Chapter 3: The first wish
The smell of old books and burnt sugar became a permanent thread in the apartment’s tapestry of scents. Sapphire complained about it weekly, sniffing the air like a suspicious hound, but Jasmine just shrugged. The lamp lived under her bed now, a silent companion in the dark.
For a week, Jasmine did nothing. She went through the motions. She applied for more jobs—a diner, a cleaning service—and received the same polite, devastating rejections. She helped Sapphire with the endless chores, the silence between them now a fragile bridge over the unspoken truth of the five hundred dinars. The shame of the alley was a stain she couldn’t scrub off, but it had hardened into something else: a cold, sharp resolve.
She would not be cornered again.
On the eighth night, with Sapphire working a late shift, Jasmine pulled the lamp from its hiding place. She placed it on the worn rug in the center of her tiny room. The single bulb overhead cast a stark light, bleaching the color from her scarves.
“Cyrus,” she said, her voice flat in the quiet.
The violet smoke coalesced faster this time, a practiced sigh of existence. He took form, his amber eyes immediately narrowing as he took in her posture—rigid, jaw set, fists clenched at her sides. She was not a weeping girl on the floor. She was a blade waiting to be drawn.
“You have decided,” he stated.
“I have.” Jasmine took a breath, the words she’d rehearsed for days lining up in her mind. “I’m tired of being seen. I’m tired of my face, my body, being a thing men like Karim think they own, or a thing desperate enough to sell in an alley. I want to be… unseen. Or seen as someone else.”
Cyrus crossed his arms, shadows clinging to the motion. “A wish for invisibility? It is within my power, but it is a hollow, lonely gift. The world becomes a play you cannot touch.”
“Not invisibility,” Jasmine said. Her green eyes burned. “I want the opposite. I want to be seen, but on my terms. I want to walk through that market and be an old woman with a stooped back. I want to sit in a cafe and be a foreign man in a suit. I want to look at a landlord and be his intimidating older brother.” She stepped closer, her conviction giving her height. “I want the power to take the appearance of anyone I want, at any time. To become anyone. To never be just Jasmine again unless I choose to be.”
The silence that followed was dense, filled with the echoes of her demand. Cyrus studied her, his expression unreadable. “A wish of skin and shadow,” he murmured. “A potent and perilous magic. To step into another’s form is to feel the echo of their life, their aches, their hungers. It is not a costume. It is an inhabitation. The deeper the difference, the greater the… dissonance within you.”
“I don’t care about dissonance.”
“You will,” he said bluntly. “To become a man, for instance, is to be flooded with a foreign chemistry, a different gravity of thought and urge. It can be overwhelming. Addictive. And dangerous. The power to deceive so completely corrupts from the inside out. You may forget which face is your own.”
“That’s my risk,” Jasmine snapped. “Are you saying you can’t do it?”
A flicker of something like offense passed over his features. “I can grant it. It is well within my scope. The wish, as you’ve phrased it, is clear: the power to transform your appearance at will into that of any other person, living or dead, known or imagined. To shift back at your own desire. Is this your first wish, Jasmine El-Nour?”
The formal question hung in the air. This was the point of no return. She saw the alley wall. She saw Karim’s smug face. She saw a lifetime of closed doors.
“Yes,” she said, the word leaving her lips like a stone dropped into a well. “That is my first wish.”
“So it is spoken,” Cyrus intoned. His voice gained a resonance that vibrated in the brass of the lamp, in the bones of the building. “So it shall be.”
He didn’t move, but a current shot from him—not smoke, but a distortion in the air itself, a wave of silent force. It hit Jasmine in the chest.
It was not pain. It was dissolution.
Her skin erupted in a pins-and-needles frenzy, a million ants crawling beneath the surface. She cried out, but the sound was strange to her own ears. She looked down at her hands. They shimmered, the edges blurring. Her bones hummed. A terrifying plasticity seized her, a sense that her entire physical being was clay waiting for a sculptor’s hand. Knowledge flooded her mind—not instructions, but an instinct, a new limb of perception. She felt the potential in the marrow of her bones.
The sensation receded, leaving her breathless and shivering on her feet. She looked at her hands. They were her own. She ran to the small, tarnished mirror nailed to her wall.
Jasmine’s own frightened green eyes stared back.
“It didn’t work,” she whispered, a crushing disappointment.
“Try,” Cyrus said softly from behind her.
She focused on the reflection. She thought of old Fatima, the widow who sold herbs three streets over, her face a roadmap of deep wrinkles, her back bent like a weathered bow. Jasmine willed it. She didn’t know how, just that she reached for that new instinct and pushed.
The change was not a slow morph. It was a snap.
One second it was her. The next, the mirror held Fatima’s weary, ancient visage. Jasmine gasped, and the sound came out as a reedy wheeze. She felt it all—the arthritic ache in her knuckles, the stiffness in her lower spine, the dry parchment texture of her own skin. She saw the room through a haze of faint cataracts. The weight of seventy hard years settled on her shoulders.
Panicked, she pushed the feeling away, reaching for herself.
Snap.
Young Jasmine again, breathing heavily, color high in her cheeks. She turned from the mirror, her heart hammering against ribs that now felt thrillingly, powerfully her own.
“Oh, God,” she breathed, a wild laugh bubbling up.
“It is not a game,” Cyrus warned, but his voice was distant. The power was a drug, already in her veins. She barely heard him.
She thought of Mustafa, the broad-shouldered butcher with his thick neck and perpetual scowl. She focused.
Snap.
The world shifted perspective. She was taller, heavier. A dense, muscular strength filled her arms and chest. A coarse beard itched on her jaw. A different center of gravity pulled at her. And with it came a simmering, low-grade anger, Mustafa’s constant companion after decades of hard labor and little respect. It colored her thoughts for a moment, a fog of irritation.
She changed back, the relief of returning to her own form a pleasure in itself.
“Stop,” Cyrus commanded, his voice cutting through her euphoria. “You are skimming the surface. To hold a form for more than moments, to act within it, requires focus. And each form has its own… biology. Its own desires. You must be master of them, or they will master you.”
Jasmine ignored him. Ideas were lightning strikes in her mind. The rent. The leering cafe owner. The man in the alley. A plan, wild and perfect, took shape. She thought of the man from the alley—his pleasant face, his soft hands. She remembered him with photographic clarity. She focused.
Snap.
She was him. The fit of his clothes was a memory on her skin, but the body was right. She held up her hands—his hands—soft and uncalloused. A wave of his essence washed over her: a fastidious neatness, a deep, calculating detachment, a cold curiosity about the world that had no warmth in it. It was repellent. Powerful.
“What are you doing?” Cyrus asked, his form beginning to shimmer with frustration.
“I’m paying rent,” Jasmine said, and the voice was his, a pleasant baritone that felt alien in her throat.
She strode to her small wardrobe, pulled out her darkest abaya and a niqab that covered all but her eyes. Over the man’s form, the clothes draped awkwardly, but it would suffice. She had seen the face of the landlord, Mr. Hafez, a portly man with a greed-glistening eye. She would become him next.
“Jasmine, this is a folly. You are playing with identities like a child with live embers!”
“You gave me the power,” she shot back, her borrowed voice cold. “Now I’m using it.”
She left the apartment, moving with a confident stride that belonged to the accountant, wrapped in the anonymous black cloth. The night air was cool. She walked two blocks to a modest building, the home of Mr. Hafez. A light was on. She willed the change, thinking of his round face, his small, piggish eyes, his oiled hair.
Snap.
The world shrank an inch. A comfortable paunch settled over her belt. A smug sense of entitlement, of ownership over his little empire of apartments, warmed her from within. This feeling was easier to wall off, to compartmentalize. It was just greed. Simple, familiar.
She knocked on his door.
He opened it, blinking in confusion at his own double standing on the doorstep. Jasmine didn’t give him time to scream. She shoved past him, into his tidy, overlit living room.
“What is this? Who are you?” the real Hafez spluttered, his face purpling.
“I am you,” Jasmine said, her voice a perfect mimic of his own wheezy tenor. “And you are leaving. You are moving to your cousin’s in Basra tonight. You will sign your building over to me. You will take nothing but a suitcase.”
“Madness! I’ll call the police!”
Jasmine took a step closer, leveraging his own body’s intimidation. “Call them. Explain the man who looks exactly like you, who knows about the secret ledger under your floorboard, the one where you keep the real rents, the ones you don’t report. Explain the cash in the false Quran. Go ahead.”
Hafez’s bluster evaporated, replaced by terror. She saw the calculations behind his eyes mirroring her own—the cold, practical fear of exposure. Within an hour, it was done. Signatures were scrawled on pre-written documents Jasmine had forged days before in a fever of planning. The real Hafez, broken and sobbing, packed a bag.
Jasmine left the building as him, walked around the corner, and in the shadows, shifted back into the accountant’s form. Then, finally, back into her own skin, leaning against a rough brick wall, gasping.
The dissonance hit her then. The leftover echoes of three different male psyches churned inside her: the cold curiosity, the entitled greed, a sliver of Mustafa’s anger. She vomited into the gutter, her body rejecting the spiritual violation. She shook, sweating and freezing, the power’s cost making itself known.
But when she stumbled home, she carried the deed to the building, and Hafez’s secret ledger. The rent problem was solved forever. She was the landlord.
Sapphire was asleep. Jasmine collapsed on her bed, the lamp at her side. She felt filthy, triumphant, and utterly shattered. Cyrus appeared without a summons, a violet shadow of disapproval.
“You see?” he whispered. “You have stolen a man’s life. You have felt what it is to be him. This is not a disguise. It is a consumption.”
“I got what I needed,” Jasmine muttered into her pillow, the taste of bile still in her mouth.
“At what cost to your own soul? The first wish is always the sweetest poison. The next will be easier for you to justify, and more destructive in its taking.”
He faded away. Jasmine lay in the dark, the deed under her mattress. The power slept inside her, a coiled serpent. She had wanted not to be seen. Now, she could be anyone.
But in the quiet, a terrifying question whispered. If she could be anyone… who, exactly, was left of her?