Wishes That Make Me Angry: Ask a Genie

Hello dear readers! It’s your doting genie, delighted to write my first column of the new year. I’ve had two letters in a similar vein, so I’ll take them both together.

Dear Genie,
Do you ever regret a wish, after you grant it, or is that not something you think about?
Signed, Sadder But Wiser

Dear Genie,
Don’t you get pissed off sometimes? I’m a family law judge, and I hear wishes every day that piss me off. Are you allowed to walk away from a wish, or do you have to grant them once you’ve heard them?
Signed, Fed Up At The Bench

Dear Fed Up and Sadder,
I’ve regretted quite a few granted wishes. (I wrote a whole book about one of them—I hope to print it someday.) The biggest one came early in my genie-journey. Some lunatic asked me to remake the moon out of cheese, and in a nihilistic funk, I did it. I used a farmers’ cheese with moon-colored mold around it. You couldn’t tell the difference, but it didn’t sit right with me. Thankfully I knew a better-than-average wizard, and changing it back wasn’t as hard as you’d think. It was only cheese for a month or two—I wonder how people caught wind of it.

Yes, Fed Up, I hear a great many wishes that make me angry. I am allowed to walk away, and I do quite frequently, though my incentive to accept a wish is rather strong. For a few examples: I turned down a wish to freeze the oceans. You’re welcome for that. And I nixed one that would have made all the deer fat and slow. I’ve walked away from a hundred kinds of petty revenge, and from scores of supposedly-scorned lovers. I turned down a girl who wanted every crow to caw, “Your beautiful!” (I was tempted, but crows have a right to their opinions.) Just last year I turned down a wish for seven new plagues, since I hate to be redundant.

But I grant some wishes, even when they tick me off. Sometimes a wish is the surest way for the wisher to learn his lesson. Other times I’m afraid the wisher will satisfy his own cruel desire, and I’d rather grant it myself, in my own way. Contrary to what people think, I usually try to grant the spirit of a wish, but there are times when I make liberal use of wiggle room in the phrasing.

One man told me, fists ashaking, the tale of his ungrateful daughter, who’d run off in the night and married an indigent road-mender, out of spite for her loving father. He wanted me to curse her with boils and a barren womb. I convinced him I could do more harm if he left me room for creativity. We made the pact on, “Curse my daughter with a heavy fate, such as she deserves.”

I knocked on her door, to see what I was working with. She invited me right in to dinner, giving me the bowl of broth that would have been hers. I never know what to do with a gesture like that, but it would have been rude to refuse. Her husband was quite poor. Their little hovel was as spare as anything, save for the flower garlands she’d strung up. But we laughed away the evening, and it seemed to me that you’d rarely find a happier couple, nor one more generous. So. I cursed her with the burden of wealth, and I’m pleased to say the both of them held up solidly. I also gave her the duty—since a curse must be a curse—to take a basket once a day to her old, mute, housebound father, and send a servant now and then to bathe him. And that she did, as long as he lived. Which wasn’t all that long.