The Lamp Genie

Many years ago, when I was a kid, I had a strange dream.

I was just six years old. It’s not that big deal to have strange, crazily detailed and realistic dreams at this age, when the imaginative parts of the brain are pulling around with excitement. But that one was different. I felt it; even being just a kid, I could feel that something with that dream was not right. It wasn’t natural.

And, not much later, what came to happen just served to prove that my feelings about it were not a mistake.

Let me tell you about it…

In the dream, I was alone in a park, sitting at a bank. The wind was getting stronger every minute, and for the grey and heavy clouds that was accumulating above my head, I could predict there would soon be a storm.

I’ve always liked storms. And I was happy there, just sitting and feeling the cold wind in my face. Until he showed up. A bald man, with a huge forehead and evil-looking eyes, wearing an outdated white suit with brown shoes. He just appeared there, by my side in the bank, sitting with crossed legs and staring at the horizon mockingly.

He turned to me.

“How are you, kid?”

“Fine” I answered, uncomfortably.

“Just fine? Oh, that’s not right” he responded, energetically “At this age, you should be happier than ‘just fine’. Kids were meant to be happy!”

I just consented quietly, feeling intimidated before his strong voice.

“What do you want to be happy, kid? What do you want to make your life better?” he asked, looking intensely at me with his deep dark eyes.

I stayed quiet. Thinking about it now, I guess I shouldn’t.

“Well, if you don’t know yet…” he said, finally “That’s fine. I’ll give you time. Just let me know when you decide.”

For a time that could have been minutes or could have been hours, we both remained quiet. It’s difficult to notice the time passing in our dreams. At some point, I really started thinking about all those things I would like to chance in my life. Before I could stop it, I found myself telling to the strange man:

“I would like to have my dog back…”

“Your dog?” He repeated, his eyes shining obsessively while he looked at me.

“Yes” I said. “Brown died two years ago… Mama said we could buy another dog, but I really miss him…”

“Well, THAT’S WONDERFUL” he shouted. And after, with a more restrained voice.

“I mean… that’s a pitty, my child. So, would you like to have him back, right?”

“Yes”

The man, then, stood up. He closed his eyes and, with a concentrated face, pointed to the amount of trees in front of us. First, I heard the barking. A few seconds later, a big, fluffy and brown-haired dog came from the darkness of the forest, running toward us. It was Brown, in all its details.

I could not control my happiness. I ran towards him too, and we shocked and rolled in the grass, hugging and kissing each other. I played with Brown for some minutes before going back to the man to thank him.

“That was nothing, son” he said “But tell me, what more could I do to make you happy?”

At that point, I wasn’t afraid or apprehensive anymore. I, actually, almost considered the strange man as a friend. I told him, without hesitance:

“My sister bothers me. You know, she is the eldest… She always thinks she is superior to me in everything. And she can do a lot of thing that I can’t, like going out with her friends at Saturday night. Mother never lets me go out alone.”

The man smiled largely, a crazy expression passing by his eyes. He seemed more and more delighted every minute.

“Well, that’s very simple” he said. And, closing his eyes again, he concentrated himself.

The park, the bank and the trees vanished, and in the next second, I was standing at home’s kitchen with the man and Brown. I went to the upper floor, to check my sister’s room. She was nowhere to be seen, and in the place of her pink room, I found a blue and green one with all my toys in it. Her room, which had always been the largest, had become mine.

I heard my parents calling me from the kitchen, yelling that the dinner was ready. I went there to eat and, for all that night, I experienced how it was like to be a loved and spoilt only child. I loved it. I found the man again in my room, when I went there to sleep, and I thanked him once more.

“Don’t bother thanking” he said. “It was nothing, my little man. Now, say to me, one more thing I can do for you before I go away.”

All my wishes had been satisfied and I had nothing more to ask. Then, I sat down in my bed and thought. What else could I wish? I looked out of the window, for the sky full of stars, and remembered of all that bible stories about the heaven. A perfect place, in the clouds, where all the good people went to. A place where anyone could never get sad.

What could be better than living a perfect life with my dog and my parents? Living a perfect life with my dog and my parents in a perfect place, where any of us would never be sad again.

That was when I said to the man:

“I wanna go live in heaven!”

And, again, he smiled.

He vanished, and for the rest of the night, I lived in a little house in heaven, right next to God, with a big garden where I played with my dog and my parents. There was chocolate cake and milk for us to eat when we got hungry. There was a giant bed where we all could lay down to sleep together when we got tired.

But dreams does not last forever.

When I woke up from the dream next morning, it was my birthday. As a present, my mother appeared with a new dog for me. It looked just like Brown.

The dog, though, was not exactly the same. It was much more aggressive than Brown, and it tried to bite me more than once. In a few weeks, I already hated him.

Ten years passed, and I didn’t think about the dog or the dream very much. But then, in my seventeen birthday, a tragedy happened in my family. My sister, driving home after having some alcohol in a party, crashed the car with a truck in the middle of the street. The car was completely smashed, and so was her. The doctors believe she died instantly.

After that, I started getting scared. “Could that be, somehow, related with my dream? Would I be responsible for my sister’s death, just because of a stupid wish I made ten years ago?” I asked myself.

I almost went crazy. I had nightmares every night, where my dog would came out of its grave as a zombie, and where my sister, with her bones crashed and covered in blood, would turn to me and blame me for her accident.

In these nightmares, I didn’t see the strange man even once.

But, today, I guess all me problems will be solved. All my questions will be answered.

I asked for my dog, and it came to me in my seventh birthday. I asked for my sister to disappear, and it happened in my seventeenth birthday. Finally, I asked for me and my parents to go live in heaven…

And today is my twenty seventh birthday.

Credit To – Natália C