“My neighbour,” says Lexy. “She’s got a lot of stuff she’s not using. It’s all in a caravan, just sitting in her driveway. I think she’d want you to have it.”
“Maybe I should ask her,” I say.
“Oh, don’t worry. I already checked with her,” says Lexy, her voice breezy-light. “And I was hoping that afterwards, I could ask you for something. Just a small thing.”
And I think: well, I guess this is how it works.
“Okay,” I say.
I follow Lexy down the alley and around to the front of the houses. It’s not late enough for the stars to be out, but it is early enough for the streetlights to be on, and half the houses are dark. From the front, Lexy’s house looks a lot like all the others, except that Lexy has plastic flowers in her window boxes and an incredibly shiny red car parked in the street outside. The neighbour’s house has plenty of flowers – real ones – among the weeds and overgrown grass and a brightly-painted bench and a kid’s bike on a kickstand. Wind chimes made of sea-glass clink in the breeze, and beside the neighbour’s front door, three pairs of walking boots stand on the doormat. There’s a light on in an upstairs window. Lexy’s house and her neighbour’s house should each have a narrow but usable driveway, but there’s a caravan parked in it, which means neither house has a usable driveway.
“Here you go,” says Lexy cheerily. “She says she’s not using anything that’s in here.”
Inside the caravan the bed is pulled out and piled with brightly-coloured blankets and duvets and cushions. There’s a teapot on the unlit stove and an empty wine bottle with two glasses on the tiny chipboard table. Everything is cramped and cheerful and covered in a light layer of dust.
I emerge clutching a full box, piled so high I can’t see over it: cushions (my house is too narrow for a proper bed, so the more padding between me and the floor, the better), a vintage picnic set (for eBay), retro versions of Scrabble and Monopoly (for eBay), and two full bottles of wine (for me).
Together Lexy and I walk round to the back of her house. She pulls bungee cords from her pocket and fastens my box of things to the back of the bike. I know I must seem like an idiot, standing there silently, carrying some woman’s abandoned possessions around, but did you miss the part where I apparently granted a goddamn wish? I’m finding it hard to figure out the right thing to say.
“I wish,” says Lexy lightly, fastening the final bungee cord, and at her words I feel the power flare up in me. “I wish that grotty old caravan wouldn’t block the light into my front room.”
I clamber onto the bike and roar away from Lexy, and I can taste the power on my tongue, can feel it filling my lungs, sparking in my mouth, throbbing along with my heart.
The current generation will grow up finding it logical that djinn and spite houses would go together. A large number of small, useless houses. A large number of useless people used to small spaces. But some of us will remember a time that the djinn – like spite houses – existed for one reason: to piss someone off. And while that’s fine for a house, for a person that sort of baggage is difficult to shake.
When they first emerged, all solid limbs and mouths that needed feeding, the newspapers used words like ‘swarm’ and ‘invasion.’ It was agreed that we should help the djinn, and that quite frankly the economy needed them. Who else was going to make things for us and then clean up after? But not so many of them, not all at once. And what were we supposed to do when they had no birth certificates, no formal education, no real job history? We all wondered: now that they were corporeal, how much of their own ways would stick? Would they still eat animal bones and dung? Would they still twist each one of our desires into something dangerous and new? What did they want from us now? And what did we want from them?
From While in the Woods I Stumbled:
An Oral History of the Djinn Emancipation
by Julie Sloma (Jackalope Press)
THE NEXT NIGHT, I go back to Lexy’s. I tell myself it’s the last time. Yes, she has lots of good stuff and yes, it’s easier to keep going back there than to scour an increasingly cold and empty city. But I know that there are more important things in this world than having a full belly. I know the power of that word she keeps saying, and I know it can’t be good.
I’ve barely swung my leg over the bike when Lexy’s pulling on my hand, leading me round to the front of the houses.
“Ta da!” Lexy says. “My wish came true!”
And true enough, the caravan is no longer blocking the light into Lexy’s front room. In fact, the caravan isn’t there at all. Instead there’s a mess of blackened metal and rubber, caked with a layer of melted white plastic. In the yellow glow of the streetlights, it looks sickly and ruined. Looking at it makes me feel bad and wrong and small.
“Would you just look!” Lexy says, so proud, so happy. “Look at all that light flooding into my windows!”
“It’s dark,” I say, and I can’t keep the shake from my voice.
“Well,” sighs Lexy. “I mean, during the day. I’m sure you can imagine. Isn’t it so much better this way? I’m so glad we made this deal.”
“Deal?” I say, and I know I sound like an idiot but give me a break, I’m in shock here. I’m a little slow on the uptake, but now that I look I can see that the neighbour’s house is empty; the kid’s bike has gone from the garden and all the lights are off.
“I wished it,” says Lexy, slowly like she’s talking to a child. “And you granted it.”
“I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t do this.”
“Oh, come on, now! You don’t have to be coy with me. I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s our little secret.”
“But I didn’t do anything. It was a fire, anyone can see it’s been set on fire. And I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t.”
“Didn’t you?” she says.
I want to snatch my words back, and then snatch Lexy’s too. Because I don’t want to be a liar, but I think I might be lying. How can I say I didn’t do it if I don’t know what I did? If I don’t know whether I did anything at all?
“Fine,” sighs Lexy at my silence. “Have it your way. You keep pretending that you didn’t grant my wish, and I’ll keep knowing that you did. I don’t mind how we do this as long as you keep granting my wishes. I have lots more things to give to you in return.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I say, “I don’t want this.” But she’s not listening.
“I think,” she says, “that I should make a wish for someone else. Because I’m sweet and kind. Don’t you think I’ve been kind to you?”
“I said I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want anything.”
“But I do. My neighbour, you see. She’s very sad. She doesn’t say it – she doesn’t say anything at all to me, now – but I can tell. I see it in her eyes. I think I should make a wish for her. And I think you should grant it. Look, I brought you some things in return.”
She picks up a cardboard box from her front step. It’s taped shut, but as she holds it out to me I can hear its insides shift and clatter.
“I don’t want...” I say, backing away from her. “I can’t...”
“I wish,” says Lexy, standing there outside her darkened house, holding a box in her arms, her voice so soft, so sweet, like a powdered doughnut fresh from the fryer, “I wish that my neighbour could be put out of her misery.”
I forget about the bike I’ve left at the bottom of Lexy’s garden. I start to walk away from her. And then I run.
Spite houses exist in dozens of forms in dozens of countries. And it’s not just houses – in the west end of Glasgow, a landowner raised ground level by two storeys just to disrupt traffic. In Vancouver, a developer built a six-foot-wide commercial building to stop the city from widening the street. A spite house, in short, is any structure used by one person to antagonize another. Spite is everywhere, in every city. It is built into the very bricks.
From Spite Houses: Architecture as Emotion
by Kaite Caskey-Sparks (Unive
rsity of Summerhayes Press)
THE NEXT NIGHT, I don’t go to Lexy’s house. The night after that, she comes to mine.
I know she’s not a monster, or an axe-wielding murderer, but it’s hard to fight the urge to scream when her smiling face appears at my peephole. I open the door, wishing I could put it on a chain. Instead I hold my boot against the half-open door, holding it firm so she can’t push it further.
“How did you know where I live?”
“Hey, Esha,” she says, her tone light. Like we’re friends, like I’ve invited her round. “Are you sick? Why didn’t you come over last night?”
“Listen. We can’t do this any more. I lied to you, and I’m sorry, but that’s the end of it.”
“When did you lie?”
“Not out loud, not in words, but I – by not saying I couldn’t grant wishes, I made it seem like I could grant wishes. Which is ridiculous. You know it is. I can’t grant wishes, and I shouldn’t have lied about it, but I wanted... I just wanted...” The sour aftertaste of power is still under my tongue, and I ache to spit it out.
“It’s okay,” Lexy says. “I believe in you.”
“No, I don’t...” I shift my foot, opening the door a little more, but still not inviting her in. “Listen. This isn’t about self-confidence. It’s a fact.”
“Come over, Esha. I have so much more to give you. There’s so much more I want from you.”
“But I don’t want anything from you.”
“No? But there has to be a give and take, Esha.”
“Stop calling me –” I say, and I stop, because even in my head it sounds ridiculous that I don’t want Lexy to call me by my name. But I don’t like the way she’s saying it. Over and over, with emphasis, like it’s a magic spell. Maybe I can’t grant wishes, but words still have power. And I don’t want Lexy to have power over me.
“There’s still plenty left for me to give you, Esha.”
“I saw the caravan. I didn’t burn it. It was you. Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you talk to your neighbour?”
“Good riddance to that filthy thing. We both got what we wanted, didn’t we, Esha? See, that’s how it works between us. I give you things, and you grant my wishes. That’s how it’s always worked between us and you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s how I knew where you lived. Come on, you don’t think everyone knows? It’s clear what you are and where you belong. Look at this nasty place. What kind of home is this?” She motions at my house, and I don’t need to look at it to know what she means. The awkward shape, the shallow depth, the useless chimneys, the bricked-up windows. The way it blocks the view for the house behind, the way it juts out over the pavement so people have to go onto the road to get past. It was built in spite, and it was spite that put me in it.
“You know something, Esha,” says Lexy, and before I realise what’s happening she’s slid her foot between the frame and the door so I can’t close it, leaning close enough that when she speaks I feels the warmth of her breath on my cheek. It smells sweet, like powdered sugar. “My husband used to fuck my neighbour in that caravan. She wouldn’t let him fuck her in the house in case her kid walked in. So every lunchtime he’d leave work and go to that caravan and he’d fuck her for an hour. And then every evening I’d complain that the caravan blocked the light from getting in our window, and he’d agree with me. And then he left me to live in her house, and he fucks her in her bed, and that caravan was still sitting there, blocking all my light. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard?”
“Go away,” I say. “Don’t come here again.”
“Esha, wait,” she says, and I think we’ve already established that I’m an idiot because I do wait.
“Don’t you want to know?” she croons, the way you’d soothe a dog. “Don’t you want to know if my wish came true?”
I kick her foot out of the way and slam the door, but nothing stops her voice creeping through the cracks in the door and into my ears. “I have another wish. Are you listening, Esha? It’s for my husband this time. My darling sweetheart husband.”
“No!” I shout through the door, but she doesn’t hear me or she doesn’t care. She keeps talking, and her voice is smooth as oil.
“I’ve left a lovely little box of things here for you, Esha. And in return, here is what I would like. I wish –”
The memory of power swells up in me, making my head spin, making my stomach lurch, and I run into the bathroom and shut the door and clamp my hands over my ears and hum as loud as I can. I keep going until my throat burns. I don’t dare stop. I stay there until I see the light of dawn slipping under the door.
Later that day I buy a chain for my front door. I move the box that Lexy left on my porch onto the street, and by the next day it’s gone. Every night I sleep with earplugs in. During the day, I always have loud music in my earphones. The sudden hard burr of a motorbike makes me flinch.
It’s been two months, and I haven’t seen Lexy. But she’s left me with something. Every time I come back to my awkward house with its useless chimneys, its narrow rooms, its smallness, I realise that my home doesn’t make me feel small. My home doesn’t make me feel awkward or useless. Every time I think of Lexy, of how huge she made me feel when she said that word, I feel tiny and trapped. I realise that one of us lives in a spite house. But it isn’t me.
Emperors of Jinn
Usman T. Malik
“THERE ONCE WAS a jinn who wore spectacles,” Zak tells the room, tugging at his sunglasses. The sunglasses are rimless, tinted blue. The blue washes the hollows below Zak’s eyes. The twins think his eyes look trapped in an aquarium. They could laugh, but they don’t. Zak doesn’t like being laughed at. Zak doesn’t like much of anything. Sometimes he punches. He likes that.
“Jinns don’t need spectacles,” Saman says. She raises a slender golden-haired arm (the twins have heard she has white blood, on her father’s side) and scratches the nearly invisible scar that slithers above her left eyebrow. She must have taken a bad fall once.
“Do too. Remember Zakoota?’
Saman snorts. “Ainak Wala Jin? Does it even run these days? What a baby. Ammi says it was boring twenty years ago, must be awful now. Which channel?”
The twins look at each other. They decide they like her.
You do too.
They are sitting in wicker chairs on the verandah behind Zak’s house. The verandah overlooks a perfectly green lawn that stretches westward until it nudges a black metal fence, beyond which are fields and pastures and lots of tilled, fallow farmland. Two peacocks strut on the lawn past a squatting gardener who is weeding beds of jasmine, marigold and yellow rose. It’s a nice view. The sunsets are smog-free.
The house sits at the end of a driveway that curves through poplar-lined lanes past a mosaic of gardens. The house is colossal—the biggest the twins have ever seen, or will. It has three floors, five kitchens, twenty-two rooms, one elevator, and two taxidermied lions flanking the landing of a balustraded staircase winding up from the marbled front hall. Zak’s uncle shot the lions on a hunting trip in South Africa. It was a real battle to the end, Zak said; his uncle nearly lost a guard.
“His spectacles have nothing to do with his vision, dumbass,” Zak is saying. “We’re talking enchanted glasses. Take ’em off and he loses his magic. Put ’em on and he can see the unseen world again. Like a reverse Superman.”
“Why is the jinn on Earth?” Saman says. “Banished from Mount Kaf, I suppose.”
Zak is thirteen, Saman is fourteen, the twins are eleven. They’re all related on their mothers’ side. Their mothers have arranged an end-of-summer weekend at the Saigol farmhouse on the outskirts of Lahore. More like a farm estate, the twins think. They’ve read about sprawling English estates in books written by authors with important-sounding names like Blyton and Montgomery. Their mother used to insist on buying them.
As, I’m sure, does yours.
Zak
’s real name is Zakariya, but no one calls him that. If you call him Zakariya, he will get mad. ‘Zakariya’ isn’t cool, he will explain before he punches you in the stomach. Or in the face. Which isn’t cool either, of course, but really, what can you do?
“No, he’s here of his own free will,” Zak says, patiently. He occupies the only rocking chair on the verandah, and rocks it back and forth, back and forth. “He has fallen in love with a spectacle-maker.”
Saman rolls her eyes. The twins coil the hemp strands in their armrests around their fingers. They think of the cottage at the bottom of the garden.
“He’s given his glasses to the spectacle maker as a token of his love. He will stay on Earth until he weds her.” Zak twists and rotates his shoulders, and the rocking chair speeds up. “He has chained her to his soul.”
“That’s a terrible story,” Saman says. “Can I see your grandma’s book on jinns?”
WHAT FOLLOWS HAS been researched thoroughly. The twins understand it and you know it to be true as well.
1. There are thousands of stories about jinn possession in human history.
2. According to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, most victims are likely to be of South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African backgrounds.
3. The Kitab al Jinn was compiled by many people. They are all dead now.
THERE ARE TWO places on the Saigol farmhouse you’re not supposed to go.
One is the Drawing Room—a steel-reinforced door tucked next to the servant quarters at the end of a long hallway in the basement. It’s a strange room: you can’t hear anything even if there are a dozen men inside, and sometimes there are. Saman knows because Zak told her. Occasionally his father and uncle go in there with their guards and lock the door. They stay in there for hours. Not a peep.
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Page 25