Page 47 - Unlikely Stories 4

The Magic Clown

“How were you wrong?—about the mess.” She attempted to
rethread a needle with a clogged and rusty eye. Could this be germane
to anything? she wondered.
“Ah, yes. It wasn’t a big mess: it was the biggest mess imaginable.
Too bad whoever put that infernal contraption together didn’t do a
better job of securing that cheap brass cap on the glass. Maybe
nothing would have stopped the genie, anyway. It had reached escape
velocity.”
“The what?”
Tony Riga made the exaggerated grimace of a face accustomed to
smiling with a broadly made-up mouth.
“Lady, I am giving you the straight story. Please accept what I am
saying and print it. This is not the same thing as a deathbed
confession, but it may as well be.”
Ann relaxed—enough to say, “I’m sorry. Go ahead, Mr. Riga.” She
mutely speculated how her editor, an inflammatory stickler striving to
burnish the image of a maligned profession, would receive her
unedited transcript.
“I said ‘genie’ because I have no other word for it. The blob rose up
out of the lamp but kept on glowing and growing. I dropped the plug
and froze in my chair. Hovering there, just above the table, the
shapeless shape pulsated for a few seconds as if catching its breath. I
must have caught mine. But I still couldn’t move. Then I heard a
voice. ‘You let me out. But you are not the one who trapped me.’ I
can’t tell you where those words came from. I looked around the
room, startled. ‘No, over here. I am the genie of the lamp, such as it
was.’”
Ms. O’Malley fixed a polite expression on her features and nodded.
“Well, of course, then I knew what was happening. Someone was
playing a rather elaborate practical joke on me. So I went along with it,
taking on the role of Aladdin. Sooner or later the perpetrators—and I
had friends who might have been capable of this, although I should
have realized they couldn’t have had time to prepare for it—would
reveal themselves and enjoy a good laugh at my expense. ‘Yes, O
Genie,’ I said solemnly. ‘How did you get stuck in a rebuilt lava
lamp?’”
“‘Its maker had gathered several old broken lighting fixtures and
was trying to assemble as many working lamps as possible,’ said the
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