Most genies grant three wishes. Ubizzim the Heavenly prides himself on only ever granting one. Ubizzim has successfully kept this up for a few millennia and plans to continue for a few more. Early one morning he is awakened by another poor soul who wants to try their luck. Ubi slyly exits his lamp as a measly wisp of smoke before transforming into a being the size of ten men. As foreseen, the lone stranger, below average size of even one man, cowers in fear, before quickly picking his head up and holding his chin high to not lose face. The man says with a newfound aura of fake confidence, “I am your master now. You shall obey my commands.”

Ubi drops in stature to pass as a mere mortal and tugs on his toga while dipping down into a mocking curtsey. “Congratulations. You seem to know the drill. My name is Ubizz-”

“I didn’t ask for your name,” the man responds with a sharp tongue, “I need not bother learning the name of a servant.” Ubi rubs his gold bracelet only mildly cutting off his circulation and decides to play along. 

“Your wish is my command,” he says, bowing to please the man.

His new master does indeed seem pleased with himself and begins his request, “I wish to be the greatest athlete ever known. The greatest in every imaginable physical feat.” 

Ubi, with a twinkle in his eyes, responds once more with, “Your wish is my command.”

The next day, the stranger arrived in Olympia to challenge all the athletes at the Games. Remarkably, he did so and won each and every event. Shortly after his final victory, the crowd grew weary of his excessive hubris without rightful thanks to the gods. The crowd then decided to take the gods’ will into their own hands. One wish granted.

 

—

After his lamp was rubbed, Ubi set out to meet his new master, this time donning a white surcoat adorned with a red cross over his chest. To his astonishment, there were not one but three individuals with a hand on his lamp. Two men, one of which had a knife pointed at the other, and a woman with coiled buns on each side of her head hardly noticed Ubi when he arrived. They were too busy squabbling over who would lay claims to all three wishes to see him.

“To save you some time,” he began, startling the group of three causing the man’s knife to clatter against the cobblestoned roads of Jerusalem, “I could just give you each one wish. If that would suffice.”

The three exchanged frightened looks and proceeded to nod gently in unison. 

“Very well. Now it is simply a matter of who goes first.”

The previously knife-wielding man shoved the woman aside at the sound of this to which Ubi said as he helped her up, “Hold on one moment here. As far as I’m aware chivalry isn’t dead yet. Ladies first.” 

She hesitates, then says, “I wish to be the most beautiful woman of all, a woman every man craves.” Ubi tilts his head up observing her and snaps his fingers. The woman was suddenly clothed in lavish silks with smooth, luscious hair.

“You next,” Ubi said to the patient man. The other man simply huffed in anger.

“I wish for immense amounts of political power.” Snap. And it was so.

“No one can so much as breathe forevermore without your permission, sir.”

The last man, jealous of the woman’s beauty and the other man’s abundance of authority, demanded, “Give me what you gave them! Make me handsome and influential!” With one final snap, Ubi made the woman far uglier than she ever was before and put the other man in patched garments even a peasant would scoff at. Their power and charm were, instead, bestowed onto the bitter man. Upset at the reversal of their desires, the man and woman picked up the fallen knife and, together, stabbed the man. At once, Ubi departed leaving his crusader attire, now blood-stained, with the dead man. Passing Templar Knights saw their fellow fallen warrior and, blaming the only two in sight, took vengeance for disrespecting the Order and the cross proudly presented on their chest. 

 

—

Ubi popped out of his lamp once again to meet the eyes of a desperate man. Surrounding the man was land ravaged by famine. He sat in tattered clothing atop a ruined field.

“Please. I wish for enough food to feed my nation. We will die without this kindness,” the man pleads. Ubi answers his prayer and fills field after field with ripe potatoes. The man looks around, wide-eyed and beaming. 

“Thank you! Thank you!” he proclaims, “I will inform the others . . . after just one bite.” 

The man was discovered weeks later at twice his usual size by a neighbor who said to him, “While your brothers starve, you sit here taking far more than your fair share!” The fields now only have scraps of what was once there. What remains has been left to rot.

“If our fields lie in ruin, perhaps they simply need fertilizer,” the starving neighbor said as he dug a massive hole in the ground and rolled his old friend into it praying for just one meal.

 

—

A boy too young to have bags under his eyes slaps an ice pack over his fresh bruise.  Unlike the burn marks on his arms, long sleeves won’t be enough to cover this one. After putting his now-broken glasses in the old sling by his bed, he tucks himself in for the night. Ubi appears before the boy’s mother, his lamp hidden within a pile of crushed beer cans. “I wish that good-for-nothing kid lived somewhere, anywhere else.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” her husband chimes in.

That night a fire started after a lit cigar dropped over a shattered bottle of whiskey. The boy was the lone survivor. A single dove soars over his old hell’s ashes.