She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people’s wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious.
She asked me if I liked hummus, and when I said that I did, she toasted a pita bread, and sliced it up, for me to dip into the hummus. I dipped my bread slices into the hummus, and ate it with delight. The hummus gave me an idea.
“Just make a wish,” I said, helpfully, “and I could have a meal fit for a sultan brought in to you. Each dish would be finer than the one before, and all served upon golden plates. And you could keep the plates afterwards.”
“It’s good,” she said, with a smile. “Would you like to go for a walk?”
We walked together through the town. It felt good to stretch my legs after so many years in the lamp. We wound up in a public park, sitting on a bench by a lake. It was warm, but gusty, and the autumn leaves fell in flurries each time the wind blew.
I told Hazel about my youth as a djinn, of how we used to eavesdrop on the angels and how they would throw comets at us if they spied us listening. I told her of the bad days of the djinn-wars, and how King Suleiman had imprisoned us inside hollow objects: bottles, lamps, clay pots, that kind of thing.
She told me of her parents, who were both killed in the same plane crash, and who had left her the house. She told me of her job, illustrating children’s books, a job she had backed into, accidentally, at the point she realized she would never be a really competent medical illustrator, and of how happy she became whenever she was sent a new book to illustrate. She told me she taught life drawing to adults at the local community college one evening a week.
I saw no obvious flaw in her life, no hole that she could fill by wishing, save one.
“Your life is good,” I told her. “But you have no one to share it with. Wish, and I will bring you the perfect man. Or woman. A film star. A rich . . . person . . .”
“No need. I’m good,” she said.
We walked back to her house, past houses dressed for Hallowe’en.
“This is not right,” I told her. “People always want things.”
“Not me. I’ve got everything I need.”
“Then what do I do?”
She thought for a moment. Then she pointed at her front yard. “Can you rake the leaves?”
“Is that your wish?”
“Nope. Just something you could do while I’m getting our dinner ready.”
I raked the leaves into a heap by the hedge, to stop the wind from blowing it apart. After dinner, I washed up the dishes. I spent the night in Hazel’s spare bedroom.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want help. She let me help. I ran errands for her, picked up art supplies and groceries. On days she had been painting for a long time, she let me rub her neck and shoulders. I have good, firm hands.
Shortly before Thanksgiving I moved out of the spare bedroom, across the hall, into the main bedroom, and Hazel’s bed.
I watched her face this morning as she slept. I stared at the shapes her lips make when she sleeps. The creeping sunlight touched her face, and she opened her eyes and stared at me, and she smiled.
“You know what I never asked,” she said, “is what about you? What would you wish for if I asked what your three wishes were?”
I thought for a moment. I put my arm around her, and she snuggled her head into my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m good.”
November Tale
THE BRAZIER WAS SMALL and square and made of an aged and fire-blackened metal that might have been copper or brass. It had caught Eloise’s eye at the garage sale because it was twined with animals that might have been dragons and might have been sea-snakes. One of them was missing its head.
It was only a dollar, and Eloise bought it, along with a red hat with a feather on the side. She began to regret buying the hat even before she got home, and thought perhaps she would give it to someone as a gift. But the letter from the hospital had been waiting for her when she got home, and she put the brazier in the back garden and the hat in the closet as you went into the house, and had not thought of either of them again.
The months had passed, and so had the desire to leave the house. Every day made her weaker, and each day took more from her. She moved her bed to the room downstairs, because it hurt to walk, because she was too exhausted to climb the stairs, because it was simpler.
November came, and with it the knowledge that she would never see Christmas.
There are things you cannot throw away, things you cannot leave for your loved ones to find when you are gone. Things you have to burn.
She took a black cardboard folder filled with papers and letters and old photographs out into the garden. She filled the brazier with fallen twigs and brown paper shopping bags, and she lit it with a barbecue lighter. Only when it was burning did she open the folder.
She started with the letters, particularly the ones she would not want other people to see. When she had been at university there had been a professor and a relationship, if you could call it that, which had gone very dark and very wrong very fast. She had all his letters paperclipped together, and she dropped them, one by one, into the flames. There was a photograph of the two of them together,
