thousand years.
“Thank you for the tea.”
“No problem.”
“But I don’t get it. Everyone I’ve ever met, they start asking for things. A fancy house. A harem of gorgeous women—not that you’d want that, of course . . .”
“I might,” she said. “You can’t just make assumptions about people. Oh, and don’t call me toots, or sweetie, or any of those things. My name’s Hazel.”
“Ah!” I understood. “You want a beautiful woman then? My apologies. You have but to wish.” I folded my arms.
“No,” she said. “I’m good. No wishes. How’s the tea?”
I told her that the
