Just What I Always Wanted
The Jinni in a bottle gag is one we all know, and the jinni in the lamp is almost as famous. This is why Jinni's are so hard to find nowadays, all the most common places have been known and watched for centuries. But I found mine in a rock.
It was an almost ordinary rock, on the outside, but like allot of stones in Arizona it was a little different on the inside. It was a geode. Geodes are hollow rocks, with crystal insides, great for coffee tables, desks, and such not, once it is cut in half.
That was my job, cutting up rocks to find geodes. It doesn't pay well, but it's easy, and I could do it alone. That meant something out there, doing it alone, it meant you were self employed. But so were the bums.
So there I was, cutting up a rock, a pretty good bet for a Geode, since it was so light, when a puff of gas comes out and fills up the room. I thought for a moment that I had blown another belt on the saw, until I saw the Jinni.
Now when people nowadays think of Jinnis, they always picture big muscular men, or skimpily clad women in silk pajamas, but that's not what I saw. He was only three feet tall, and was wearing some kind of leather breechcloth. If you lightened up his skin, and dressed him in green, he would have made a pretty good leprechaun, except for his grin. It was so malicious it would have scared a priest. Or a mugger.
Another misconception about Jinnis is that they always vow to serve you, by granting wishes. Not true.
"Xaberaitoush!" he said.
"God bless you" I replied.(Well it had sounded like a sneeze to me.)
"What form of language is this?" he asked, in my own voice.
"English" I replied, asking "Who are you?"
"Well what do you want?" he asked, clarifying, "I am the Jinni of the rock."
"How many wishes do I get?" I asked.
"What wishes? Who mentioned wishes?" he asked.
"Well it is customary for a Jinni to grant wishes." I informed him.
"Have you ever met a Jinni before?" he asked.
"No." I said.
"Ok then, don't tell me what it is customary for Jinni's to do, and what it is not." He replied.
"Sorry, well then what do you do?" I asked him.
"I answer three questions, about anything in the world, then I move on to another plane of existence, where I do it again, and so on, until the end of time." He stated, then flashing that grin added "And you just used all of yours up."
And with a puff of smoke, vanished.
The moral of the story? Just this, don't believe everything you hear, take nothing for granted, and finally, always find out what something is worth before you waste it by accident.