The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  “What are you watching?”

  Khalid looked beyond her to the flat reflection of the TV. It had gone to static. And now his wife’s body was lit with strange, brief shadows casting across her in the flickering light.

  “Habibi. Did you go into my room?”

  Certain he was dreaming, Khalid shut his eyes, hoping she might go away and he would wake up. He wished some kind of immaculate miracle might occur and save him from contact with that unknowable, inhuman other: the infinitely twisting insides of a woman.

  “Habibi,” she repeated. This time her voice sounded as if it came from some cavern behind her throat. And her tongue flickered at her lips as she bent over him in the dark. And then, looking up into her face, he saw a flange of amphibious fingers pull her blue lips apart. It was a bright thing, sizzling with light. Its eyes wide-set like Aneeza’s, but red like a mantis. Khalid could feel the prickling of electric hairs stinging his belly. “Look to her,” the creature lisped from behind the blinding light. “Look to her.” Khalid looked, and let her swallow him up. The miracle and the horror of her body finally revealed and the marriage finally consummated.

  THE NEXT MORNING Khalid knew he had his answer. His wife was possessed, and by a very powerful, lustful djinn at that. What else would cause her to keep sex toys in their marital bed? What else would make a nice girl behave this way? How else would he have seen her in that pornographic film?

  While she was away visiting her sisters and mother, he prepared. He watched YouTube videos of exorcisms and testimonials on technique. By the time Aneeza had returned, he had a pretty clear idea of what had to be done. He downloaded mp3s of several ruqayas and put them onto his player. Then he went to the pharmacy to buy rose water, a crate of Nestlé Pure Life and the most expensive bottle of Oud he could afford in a crystal decanter.

  The next morning, Khalid watched Aneeza on her return from the day’s walk, sneakers pouncing out from under her abaya one by one like little white kittens. As she unlocked the metal gate to the house he ducked behind the rooftop’s wall and squatted amongst the satellite dishes until she was safely inside.

  On entering, Aneeza found that the house was oddly silent and filled with the smell of cheap rose water. She followed the scent into her room to find it filled with candles. Ulama TV was on in the background and the water for the bathtub running, steam billowing from the open door.

  The stuffed toy on her bed had its back flayed open.

  She saw Khalid in the mirror before she felt the plastic ropes around her middle, holding her arms down to her sides.

  “God have mercy, God protect us,” he said as he gagged her and laid her down gently on the bed, but when she kicked at him powerfully, he tied her ankles too. She thrashed and struggled, glaring at him. “You have to listen to this,” Khalid said as he slipped headphones from his iPod over her ears. She continued to thrash. “This is proving beyond any doubt that you are possessed, Aneeza. We must take further steps to relieve you of your djinni. Now don’t scream.” He ungagged her and spitting air into a bottle of water with three swift whistles, he poured it down her throat. She choked.

  More proof. After this, he followed all the steps prescribed. A steaming rose water bath. A liter of holy water down the throat. But she did not recant and there was no change in her behavior, even when later that night she had grown too tired to kick anymore. Checking her binds, Khalid let her have a rest with the Verse of Fidelity playing from the ear buds he had planted like seeds in her head and covered over with her shala.

  He had begun to feel more for her in these few hours than he had in all the months of their marriage. Khalid thought to himself, with some surprise, that he was happy. Sitting her up as if she were his baby and rocking her, Khalid thought he could feel himself dissolve into her and simply disappear there. Aneeza’s eyes were shut now. She was unconscious. He had to keep her awake or the djinn might bed down even tighter to her. He ran a bath and placed her in, dousing it with what was left of the Zamzam water.

  It was then Khalid heard a familiar voice and poked his head from the en suite to look at Sheikh Safar on the bedroom TV.

  “How can I help you sister? You’re on the air.” The sheikh asked, patiently tenting his fingers beneath the wiry curtain of his beard.

  “It’s my son,” Mother said. “He’s afraid of his wife.”

  Back in the bathtub, bubbles rose in a shroud around Aneeza’s face. She kicked and struggled still, but the surface of the hot water only peaked and jagged in quiet laps.

  “He thinks she is possessed. I don’t know how to help them.”

  “Dear sister, you must try not to worry. Perhaps your son is right and she is possessed. Trust that God will show him the right path.”

  “InshaAllah,” Mother said and Khalid agreed, staring down at the drowning woman on the bottom of his dull pink tub. He went to the threshold of the bathroom and looked back. “InshaAllah.”

  The Spite House

  Kirsty Logan

  I GO OUT most nights. There’s always something new to find. Always something unneeded that I need. The evening smells of green leaves and frustration and burnt sugar. This last thing confuses me, until I notice the grumpy guy in the corner stall dropping doughnuts into a portable fryer. Usually he does coffee and sandwiches, which don’t interest me. Fried sugar, on the other hand... I’ll stop back later, see if any doughnuts are going spare. The city is quiet tonight, so they probably won’t all get used, which means they’re basically already mine.

  Guys on bikes shout to each other; trucks kwa-thunk over potholes; clusters of friends tumble out of bars, checking their hair in the darkened windows. I turn off the main drag and down one of the quiet alleys that bisect the raucous streets. Without thinking about it, I’ve hunched my head down into my shoulders – my ears ache with cold, and I realise I forgot my hat. Stupid, I know – the hair is a dead giveaway. And it’s not that I’m ashamed, but sometimes it’s nice not to have people immediately know what you are, you know?

  The bars close, and the streets get louder, then go quiet. The night stretches and contracts around me. The guys on bikes are replaced by foxes slinking between the shadows. I’m far from home, labyrinthing through unfamiliar alleys, before I find the right house.

  I know it’s the right house because there’s nothing separating the end of the garden from the start of the alley. No wall, no fence. Even the edge of the grass is ragged, no clear lines at all. And more importantly, stuff. Loads of it. There’s a green vintage telephone and a plant pot full of foreign coins and a clear plastic crate of Happy Meal toys and what looks like a motorbike under a mucky green tarp. And most of it is technically in the alley rather than in the garden. It’s all flecked with rain and dotted with leaves and it is definitely, definitely not being used. So I step forward, and –

  Okay, look, maybe you’re thinking I’m some kind of tragic bin-raider. That I rip open bin-bags, wipe carrot peelings off broken toys, steal credit card statements to buy shit online. But it’s not like that. This isn’t rubbish, out here behind the houses. The bins don’t even go in the alleys – they go out the front of these houses, see? Lined up along the pavement every week for the bin lorry to collect. And I –

  Look, I need to get on with this before someone comes, but there’s some stuff you need to know about who I am and where I come from. You have time right now, and I don’t. So go and get a book and look it up. It won’t take long. I’ll still be here in the alley when you get back.

  Spite houses are buildings constructed or modified to antagonize neighbours or landowners, usually by blocking access or light. They have one purpose, and one purpose only; although technically ‘houses’, these buildings are often symbols of defiance rather than genuine attempts at a home. When building a spite house, the comfort and safety of someone living inside are secondary considerations at best. What does it matter if the bedroom is too narrow to fit a bed? What does it matter if there’s no electricity or gas or running water? What
does it matter if there’s no ventilation or natural light? If the house is awkward and dark and damp, if the house rattles in the wind or leaks in the rain, if the house presses its bare walls to your shoulder as you walk through the rooms? If the house is not, in fact, a usable home – then the spite burns all the stronger.

  From Spite Houses: Architecture as Emotion

  by Kaite Caskey-Sparks (University of Summerhayes Press)

  THE BACK DOOR slams open and there’s a woman silhouetted in the light from the kitchen.

  “What are you doing in my garden?” she says, bold into the night. I wish I could say there was a shake in her voice, but there isn’t. The kitchen light gleams on her pale hair, on the silk covering her shoulders.

  “I’m not actually in your garden,” I say, and I make sure to keep my voice sweeter than the doughnuts I can still smell on the air. “I’m just outside it.”

  “And taking things that are in it.”

  I spread my hands wide. I’ve barely got an accent any more, and that makes a difference. I’m doing everything I can to be apologetic, friendly, so super-fucking-nice you wouldn’t even believe. “I’m sorry,” I say, “I didn’t realise you were using them.” She’s not using anything in this garden, I know she’s not. And she knows it too.

  “I – well. Not right now. But I will be.”

  “Ah,” I say. “Sorry. You’re right – I store things I will definitely use at the bottom of my garden too.” I pause for her to speak, to argue with me; she doesn’t. I grin and carry on, still sugar-sweet. “In the rain. And the dirt. With mice running over them and foxes peeing on them.”

  I try not to flinch as she marches down the garden towards me, out of the light of the house, joining me in the dark. Maybe I went too far this time. Not everyone goes for the cheeky act. Now she’s closer I can see that the slinky dress I thought she was wearing is actually a dressing gown, and I can see her faded floral nightdress through the gap where she hasn’t tied the gown properly, and somewhere in the garden she’s stepped in a puddle and now there’s dirt on her slippers too. I make sure that no part of me – not the tip of my boot, not a strand of my hair – is trespassing on her garden. She looks at me and she narrows her eyes.

  And I can feel her looking at the red of my hair, at the red of my eyes, and even in the dark I know she can see the blue tinge of my skin.

  “Oh,” she says. “You’re...”

  “Yeah,” I say, keeping my head high. “I am.” For a moment I think she’s going to run back into her house, or phone the police, or open up that plastic box of Happy Meal toys and throw them at me one by one.

  She doesn’t do any of those things. Instead she says, suddenly softly, “What’s your name?”

  “Esha,” I say. Why lie? I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a liar.

  “I’m Lexy,” she says. I take her at her word, though I have no way of knowing if she’s a liar.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I say, which I know is weird but I’m a stranger who’s suddenly appeared in her garden and she’s in a dressing gown so, really, what’s not a weird thing to say?

  “Okay, Esha,” she says. “You’ve got me. I’m not using any of this, not now and not ever. They’re not even mine. My husband – my ex-husband... it’s complicated.”

  I say nothing, so she can assume I’m feeling whatever emotion she wants me to feel. Lexy isn’t giving me the usual reaction from a person who’s just found me about to take their stuff, and I’m not sure how to proceed. Best to keep it vague and non-committal.

  “He won’t clear his stuff out, but he won’t let me sell any of it. Honestly, he’s a fucking – he’s such a fucking –”

  I still say nothing but I try to make my expression more thoughtful, more angry, more sad, more – whatever she wants to think.

  “I just wish...” she says.

  That word. Oh, that floors me. It’s years since I’ve heard it spoken. My djinn half is from my father’s side, if you’re curious, and my childhood was rich with the stories he told me about when he was younger, before the Emancipation. He told me about being given the spite house – the house where I now live alone. He told me that my whole life only happened because I got things that other people weren’t using, and since he’s been gone I’ve lived my life on that same principle. He told me a lot of things, and the most important of those things is never, ever to use the word wish.

  But Lexy is totally unaware, her words flowing up like she’s struck oil, like she’s been holding in the words for years, like she’s just been waiting for the right person to speak them to.

  “I wish...” she says, and that’s when everything changes.

  Your history books will tell you that the Djinn Emancipation occurred seven years after the fall of the Iberian Empire, when thousands of djinn were made corporeal. They will tell you that a djinn is a supernatural creature, confined to a magical object, that can shapeshift and grant wishes. In your history books you can see archive photos from the time of the emancipation. Placards scrawled with NO SNAKES IN OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD, NO SNAKES NEAR OUR CHILDREN; HUMAN RIGHTS CAN’T BE WISHED AWAY; OUT BLUE DOGS.

  What your books will not tell you is the answer to this question: what is a djinn that is no longer a djinn? When it is no longer supernatural, no longer confined to a magical object, can no longer shapeshift or grant wishes any more than anyone else?

  Initially it was expected that the main problem would be the outcry over lost wishes, but in fact the situation was much more mundane. It all came down to housing. The djinn were smokeless fire; now they were bone and blood. Thousands of new bodies, needing thousands of new homes. The djinn have existed since antiquity, moving near us but always hidden, always tucked away until we needed them. No one minded them when they stayed in their little coffeepots and lamps and jewel-boxes.

  We accepted that they would always be among us. We just couldn’t accept that they would be us.

  From While in the Woods I Stumbled:

  An Oral History of the Djinn Emancipation

  by Julie Sloma (Jackalope Press)

  “I WISH...” LEXY says, standing at the bottom of her garden in her dressing gown. “I wish...”

  “Just say it,” I say, and I don’t even understand what’s happening at that point. My voice is only a whisper, but it carries, it has power, and I’m leaning towards Lexy but I’m taller than her too. I feel like my body is stretching tall, up past the trees and the houses, my shoulders among the stars.

  “Say it,” I say.

  “I wish,” says Lexy, her voice so soft, so unassuming, “that he’d never existed.”

  I am tall and my voice carries and I have power, so much power, I can feel it in my fingertips, at the base of my tongue, with every throb of my heart.

  “Wish granted,” I say.

  As I’m standing there, overwhelmed by power and confusion, Lexy whips the mucky green tarp off the motorbike – the keys are in the ignition, for fuck’s sake, she was desperate for someone to take it – and with bungee cords she ties the plastic box of Happy Meal toys onto the back of the bike, and she motions for me to get on, and I turn the key and turn the key again and finally the engine catches and I roar off down the alley, and what the actual fuck just happened.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, I go back to Lexy’s house. She’s still got a lot of things she’s not using, and she seems willing to let me have them. I’ve already listed all the Happy Meal toys on eBay. Nothing yet on Grimace, but the Hamburglar has three bids. And the city has been so empty lately, and I know I said I wasn’t hungry, but come on. Everyone is hungry.

  A walk that took over an hour last night takes ten minutes on the bike. It chews up the streets and spits them out behind me, and I feel like the tallest, fastest, fullest thing I’ve ever been.

  She’s waiting for me at the bottom of her garden. As the bike’s headlight approaches her, I see the ratty dressing gown has gone; she’s also wearing a pretty floral dress and her hair is shining pale as opals.r />
  I pull the bike in where the grass meets the alley. There’s no plant pot full of foreign coins. There’s no vintage plastic telephone or mucky green tarp. There’s nothing at all. I step off the bike and lean it on the kickstand.

  “It’s gone,” I say.

  “What’s gone?”

  “The rest of your husband’s stuff.”

  “My what?”

  “Your ex-husband, I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?” She lifts the torch and shines it in my face. “I was never married.”

  I stand there at the bottom of the garden, squinting into the torchlight, and I think: well, shit. I granted a goddamn wish. I can’t even tell you how many times I tried to make wishes come true as a child. Even though I knew that word was dangerous, even though I knew it was a word only ever used against us. I wished and I wished and I wished, and not a single one of those fuckers ever came close to true. But Lexy made a wish to me, and now it’s come true, and that means I – that means she –

  I have no clue what it means.

  “Nice bike,” Lexy says.

  “Yeah,” I say, not sure whether to laugh. “I got it from – I mean, you gave it... Wait, why are you here?”

  “It’s my house.”

  “Why are you here, waiting for me?”

  “I thought you’d come. I wanted to give you something.”

  And that snags in my brain, of course it does. She wished her ex didn’t exist, but if he didn’t exist then he wouldn’t have left his stuff in her garden, and then I wouldn’t have stopped at her house to take the stuff, and then I wouldn’t have been there for her to make the wish. My head is spinning, and I don’t know what the fuck is happening, but I know it’s something, so I don’t climb back onto her bike – my bike – and leave. Maybe I should. But I don’t.