If Horses Were Wishes

===============================

In case it isn't obvious, all characters are over the age of eighteen.

One of them is over the age of eighteen hundred.

===============================

The pocket watch told perfect time and wouldn't stop ticking. I realize that this is what watches are designed to do, but it had been too long. This was getting ridiculous.

I'd bought the pocket watch for fifteen dollars and thirty five cents at an estate sale. It wasn't what I really wanted to bring home from that auction, but it was all I ended up getting.

Nominally, I was there for a new chest of drawers, but I was actually there for a chance at seeing a certain chest, and the legs attached to it, without any drawers.

My coworker Nell had a hobby restoring old furniture and she went to every estate sale she could find, searching for cheap raw material. She also had the most perfect ass I had ever seen. Listening to snippets of conversation, I was able to further determine that she wasn't in a serious relationship. That suggested an opportunity.

I dropped a few hints around the water cooler that I might be in the market for a new chest of drawers. The staples that held the particle-board drawers together had started to rip out. I'd been addressing this issue for the past two years with some strategically placed duct tape, but now the tape was beginning to detach too.

I'm not sure exactly how I managed it, but I'd held down a job for over four months at that point. I could finally afford to invest in furniture rather than another roll of duct tape.

Nell enthusiastically told me about the estate sale she was planning to attend that weekend. She also let me know her opinion of my unique furniture maintenance strategy.

"Oh my god, staples? Particle board? Duct tape???" She visibly cringed.

"You poor thing, we'll get you sorted out. Lots of good stuff cheap, you'll see! If you find something run-down or in the wrong color I'll be happy to refinish it for you at a discount."

She seemed really enthusiastic at the idea of helping me out, and I took it as a good sign.

Unfortunately, Nell showed up with a date. This had the same effect on my good mood, as the US military had on the city of Hiroshima circa 1945.

There were many dressers and chests of drawers being offered. They qualified as attractive, decent, solid pieces of furniture. They were the sort of things an adult would put in his house and use to store his clothes.

Within a few minutes of realizing that this did not, in fact, qualify as my first date with Nell, I reached a decision: I would not buy a new chest of drawers. In fact, I would never buy a new chest of drawers. The one I had was perfectly serviceable. All it needed was a little love. Home Depot sold rolls of duct tape for extremely reasonable prices and I clearly had nothing better to do with the rest of my day than to make such a purchase.

I did, however, buy the pocket watch.

Furniture was boring. That shit hadn't changed in centuries. Millennia, maybe. But a watch was a small, incredibly complex machine ticking away, doing it's thing. That was cool.

It was mechanical, with a key to wind it up. Nevertheless, when I held it up to my smart phone the time matched perfectly. I suspected someone had set the time just before the auction, but I was still impressed.

It was also a financially prudent decision. After buying the watch, I had plenty of money left over for the roll of duct tape on the way home.

One week later, I remained very satisfied with my purchase. I carried the watch everywhere, and somehow the time was always accurate.

After another week had passed I concluded that the watch was truly amazing. I hadn't had to wind it up once in the entire first week. According to my research, or rather my Google search, the better pocket watches will run down after a week or so. I hadn't wound the watch yet, and not only was it still ticking but the time was correct down to the second.

By week three, however, I had the nagging suspicion that it was not a mechanical pocket watch at all. The people at the estate sale had lied to me. There had to be a battery in there somewhere.

Maybe fifteen dollars wasn't much for a genuine antique pocket watch, but it was the principal of the thing. I'd been lied to! It was supposed to be one of those old-fashioned mechanical watches, not some modern piece-of-crap knockoff.

I was a sophisticated man, and I deserved a sophisticated time piece. The stunning, one-of-a-kind chest of drawers sitting beside me in my basement studio apartment could even qualify as modern art. The duct tape was there to symbolize the deplorable state of modern society.

Really.

And, admittedly, to hold the drawers together.

That's why I decided to remove the back of the watch. I wanted to find that battery, and prove that the auction people were full of shit. It wasn't as if they would take it back, but I needed to know for sure.

After another trip to Home Depot to get the right size screwdrivers and much fiddling with tiny screws, I got it open. I expected to see a battery, or if by some chance I was wrong, a bunch of tiny gears whirring away inside.

I did not expect to find a bubble.

A shimmery iridescent material formed a glimmering half-dome over the top of the open watch. I couldn't quite see what was beneath the reflective sheen. As if this wasn't weird enough, I realized the bubble was growing, elongating from a half-sphere to become longer, cylindrical.

Phallic.

This resemblance became even more pronounced as the bubble briefly shrank down a bit into the watch, and then expanded back outward. If I had to pick a single word to describe such movement, it would be 'thrusting.'

Then the music started. It was a cover of Wild Thing, with a female vocalist I didn't recognize. She was good. That voice was liquid sex.

The watch itself had taken on an ethereal sheen and was growing along with whatever was coming out of it. It grew larger then shrank along with the dick-bubble, then expanded again, larger than before. Rinse, repeat. Over and over, to the rhythm of Wild Thing.

I stood, stunned, at the impossible scene unfolding before me.

When the bubble was roughly the size of a person it burst, spraying my apartment with fluid and revealing that I was being treated to a live performance.

The watch had returned to its proper size, but this barely registered as I gaped at the woman in front of me.

If her voice was liquid sex, the rest of her was the distilled, concentrated essence of carnal delight. Her deep blue eyes matched the color of her skimpy blue bikini and perfectly contrasted with her pale skin and fiery red hair. I'd never seen a woman quite this beautiful, even on television. She put Nell to shame.

As I scanned her… assets, I also noticed she wore a bit of unusual jewelry, a simple, unadorned silver bracelet on her right arm, and three identical, solid metal rings on her left hand.

"Shake it, shake it wild thing." The impossible vision of feminine beauty put her arms on my shoulders, gyrated her hips and looked directly into my eyes as she finished her song.

"Yes, please," I said in stunned approval.

She laughed, and stepped back. "Oh baby, you need to tell me what you want before we can get started!"

"I think you already have the right idea," I told her with what I hoped was a sly grin, and not open-mouthed incredulity.

"Unfortunately, no," she said with a sigh. She leaned back, resting her beautiful bottom on the work of modern art next to my bed. "There are rules. I hate rules. Don't you hate rules?"

"Fuck the rules," I said. Now there was a sentiment I could get behind.

"I know, right? Anyway there are rules. You don't get three. One to a customer, and no take-backsies. It's gotta be in my field, which is… well. Look at me. And you can always opt out. You can now, I mean." She giggled. "Not after. That would be silly."

"What?" I'd zoned out for a bit staring at her nipples, which were quite visible through her thin bikini top.

"Surprised? Well what can I say, Disney got pretty much every single thing wrong. Fuck 'em. Those cunts are busy teaching poor little girls to pine away for Prince Charming instead of getting busy and taking what they want, am I right?"

As she said this, she briefly grabbed my ass. I was still stunned, trying to figure out what she was getting at as she went on.

"Oh, and no, there's no such thing as a wise-ass genie. That would be a specialty, wouldn't it? You'd need the right specialty to wish for more wishes. So it's not technically against the rules but I don't have any friends who might help you out there. I guess Disney didn't get it all wrong. Only almost all wrong."

Wishes? "Did you say wishes? I get wishes?"

"Wish. Singular. Has someone not been paying attention?" She put on a pouty face. It was still beautiful.

"One wish," I echoed back. "So I can wish for anything?"

"No." She sighed. "Let's start at the top. I'm what you'd call a genie. Your media types mangled the word from djinn, but that's even more wrong, because the nature of what I am comes down to binding rather than class. Except, history and etymology are total boner-killers, so let's stick with genie. That cool?"

I continued to stare. I could stare at her for a very long while. "Uh. Eti-what?"

"Exactly. Bore-ing! Anyway, I was kinda-sorta hoping you'd figure the genie thing out seeing how I popped out of that watch, but hoo-well, there it is. What, do I gotta go with the weird hair and the cheesy music for you people? Wild Thing just happens to be more my style then the beats Barbara Eden was swinging to, that's all. That, and genies have specialties. Domains. Realms. Shit we're into. Get it? Your wish has to be in my specialty. Care to guess what that might be?"

She noticeably thrust out her impressive chest, jiggling her boobs.

A thought popped into my head which was absurd, but it seemed I had left the laws of physics behind a few minutes ago.

"You're a sex genie?"

My genie pulled a pair of reading glasses from her cleavage. This was the same thing, in a sense, as pulling them from thin air. Every millimeter of her bikini had clearly been occupied, and I was quite certain there had been nowhere in there the glasses could have been hiding. I'd been watching closely.

The genie made a gesture with her hand and suddenly, much to my dismay, she was wearing a prim suit, with her hair tied up in a bun. She pointed at the nondescript beige wall of my apartment where diagrams of the male and female reproductive anatomy had mysteriously appeared.

"Now class, today we're going to talk about human sexual reproduction. When a man and a woman decide they want to have a child, they must combine their gametes. The male produces sperm, produced in the testes." Here she waved her arm at the scrotum on the male diagram.

"The male sperm must reach the female ova which will be traveling down her Fallopian tube, here." The prim teacher-genie then pointed to the female diagram.

"In order to accomplish this, the man inserts his penis into the woman's vagina. The sperm travels from the testes, through the penis, and into the woman, where it is free to fertilize her egg. If all goes well, nine months later a screaming poop machine is born, which will ensure the man and woman never get a good night's rest ever again. In due course, it will also eat through all available disposable income the formerly happy couple might have lying around. And that, class, is everything you need to know about sex."

She put her hands on her hips and raised her voice. "So no, I'm not a sex genie. If you and your special someone are having trouble creating a beautiful child together, then please, for the love of whatever deity you worship, don't call me. I might barf. I don't do babies."

"If, on the other hand, you see that gorgeous hottie across the room and start feeling a certain something down below, I might be able to help you with that."

As she continued she began to unbutton and remove her conservative blouse, revealing a lacy black bra that proved to be significantly more revealing than even the bikini top had been. She had impressively large areolas.

"If you've spent one too many lonely nights staring at a screen, relying on your trusty right hand to get the job done instead of feeling something real, then I might be your gal."

With her blouse gone, the apparition before me let down her hair and began sliding off her skirt. Her panties matched her bra, and were equally transparent.

"If you're after the heart-pumping, toe-curling, brain-scorching visceral experience you can only get by touching, grabbing, kissing, grinding, penetrating, thrusting, skin against bare skin, body against body? If you're ready to move by instinct, looking to feel things in places you don't even have a name for? Now, that's my style. Am I a sex genie? No. I'm a lust genie."

"Um, yes please?" I reiterated.

"So what'll it be?" She asked. "I can make anyone fall in lust with you. Not quite the same thing as love, but close enough. I can crank your sex appeal up to eleven, so you're never lonely again. I can even transport you into a different universe, your own fantasy full of exotic smokin' babes that need rescuing, from the land of elves and dragons to outer space. Anything is possible. Your wish is my command."

She paused. "Or, you could decline your wish. If horses were wishes, and all that."

This oddity managed to cut through my fantasies of rescuing busty space-babes. "You mean, if wishes were horses? You said it backwards. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

She screwed up her face. "Ehhh, if you say so."

"Besides, the point of that saying is that wishes aren't real," I said. "But now… either I'm hallucinating on some seriously high quality drugs here, or you're real."

Her smile was downright predatory. "Only endorphins, my dear, only endorphins."

"What?" Was I tripping? Was my subconscious trying to remind me of something I'd recently ingested?

"Endorphins are hormones. Hormones, pumping through every inch of that firm, taught body of yours. Mmmmm."

While I wasn't fat, people tended to describe me as "scrawny" rather than "firm" or "taught." And by people, I mostly mean attractive women. This was a nice change.

"I'll bite," I asked. "Why would anyone turn any of that down? Why give up a wish?"

"Oh, hardly anyone does that," the genie said. "I just had to mention it."

"Yeah, but why?"

"Well…" her massive chest bounced enticingly as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Have you ever tried to program a computer?"

"I tried to build a web page once, but it sucked. Too fiddly. I had to take it down."

"Yes!" She said. "Like that. Wishes are fiddly."

"How do you mean?"

"Look, don't get the wrong idea. Do you honestly think we're trying to cause trouble? We always get a bad rap, as if genies are these evil demons, bent on mayhem and destruction. As if."

She put a carefully manicured finger to her chin, considering. "Except… I guess Robin Williams wasn't evil, but he was Disney. That might be worse. Anyway, the rules say I have to warn you. You get exactly what you ask for, but if you're not careful, you might not get what you expect. You have to be specific."

Assuming I wasn't hallucinating, that meant I had to think this through. "Is there a time limit on this wish deal? Can I think it over?"

She grinned. "No worries. Take your time. Although…" She raised a finger to her chin in consideration. "How about a trade? Keep your wish. Think it over. But how about a little quid pro quo first, hmm?"

"What?"

Her eyes drifted to the chest of drawers covered in duct tape sitting beside my bed. She sauntered over to it, swaying her hips seductively. In fact, her every movement was seductive. "I can't help but admire this exquisite piece."

I'd been thinking earlier that it resembled modern art but that sounded absurd, even in my own head. That this woman, this vision would validate such an idea, was as difficult to believe as the possibility that genies were real. The thing was a heap of shit.

"I don't know." I pretended to consider. If it was worth anything at all, it was worth haggling over. "I've had that thing since I was a kid. I've grown rather attached to it. What are you offering?"

She placed a hand on the heap of shit and breathed in deeply and then exhaled slowly. She looked me in the eyes.

No woman had ever given me a look like that before. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply a second time.

"Yes. Yes! I can feel it all. The bottom drawer. Every fuzzy, sticky sock, and the clean — well, clean-er — ones you keep ready to use. The USB sticks with your porn. The lube seeping into the wood of the drawer. The condoms you bought as a freshman you were so determined to use, still in there, expired, unopened. Even the remnants of the time you tried something a little different with a rubber balloon and a paper towel tube… I can feel it. All of it. Incredible. Delicious."

"Umm." I'd never told anyone about the balloon incident.

She opened her eyes again. "Oh! An offer. Naturally. Quid pro quo. Let's start with your rent. You take care of my rent, I'll take care of yours. You won't have to pay a dime for housing. Cash only, though. Favors are on you. If some little vixen says you can stay with her long as you lick her clean every day, you're still going to be tasting that pussy!"

"Umm." The thought of a woman offering me free rent in exchange for oral sex was rather distracting, and quite different from my previous experiences with the opposite sex. It took a moment for my mind to switch gears back to the discussion at hand. "For how long? How many months rent are we talking?"

"Don't be silly. All of them, of course."

"You'll pay my rent forever. Okay, but wait, what if I move?" I asked. "This place is a bit small, and now that I have a job I've been thinking of finding somewhere with more space. Does that mean I'm stuck here?"

"Oh no," she said surprised. "You'll need a much bigger place than this. As soon as possible. Somewhere that can accommodate a nice big bed. I'm thinking Caesar. You ever hear of a Caesar bed? They have them in the UK. Think King sized, only bigger. Twin beds are so limiting. Then again, they do force people to lie practically on top of one another, which can be all sorts of fun. Anyway, a bigger place means a bigger bed, which means better sex, which is why I can offer you this deal. In case you were wondering, that is."

"So, what's the catch?" I asked. "You said to be careful. Well, I'll bite. What's the downside?"

She shrugged "You're gonna lose everything in the bottom drawer. I assume you've grown attached to your socks and the remains of your balloon… experiment. Oh, and I'll need that watch back too."

"The watch? But, that's your thing. Like, your lamp, right? Are you tricking me out of my wish here?"

"Oh no, sweetie!" She gushed hurriedly. "Not at all. You'll still have your chest of drawers."

I blinked. "I'm confused. You wanted it."

"The inside of it. And only the bottom drawer. That watch is dead. It's a dud. There's less lust left in there than in a nun's rosary. I need a new home, and from my perspective, your drawer is looking all warm and cozy. What do you say? Roomies?"

"But that chest of drawers is sort of big," I pointed out. I can't carry it around in my pocket like the watch."

"Look, hon." The genie was annoyed. "I hate to break it to you, but no power on Earth is getting me back inside your watch. It's empty. Done. Spent. At this point it's like a cage. Carry it around if you like, but it won't matter, it's the same as any other watch now. I'll hang around out here, thank you very much. Or, even better, we can come to terms on your drawer."