Careful What You Wish For

    Antique shops have held something of an attraction for me ever since I was a little girl. Maybe that says something strange about me. I think it just says something about antique shops. 
   So when, in my senior year of college, a new antique store (oxymoron?) opened within easy walking distance, I was on it like brown on rice. It was a curious place, under the name of Norman’s. As I entered, I had to be impressed by the fact they had, apparently, imported their own cobwebs and dust. It was everything that one would expect from an antique store. And I was enchanted. 
   After about an hour of looking, I found something that interested me particularly. It was a lamp, which had perhaps been silver at one point, but was now completely dull. For those of you who have seen Aladdin, there is no need for me to describe the lamp’s shape. And if you haven’t, I can’t imagine why you’re reading erotic choose your own adventures instead. 
   A man with thick glasses and a white beard walked over to me. He looked at what I was holding. 
   “Ah!” he said, in a voice almost as dusty as the room. “I see you’ve chosen the magic lamp!” 
   “The magic lamp?”


 He nodded. “Like all antique stores, we’re required to have one or two magic items around. We also have an enchanted mirror that shows everything in black and white and a quill pen that only writes in Spanish. But that may be our best item.”

 “What’s magic about it?”

 “There’s a genie in it. We have another that will burn oil for unusually long periods of time.”

 I looked at the lamp. Obviously, I knew that genies were bogus, but I couldn’t claim that I wasn’t tempted by the thing. “How much?”

 “Twenty dollars.”

 “Awfully cheap for a genie.”

 “Well, the lamp itself is worth forty dollars. The negative twenty dollars is my gift to you to compensate you for the potential bother of having a genie around. One piece of advice?”

 “What?”

 “Never rub it three times under the stem and say ‘Genie, I unleash thee’. It’s much more bother than it’s worth.”
To make a short story slightly shorter, I bought the thing and took it home to my dorm. My roommate, Jenny, thought I was an idiot for getting the thing. But I couldn’t resist a sales pitch like that. And I was having a harder and harder time resisting rubbing the thing three times under the stem and saying “Genie, I unleash thee”.