The Ewer
Once upon a time, a young man and a young woman almost discovered a genie in a bottle. The Genie, trapped inside a ewer older than Narmer, was a steal. Set on a shelf inside Endwell Antiques, the artifact, competing with pretty vases, attractive phials, strange flagons, and religious partitions from stained-glass windows, was marked at forty-eight dollars (but could be had, were you the least bit savvy, for forty). The shop’s keeper, a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses, bushy eyebrows, and a thick mustache, had arranged the glass in front of a west-facing window, and sunlight filled each bottle with something seemingly breathing, as if each vessel contained part of this given day. The couple had just smoked a huge bong, and the thought of everything teetered on the edge of terrifying and much more interesting.
They inched through the cramped space, its floor and shelves overwhelmed with objects. The man noticed the woman admiring the strange container, and he resolved to buy it for her. “You want this thing,” the man said, reaching for the glass. He smiled, “What is it? A jug?”
The woman gasped. Her husband was very clumsy, and the cardboard sign tacked above the shelf, in the shopkeeper’s carefully drawn hand, clearly stated:
You Break It, You Bought It.
The woman practiced law. While not positive, she was fairly certain such language wouldn’t hold up in a court. For one, she didn’t believe there was any such statute on the books. Moreover, the sign couldn’t constitute a contract. For a contract to be a contract, there must be an exchange of value. This is what the court called ‘consideration.’ And it wasn’t very considerate of a store to state you bought an item simply because you had accidentally broken it. If you thought about it, the man could have written:
You Smell It, You Buy It
and, legally, the sign would mean the same thing.
Still, that meant nothing. Endwell was a progressive city. For instance, its public library really was free (late materials didn’t incur fees) and, just down the street, there was a popular open-injection facility. But the woman’s concern wasn’t financial (although the bauble, while strange, and lovely—it was, precisely, her thing—was ridiculously priced at, and she took the bottle from her husband, examined its hand-written price tag, forty-eight dollars). Hypothetically, she had no problem paying for something her husband had broken. Perhaps not a moral imperative, it was the right thing to do. Her distress stemmed from her husband’s behavior. First, he would feel terrible. He would experience a sort of public shame (one that he would equate with some horrifying opprobrium, like he had killed some mother’s daughter while out drunk driving.) Then he would insist upon paying the shopkeeper “in full.” Lastly, he would promise, as if this were possible, let alone necessary, to “make it up to him.” The process would be exhausting (not to mention embarrassing).
She was about to ask for the bottle, only it was missing. Why was her husband smiling? What, exactly, was happening? Then she saw, in her hands, the ewer. Something in the pit of her stomach fell. Her high hit like a little acid peak. A cloud passed in front of the sun. The shop darkened. This feeling, right here, was why she rarely smoked dope. Especially this stuff. She wanted to leave. Now.
“What’s wrong?” the man said. He smiled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He blinked. And then, stepping towards her, “Wait, you didn’t actually, uh,” and he looked towards the shopkeeper. “You didn’t actually see a ghost, did you?” He paled. His lips bright red. “No, wait, don’t say it. I can tell. You did. Didn’t you?”
He believed in ghosts. Specifically, the man believed in poltergeists, and considered them evil, unfriendly, malevolent, and, quite possibly, but not necessarily, dangerous. Turning, he knocked a brass candelabra and a stack of vintage comic books to the floor. The shopkeeper frowned. He seemed disappointed that nothing had broken.
“Follow me,” the man said. He motioned for his wife to pick up the comics and the candelabra. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
Bugged out because her husband was bugging out, the woman set the ewer on the windowsill, crouched, and, quickly, organized the comics, lifted the candelabra, and, carefully, set the junk atop a giant oak barrel. The sun broke through the cloud. Light illuminated the window. The bottles began glowing.
Her bottle, which was the deep, bloody orange of a seashell, was touched by enough natural light to reveal its Genie—utterly stereotypical, imagine Jambi or Barbara Eden, any djinn will do—floating, Indian-style, inside the glass. But of course the woman didn’t believe in genies (it was hard enough to accept that the bottles, like struck tuning forks, were humming) and tossed the vision up to the weed. Because most genies couldn’t care less if they are discovered—after a couple thousand years of creating the same sets of problems for poor, desperate humans, it got old—he remained motionless, utterly apathetic. It was hard to blame him. He just got here. Part of an estate sale, the Genie had spent the last twenty years boxed in the attic of a geriatric.
“I’ll be back for that, uh,” the man said. “Um,” he gestured towards the ewer. They walked past the counter. “I just gotta grab my wallet,” he pushed open the door. “Left it in my car, like an idiot.” Looking back, he followed his wife into the security of the sunlight.
The shopkeeper listened to the bell above the door tinkle off and into silence, and he shook his head. He stepped from the counter and went to the window, where he eyed the woman. The Genie laughed. The woman was hot. No doubt about that. How it was that so many clear-cut idiots managed to land such fleshpots? Neither the Genie nor the shopkeeper had a clue. Not that either gave it much thought.
Richard Leise writes and teaches outside Ithaca, NY. A Perry Morgan Fellow from Old Dominion University’s MFA program, his fiction and poetry is featured in numerous publications. His debut novel, BEING DEAD, will be available from Brigids Gate Press fall, 2023. His unique literary work, Johannes & Merritt (Dark Lake Publishing), is available from Amazon. And his luminous love story, Jennifer, will be available from DreamPunk press January, 2023. Follow him on Twitter @coy_harlingen.