Genie

Mark looked at the elderly man and smiled. “I can get anything I want? That’s crazy.”

The elderly man smiled. “You’d be crazy to believe if not true. You’d be crazy to _not _believe if true.“

“And I can have as many wishes as I want? No restrictions?”

“There are no restrictions on what you might wish for. There are restrictions on what I will provide.”

Mark mulled things over. The old man had popped into his dorm room, without warning, appearing out of thin air. It was noon on a Tuesday. He hadn’t smoked weed since the weekend, so he wasn’t high. And he generally didn’t hallucinate, so he didn’t think he was psychotic. He looked around his dorm room and focused on a pile of clean clothes that had been sitting in his laundry basket for a couple of days.

“Would you mind folding those clothes?”

The elderly man walked over to the pile, picked up a wrinkled blue t-shirt, and carefully folded it.

“Jesus,” Mark said. “Are you a genie or a maid?”

The elderly man looked back quietly.

Mark seemed confused. “How come you’re not saying anything?” Mark was 21, and with his shaggy brown hair and freckles, he looked a bit younger. Aside from his sarcasm and impatience, he was an appealing if nondescript young man. “Cat got your fucking tongue?”

“If you ask me to ‘fold the clothes,’ I might try to do so. If you say, ‘I wish for all the clothes to get folded,’ and we then confirm that such is your actual wish, you’ll get a response.”

“Ok, Genie, I wish for all these clothes to get folded and put on my dresser.”

“Mark, are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Instantly, a huge stack of clothes appeared on his dresser. The stack included his clean clothes from the laundry basket, as well as dirty clothes from the floor of his closet, and all of his roommate’s clothes, and all of their clothes hung in the closet, and all the clothes that Mark was wearing.

Mark looked down at his naked self and glared at the genie.

“What the hell? I said to fold my clothes, not all the clothes in the room.”

“It is perhaps fortunate,” the man began, “that my power and imagination are limited, or else all clothes the world over would be folded, and all its people would now be naked.”

Mark sighed. “Ok, I wish for everything to be put back the way it was.”

“Are you sure?”

Mark nodded.

The room returned to its former state.

At that moment, the door to his dorm room opened. In walked Joe and Jo, hand in hand. The name coincidence always made Mark smile, but this time, he smiled because he was looking at Jo in a whole new way.