Introduction:

As stated in the description, back in October my local Writers’ group did a writing exercise, which in turn led to my writing this little piece of flash fiction. I originally wrote the actual writing exercise myself, which I subsequently published at the Writing Hood, found at: Halloween Humor (Writing Exercise). The following story was my result from this writing exercise, after a little bit of polishing for presentation’s sake.

Cover of Aladdin [Region 2]

My Nightmare Genie:

It started out like a normal costume party. I spied a pretty good blend of original and not-so original costumes all around.

Then I saw the guy in the blue genie outfit, carrying his genie lamp. It was a very traditional genie costume for his chosen theme. Loose fitting silk pants, shoes with the curled up toes, an opened vest with no shirt underneath, and topped off with a floppy Phrygian cap that leaned decidedly to the left; all in royal blue. He definitely had the body for that opened vest, cuz he was truly built, with perfect washboard abs dominating the view between the sides of his vest that was obviously intentionally too small for his large frame. He was quite tall and so blue! Even his skin had a slight bluish tent. He looked like a Smurf with a pituitary condition.

I approached and thought maybe a good conversational starter might be giving his lamp a little rub, and then go from there.

His eyes widened with dismay, “You just rubbed my lantern the wrong way!”

I looked into his saddened eyes as he dematerialized, transforming into a puff of smoke that quickly poured into the lamp as it tumbled to the floor. Without hesitation I grabbed up the lamp and found a near by place to sit and figure out what just happened. Gazing around the room, it appeared that everyone was so self-absorbed in their conversations and such that no one else seemed to have noticed this strange turn of events.