What to Do in a Bottle

Magpie Tale 115

I was bored. After all, I’d only read the same book a few thousand times, maybe a million, maybe more. I flipped another page, taking care to turn it from the top. The next page I’d turn would be from the bottom, after that I’d go for the one seventy-eighth mark. When turning pages is all you do for centuries, you get picky about how you do it.

It had been a great book once, before I had it memorized and could quote every word of the text. Now it was dull and about some guy with a genie doing impossible feats. Once that genie had been me. I guess I should have known reading about myself would get boring after the first century. If I’d even been in here a century.

I guess that’s the worst thing about being a genie in a bottle. Time slips away from you. It wasn’t so bad when my bottle was new and I a freshly caught genie. Oh, I’d been angry and fearsome then. I’d fly screaming out of the bottle, hissing insults and trying to turn the tables on those who called themselves my master. Then I missed my first two hundred years of history. After that I learned to scream with joy when the seal on my bottle was broken. I’d been a busy genie, granting wishes, building golden castles and destroying them again. And then nothing.

Sometimes, I’m not sure why, I can get a glimpse of the world outside my bottle. I’m not sure if this makes confinement worse, or if it eases the monotony to see something new. Either way, from what I’ve seen, and because of all this water that keeps leaking in, I’m at the bottom of the sea.

So I was bored. Until I felt my bottle move. I’ve gotten good at telling what moves my bottle. Sea tides, an animal, a human hand. This was a hand. I strained to hear sounds from the outside world. There was something about a shipwreck recovery and learning about an age gone by. They were excited about my bottle, wondering how old it was. Older than the ship they guessed. What’s inside I heard them ask.

Now I’m just waiting for my bottle to be opened. There will be great deeds for me to do once more. And before I get sealed away again, I’m going to bring a lot more books.