The genie looked up at me, then looked at the bottle. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.
I wasn’t kidding. “You’re supposed to fit. Shrink or something.”
She pulled up at the corner of her silk pyjama pants. “Laws of physics say you can’t make something smaller than it is. Conservation of matter or something. Unless it’s a black hole.”
“Is it?” I lifted up the glass bottle. It was heavy purple glass, possibly leaded, but surely not heavy enough to be condensed matter.
“What I suggest,” the genie said, stroking a finger along my shoulder, “Is that I come live with you.”
I remembered the day I’d found the bottle on the edge of the sea, partly covered by kelp, shining in the sun. I’d pulled the cork, thinking there would be wine inside, not a woman. How had she come out of there? There had been smoke. I’d been shocked, dropped the bottle. It had all been so sudden.
She moved her finger to touch my earlobe. “And who knows? Sometime in the future, you may relent and take me up on my offer.”
“Three wishes? Never.” I’d read all the stories. I knew better. “You’ve had a week of modern life. Isn’t that enough?”
I’d pulled the cork, thinking there would be wine inside, not a woman.
“You can’t condemn me to a bottle-life. That’s barbaric.”
“But it’s where you belong,” I said, moving away from her soft skin and incense-like perfume. I’d basically been her slave all week, driving her around the tourist hotspots. “Vancouver doesn’t have magical creatures unless it’s on a film set.
She put her hand out towards the bottle, as if she would grab it and smash it, but she shrank from actual contact. “I can’t do it. Please, release me from this curse.”
I looked at her tear-stained face. “But that’s using a wish.”
She got on her knees. “Do it.”
“But that’s changing the entire ecosystem. That’s transferring power — or negating power — that will put the whole universe
out of balance.”
She prostrated herself. “You have the power to free me.”
“What is freedom?” I pulled my feet from her grasp, forcing her to release my made-in-China running shoes. They were a luxury commodity constructed by people who had enslaved themselves to the dream, workers who put up with extreme factory conditions in order to have a better life for their children, while the company executives took the profits to build their own dreams of big houses and offshore tax-haven investments. Even I had bought my shoes for my own personal dreams of being fit, to have knees without pain when I ran, and to look cool.
These same shoes I had worn last week when I walked on the beach and found the bottle. “Dreams are funny things,” I said. “They’re never what you expect. Never really what you wanted.”
She could tell I had made my mind up. She got up. She was going to run away, as if running could save her now.
“I wish — ” I pronounced loudly, and took a deep breath as she halted her flight, ”I double wish, I triple wish — ”
She turned to me, fear and perhaps even horror in her face, for she had spent a week with me and knew my habits.
“I forever wish that I never wish for anything more again.”
She started laughing then. She laughed until she cried. I couldn’t understand it. “Are you okay? Aren’t you going to
grant me my request?”
“You solved it!” she sputtered.
“I did? Am I like Spock now?”
“Quite the opposite, you idiot.” She laughed. She took the bottle and tossed it in the grey recycling bin that was part of every park’s zero-garbage initiative.
“Are you free?” I asked, perplexed.
“More than free,” she said. “So are you.”
“But I can’t wish you free,” I said.
“The bottle wasn’t my cage,” she said. “The wishes were.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
She embraced me fully and freely. No games, no toying with my ear. “I’d love some sushi right now. Want some?”
“Sure,” I said. “That would be — not what I wish for, but …”
“Bonus,” she said.
I took her outstretched hand. “Yes. Bonus.”
Buddha in a Bottle was written by Susan Pieters and was originally published in Pulp Literature, Issue No. 25, Winter 2020.