Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

In bed with him that night, like every night,

her sister at their feet, she ends her tale,

then waits. Her sister quickly takes her cue,

and says, “I cannot sleep. Another, please?”

Scheherazade takes one small nervous breath

and she begins, “In faraway Peking

there lived a lazy youth with his mama.

His name? Aladdin. His papa was dead…”

She tells them how a dark magician came,

claiming to be his uncle, with a plan:

He took the boy out to a lonely place,

gave him a ring he said would keep him safe,

dropped in a cavern filled with precious stones,

“Bring me the lamp!” and when Aladdin won’t,

in darkness he’s abandoned and entombed…

There now.

Aladdin locked beneath the earth,

she stops, her husband hooked for one more night.

Next day

she cooks

she feeds her kids

she dreams…

Knowing Aladdin’s trapped,

and that her tale

has bought her just one day.

What happens now?

She wishes that she knew.

It’s only when that evening comes around

and husband says, just as he always says,

“Tomorrow morning, I shall have your head,”

when Dunyazade, her sister, asks, “But please,

what of Aladdin?” only then, she knows…

And in a cavern hung about with jewels

Aladdin rubs his lamp. The Genie comes.

The story tumbles on. Aladdin gets

the princess and a palace made of pearls.

Watch now, the dark magician’s coming back:

“New lamps for old,” he’s singing in the street.

Just when Aladdin has lost everything,

she stops.

He’ll let her live another night.

Her sister and her husband fall asleep.

She lies awake and stares up in the dark

Playing the variations in her mind:

the ways to give Aladdin back his world,

his palace, his princess, his everything.

And then she sleeps. The tale will need an end,

but now it melts to dreams inside her head.

She wakes,

She feeds the kids

She combs her hair

She goes down to the market

Buys some oil

The oil-seller pours it out for her,

decanting it

from an enormous jar.

She thinks,

What if you hid a man in there?

She buys some sesame as well, that day.

Her sister says, “He hasn’t killed you yet.”

“Not yet.” Unspoken waits the phrase, “He will.”

In bed she tells them of the magic ring

Aladdin rubs. Slave of the Ring appears…

Magician dead, Aladdin saved, she stops.

But once the story’s done, the teller’s dead,

her only hope’s to start another tale.

Scheherazade inspects her store of words,

half-built, half-baked ideas and dreams combine

with jars just big enough to hide a man,

and she thinks, Open Sesame, and smiles.

“Now, Ali Baba was a righteous man,

but he was poor…” she starts,

and she’s away, and so her life is safe for one more night,

until she bores him, or invention fails.

She does not know where any tale waits

before it’s told. (No more do I.)

But forty thieves sounds good, so forty

thieves it is. She prays she’s bought another clutch of days.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.