An eight-year-old child with bright eyes, a dinosaur backpack and a little shovel in hand digs a hole under the furthest tree in their back yard, alone.
He hears a little “clink”, but it doesn’t sound like a rock. Excited, he unearths a strange bronze vessel, like the old lamps his grandmother burns incense in, but… heavier.
There’s no mythos in this child’s culture of genies and lamps; he’s too young to understand the stories about the steep price of selfish wishes, the cursed fate of those who willingly place themselves in the hands of the trickster’s particular reading. He has never started awake dreaming of the deep, cold water that rushes under the thin ice walked by careless power, the slow curl of the monkey’s paw.
He starts to rubs the lamp clean.
The spirit that emerges from this long-lost lamp is gaudy and resplendent, radiating an ancient power that seems to hum and crack just out of earshot, completely out of place in every form and scale that might suit this idly pastoral backdrop. It looms above the child, somehow both vast beyond imagining and merely too tall, too broad. Resonating as though a forgotten temple had found its voice, it speaks: “You, who have released my from my ancient prison, know that I will uphold the covenant. I will grant the three boons. Thrice, what is within my power to grant will be yours.
Wide eyed, the child responds “is a boon … like a wish?”
The genie smiles; this guileless child is the only soul near. T
“Indeed.”
“I want to be a doctor.”
The smiles turns a corner the child cannot recognize; patronizing, predatory. What luck, that it is so easy.
“Very good, may your w…”
“A dinosaur doctor.”
For the first time in uncountable aeons the genie is taken aback.
“You want to be… a what?”
“I want to be a dinosaur doctor and I want to find dinosaurs.”
“… what”
“Oh! And I want my own shirt with my dinosaur I find on it.”
“… you … A dinosaur doctor, you say.”
“Yes and I want to find dinosaurs.”
“Have you considered … Wealth? Power? Strength, beauty?”
“No.”
“Empire? Mountaintop palaces, grand vistas?”
“I don’t want a mounty visty, I want to be a dinosaur doctor.”
“And a dinosaur shirt, you say.”
“My dinosaur shirt. I want my own dinosaur I found on a shirt.”
The spirits can See deep into the folded contortions of the human spirit, the twisting ochre contradictions of a lifetime of justifications, self deceptions and lies, the gnawing tendrils of envy, lust, desperation and greed so common in those who’ve sought out his kind, and this one is fascinated that there is none of that before him. He has been summoned, somehow, by this uncomplicated form, by untainted colours vibrant, primary and whole. Where would he reach into this to set the hook, he wonders, to anchor the final turn of this child’s undoing?
And then for the first time in as many aeons, he finds himself wondering… why?
The cursed fate of those who seek the out the lamp’s prisoners is its own justification; its own poetry. None who could See those whose wishes were twisted into cruel consequence would ever think otherwise; the reason is there, sufficient and indisputable before them: corroded, vile and eminently, universally human.
Except, somehow, today. Except here and now.
The genie knows with a cosmic certainty that the contortions, the justifications and contradictions will come to this child in time. It cannot be otherwise. But they are not here now; perhaps that balancing will be set before another spirit on another day.
“Very well. You wish to become a Doctor of Dinosaurs? You wish to discover new dinosaurs, and you wish to have a shirt with the dinosaur you have discovered on it?”
“Yes.”