Mad Madeline

I look exactly like the genie from Aladdin. I’m blue, I’ve got a beard and I live in a lamp. The only difference is I’m not as funny as the genie from Aladdin. I’m also not flamboyant enough to break into song. But to make up for my poor sense of humour and lack of energy, I suppose I can cook pretty well.

My signature dish is my dark chocolate soufflé (a very easy to dish, really, as long as you have an electric mixer and use dark chocolate from Sweden) but I also enjoy making basic dishes taste otherworldly. My chilli con carne, for example, is so potent that when people taste it, they suddenly wake up two days later with a feeling of extreme bliss combined with the urgent desire to run to the toilet. A client once told me that my chicken pasta, which features my homegrown sun-dried tomatoes, tastes as if he’d rediscovered the joys of his youth (his words, not mine), and lately, the gado-gado recipe I’ve recently mastered — let’s just say that if you tried it, you’ll never see the world the same way again.

But enough about food for now. I want to tell you about Mad Madeline: my worst and final client.

“You’ve woken me from my slumber!” I yelled theatrically when I emerged from my lamp to see Mad Madeline for the first time.

“You don’t look like you were sleeping,” she said. She was young, maybe eighteen, and she wore some strange purple garment with a bow tie. Peering from the pocket of her strange purple garment was a well worn, little black book. “You’re a genie, aren’t you?”

“How can you tell?” I asked her.

“Well you’re blue and have a beard and you came from a lamp.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “You have three—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen Aladdin. Why aren’t you singing and dancing?”

I sighed. “How did you find me?”

“I found you inside a bag with twenty thousand dollars in it.”

“Sounds awfully convenient. You should give that money to the police.”

“Can I make my first wish now?”

I looked her over. Normally, people would be surprised to see a genie, and there’d be several dramatic dialogues before they’d make their first wish. “Didn’t you listen to what I just said?”

“My first wish is to make everyone in the world have to wait five minutes longer at red traffic lights, and for red traffic lights to last for fifteen minutes just as they’re about to get home.”

I paused. “What?”

“My first wish—”

“I heard you. You sure you want to do that? Don’t you want a trillion dollars or world peace or something?”

She smirked. “World peace?” She lifted a small cloth bag. “Plus I already have twenty thousand, remember?”

“Fine.” I granted her wish and went home, to my lamp, sad. I felt the world churn, and when I turned on the news all I saw was chaos: protests about delays in traffic, sweating politicians trying to explain the situation, the stock market at an all time low. I cooked yellow rabbit curry to try and cheer myself up, but it didn’t work.

I left my lamp to speak to Madeline. She was in a hotel lobby, sitting on her own, grinning.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What are you doing?”

I sat next to her. “You just made the world a more bitter place, and you’re grinning?”

“It’s pretty funny, don’t you think?” She said.

“Not really.”

“Genies are supposed to be funny.” Madeline had small ears and a small nose. Her hair was thick, brownish, curly. She removed one of her shoes and scratched at a hole in one of her socks. “Don’t whinge. You don’t drive.”

I eyed the grand hotel lobby, then her bag of money, which probably contained my lamp. There was a blood stain on it. “Is this hotel what you’re spending your money on?”

“No,” she yawned, sniffing her finger. She scowled before aggressively wiping it against her sleeve. “I go here because out of all the places in the city, this one has the cleanest toilets. You can’t beat five-star hotel toilets.”

“You only get these wishes once in a lifetime. You don’t want to waste them.”

“These aren’t wasted wishes,” she said, pulling out her little black book and flicking through its pages. “These are well thought out plans. My friend and I spent at least ten minutes writing them out.”

“Your friend?” I saw a bunch of random scribble, and then a page with her wishes. Before I could read her second wish, she quickly closed the notebook.

“You want to hang out, play pool?”

“It’s midnight,” I said, yawning. “I need to sleep.”

I pretended to return to my lamp, and for a while I watched her while invisible. She just sat there, stroking her bag of money for a good half hour before going to the hotel restroom. Afterwards, she walked out of the hotel, and into a pool hall where she played on her own.

After her game, she caught an Uber to a rather expensive-looking apartment. There was a room with a closed door, and a light shone through the bottom of that door. She raised her fist as if to knock on it, but then stopped herself. She scratched her hair in irritation, showered, watched videos on her iPad while in bed until eventually falling asleep.

I hovered to the closed room. I hovered through the door, and behind that door were two dead bodies.

***

“Here’s my next wish.”

I rubbed my eyes. “What time is it?”

“I wish that every six hours, every human being, no matter their age, will lay an egg. The eggs will come out of either the anus or the mouth, and the eggs, whose shells are indestructible, will always hatch within two minutes. The contents of the eggs could randomly contain yolk, a bloody human finger, sewage, blood, red pubic hair, ebola, a rare diamond, one thousand US dollars, or any item in the world weighting five grams.”

“You know you’ll also be one of these ‘humans’, right?”

“Just grant my wish!”

I granted her wish, and within six hours, everything that made sense about the already confusing world perished. Scientists and religious people had spent thousands of years trying to comprehend even a speck of the world’s mysteries, and this twisted wish of hers turned everything sideways.

“You know this is half your fault,” Madeline told me right after vomiting out an egg.

“Why can’t you wish for world peace?”

“How do you know that’s not my last wish?”

“Is it?”

“Hell no,” she laughed.

I spent the next month in mourning. I watched the world rattle and implode. Countries threatened other countries, millions of people died from the sheer shock of seeing eggs come out of their anuses.

It took hours of immersing myself in motivational podcasts to finally get out of bed. In my mourning I concocted a plan to save the world by preventing Madeline from making her last wish, whatever that wish could be. My plan was simple: to end her life, even if it meant getting fired from my job as a genie.

“Why are you here?” She was staring at the hotel lobby chandelier.

I glanced at the book in her pocket. “Want to come over for dinner?”

She smirked. “In your lamp?”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t think I’d fit.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“You will once you smell my cooking.”

She shrugged. “Fine.”

I teleported her to the confines of my lamp.

“So this is the inside of your lamp,” she said.

“This is the inside of my lamp.”

“It’s underwhelming.” She glanced around my little space, which I was actually quite proud of.

“Well I live in a lamp. There’s only so much you can do.”

“Still…”

I cleared my throat. “Have a seat.”

Before dinner, I provided us both with freshly baked ciabatta bread drizzled with olive oil and homemade almond butter. For our amuse bouche: a concoction of avocado, walnut, starfish and sunflower. This was followed by turtle soup, and then slow roasted deer with walrus fat, rosemary and chestnuts. The dessert, of course, was dark chocolate soufflé.

All of my ingredients worked together with one purpose in mind: to gradually unravel Madeline. And it worked. As she enquired about each dish, I enquired about her life. It turned out she had only ever loved one man, and his name was Robert. If I thought Madeline was an unruly flame, Robert was the source of all hell. He’d commit all sorts of crimes, and at the end of the day he’d buy her dinner and they’d cackle about how ridiculous the world was.

She pulled out her little book and smiled. “When we’d eat, we’d draw our stupid little fantasies in this book.”

“What happened to Robert?” I asked.

Her smile faded. “Some hag was selling him a magic lamp for twenty thousand dollars. He thought it’d be funny to rip her off.”

“But you have the lamp and money now.”

“Dunno,” was all Madeline said, placing the book next to her plate.

“You need to try my radish juice,” I said, standing up to clear the table.

“Sounds disgusting.”

“It’s not.”

I prepared two versions of radish juice: one that was mine, and another that contained poison. I walked to the table with the glasses, and she immediately took both off me. “Let me take these.”

I carefully watched her walk to the table, but then she turned her back on me and all of a sudden, said, “I’m ready for my third wish.”

“Why don’t we drink to it first?”

“Fine,” she said, turning back around and giving me a glass. “Let’s drink your disgusting juice.”

I looked at the glass she gave me, and the glass in her hands. Which one was the one with poison? Genies can’t be killed by humans, but they can kill themselves. Would I technically end my life if I drank the juice?

“Why are you sweating?”

“I’m not.”

“Whatever. Cheers.”

We tapped our glasses and drank. At first, she looked cautious, but then her face relaxed as she tasted the flavour of the drink.

“This is good.”

I drank a bit more, noting the bitterness of my drink. Did I drink poison?

“My third wish—” Madeline bent over, and to my relief, clutched her stomach in pain. “I’m about to lay an egg,” she grunted before rushing to the bathroom.

I drank the poison! I thought to myself. I noticed her little black book on the table. I quickly picked it up and flicked to a page that said, OUR THREE WISHES TO UTTERLY TROLL THE WORLD. I recognised the first two wishes and gasped at the third wish.

“What are you doing?” She said, a fresh egg in her hand.

“Don’t make this wish.”

“I knew you were following me, you know.”

“What?”

“That night. You saw the bodies in that spare room. One was Robert, the other was the old lady’s. It’s her apartment I’m living in.”

I suddenly felt a pain in my stomach and dropped to the floor. The poison was kicking in.

“I walked in the room and saw them both dead. I think she defended herself, and they took each other’s lives. Without Robert, there’s really no one else in my life. Except you, genie.” She watched me curl over. “You put something in my drink, didn’t you? But you drank the wrong one? I better make a wish, before you die.”

“Please don’t.”

“Genie, it was nice knowing you. Thanks for the dinner, and sorry it had to end this way. My third wish is this: that the entire earth becomes a giant piece of dog poo.”

And in that instant, before I died, the world turned into a piece of dog poo.