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    A Million More Wishes
    A Million More Wishes
    A Million More Wishes
    Ebook131 pages2 hours

    A Million More Wishes

    By Christopher McDevitt

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    About this ebook

    At age 29, Dennis Harkness thought he had everything he could want: a beautiful fiancee, three weeks vacation per year , a 401k and a starter home in the suburbs. Everything was coming up Dennis. Until he discovered Djosar, an ancient genie,residing in a gravy boat his fiancee, Jenny, had purchased at a yard sale. Within minutes of meeting the magical genie, Dennis's entire life is turned upside down.

    Chaos and hilarity abound as Dennis attempts to use the wishes offered by Djosar to better himself, his life and the world around him; often with disastrous and unplanned results. It's like a Shakespearean comedy of errors but way less preachy.

    A Million More Wishes is the first book in Christopher McDevitt's planned multi-volume series," The One Million Wishes Saga." A former stand up comedian and generally awful person, McDevitt offers up a mix of entertaining dialogue and maniacal antics in this post-modern take on "The Monkey's Paw.

    "McDevitt paces his story with Elmore Leonard-esque dialogue in a rapidly expanding world. An east-coast Christopher Moore." - Halfninja.com

    "'The One Million Wishes Saga' could have just as easily been called 'A Hitchhiker's Guide to World Religions I Googled.' I think people will be surprised at how little I had to make up. Surat 72. The turtle vs. frog argument. It's all out there. I just brought it together in a silly little story about a manboy and his genie...and a lot of dick jokes."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristopher McDevitt
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781310706141
    A Million More Wishes
    Author

    Christopher McDevitt

    Christopher McDevitt is a former stand up comedian and generally awful person. The married father of one lives in New Jersey where he trains Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and dreams of getting the hell out of that state for a much warmer climate.

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      Book preview

      A Million More Wishes - Christopher McDevitt

      A Million More Wishes

      By

      Christopher McDevitt

      © Copyright 2013

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2013 by Christopher McDevitt

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Smashwords Edition

      ISBN: 9781310706141

      Cover artwork copyright © 2013 by Joshua Kaulius

      Title: A Million More Wishes

      Author: Christopher McDevitt

      Publisher: Smashwords, Inc.

      Dedicated To

      Mary and Phil Romano,

      As Promised, 25 Years Later.

      I Love You Guys.

      Thanks:

      An immeasurable amount of thanks goes out to my wife, Jessica, who has been forced to listen to me prattle on about genies and wishes for months now. Without her support and financial acumen, I’d have just given the damn thing away if you promised to like me.

      Thanks to my editor, Heidi Zengel, who did a hell of a job policing my rusty grammar and irregular capitalization.

      Thanks to my beta readers who encouraged me to publish this silly little story: Tracy Link, Morgan Jolley, Cherie Lenac and Sweet Dee Sanders.

      Thanks to Aslan Grealis for being a real live Djosar living in my basement.

      Thanks to my mother, Margi, for forking out tens of thousands of dollars so that I could major in a language I’d been speaking for twenty years.

      Thanks to my friend for over 30 years, Joshua Kaulius, for designing the kickass cover to this book.

      And thanks most of all to you, reader, for allowing me to have ‘author’ put after my name in my forthcoming obituary.

      Chapter One: Wishy-Washy

      As I stood at my kitchen sink, I stared out the window at the family of deer grazing in my neighbor’s overgrown back yard. My hands washed dishes while my mind wandered. Why didn’t the deer migrate to where there was more deer stuff to do?

      Our housing development is not exactly what you would call ‘wooded’." The more I thought about it though, I guessed the lack of both natural vegetation and trees was a small price to pay for not being systematically hunted, killed, stuffed and mounted by gun-toting woodsmen. An urban deer only had to fear an inebriated volunteer fireman blasting off a few rounds on the 4th of July or more likely the grill of a minivan doing 60mph in a 25mph zone.

      I continued to clean plate after plate, sliding each one into its temporary home in the drying board. Most of the silverware was thrown in the Crock-Pot, which sat soaking in the left basin of our dual sink. The steak knives, however, were washed immediately. I’d learned from experience, if you allow those troublemakers to mix in with the regular flatware, you will inevitably forget they are in there and the evening will end with stitches at the emergency room. Like clockwork, as soon as I managed to empty the right basin of the sink, my fiancée Jenny entered stage right with an armload of errant plates, glasses and bowls.

      On the How-Long-I’ve-Been-Washing-Dishes scale, my fingertips had just registered somewhere between prunes and a corpse found floating in the river when Jenny brought in her haul from the morning’s yardsaling. Jenny and her mother spend almost every Sunday morning going to nearby yard sales and sifting through the byproducts of other people’s lives. It’s like church to them, their own private Sunday morning ritual. Most of what they buy they resell online; usually at a profit. I say usually because Jenny once blew 50 bucks on a collection of signed baseball cards from the mid-80s, only to find out later that the kid’s father had autographed almost all of them himself. It took me 15 minutes to convince her that Mookie Wilson did not spell his name with a U and two K’s to screw with people.

      She’d learned her lesson with that experience and mostly restricted herself to old toys, antiques and other things she could authenticate or price from her smartphone. So it didn’t surprise me when she dumped a few gravy boats, three nesting bowls and a serving tray on the counter next to the sink. It did surprise me when she slapped me on the ass and walked away. Normally, I’d hide behind the old fisherman’s you caught, you clean it adage but she had been exceptionally cool about me going out drinking with my friends the night before. I figured cleaning her yard sale junk was tat for tin and started scrubbing the serving tray.

      Decades of grime covered most of her morning haul and I was tempted to walk away from my good deed when I heard the stilted grammar and nasally whines of unwed teenage mothers coming from the television set in our living room. I’d rather clean truck-stop toilets with my own toothbrush than watch another episode of that show, so I kept scrubbing…and scrubbing…and then it got weird. You’re just going to have to take this next part on faith. If you can’t do that, you might as well put this book down and go watch whatever channel those millionaire hillbillies with the ZZ Top beards are on.

      While I rinsed out what I thought was an oddly shaped gravy boat, I noticed a particularly steadfast piece of gunk around the lip of the base. I tossed the sponge back into the sink and went to work using my fingernails. I guess I’d been a little remiss in my personal grooming for a while because my thumbnail was long enough to get a pretty good purchase on the basement barnacle. I scratched, I scraped, and I even buffed it a little with my shirtsleeve. I expected the little son-of-a-bitch to pop off at any time. What I wasn’t expecting was a chemical reaction that fired off a plume of smoke in my face, and I certainly was not expecting that smoke to take on the form of a large mustachioed, naked man standing hands-on-hips in my kitchen.

      In his defense, he wasn’t expecting my shriek of terror to be followed swiftly by the gravy-boat-turned-split-finger-fastball. As my projectile clunked off his large, furrowed brow, I turned and attempted to run. Unfortunately, due to a puddle of water I assumed leaked off the drain board and the front of the sink, I crashed down onto my ass. From my viewpoint on the floor, I noticed that the nude man was soaking wet and that much of said puddle was water that had dripped off of him. My eyes followed him up from the puddle [because hey, I’m as curious as the next guy], but much to my relief he was decidedly neutered.

      BEHOLD THE DJINN! the naked man exclaimed.

      Calling upon years of martial arts training, I scurried backwards away from the naked man until my back pushed up against the corner door of the Lazy Susan. With my flank thereby protected, I asked, Behold the what?

      BEHOLD THE DJINN! he repeated.

      You need to be-holding the front door before I call the police, I threatened.

      To describe the sudden transformation of his body language as crestfallen would be to somehow undermine centuries of crestfalls. He absolutely withered. I guessed that I inadvertently wounded his pride by not beholding the Djinn in the manner he1

      had grown accustomed to. I know I’ve already said that he was neutered, so it must seem kind of sexist to keep referring to him as a He, but in my defense, he did have a very thick mustache. It was the kind of mustache you might see on a Disney villain or a night shift waitress at a diner. It would take a dozen Novembers to grow this kind of mustache. It was glorious.

      YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF THE DJINN, HAVE YOU? he asked.

      Man, you need to use your inside voice, okay? I don’t know what you’re doing here, or what kind of bath salts you smoked, but I do not need my lady coming in here right now and seeing you all naked and no-nutsing up on her dishes, all right? That is a conversation I do not want to have, I pleaded. Making no sudden movements, I slowly stood up and offered him the dishtowel from off my shoulder to cover his junk.

      You can cover your junk with this.

      Shukran. he replied. I later gleaned that shukran is Djinnglish for thank you and that djinn is their word for genie. They don’t sell a Rosetta Stone for genietalk, so you just have to pick it up as you go along. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Djinnglish seems to have a lot of indiscriminately silent letters for no fathomable reason. Djinn is pronounced like the liquor gin, but my naked friend spelled his name Djosar and pronounced it dozer. Throughout

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