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THE DJINN’S GRANDCHILD by David Coles

In the days before creatures of fire and air had gone, dead of unbelief, there was a Djinn whose skill was to fashion lives for children yet unborn.

In a dream, a woman came to the Djinn and asked for a girl child. Leaving aside irrelevances, the Djinn carefully selected the needful things: star stuff and earth, flame and water. These, he brought together, each in proportion.

The day was the seventh of a seventh month and therefore, he strived for beauty. The girl’s hands were elegant, delicate fingers with nails the colours of mother of pearl. Her feet were made for dancing with toenails like pink seashells. Her eyes were the colour of aged amber and made for laughing. Lips were dark and had the softness of ripe fruit.

But beauty is nothing without a mind to animate it and make it shine. So the Djinn added an intelligence as sharp as mint of mint and a nature sweet as maple. Her chuckle was like brook water over stones and her smile would open flowers and hearts.

All this did the Djinn do and shrank the life smaller than a drop of ink on the smallest brush that it might be placed within the waiting womb.

An eye blink later, the Djinn saw his child flying a paper kite over a waterfall, and as with all parents, of earth and water or fire and air, the Djinn’s eye brimmed with love. Where the tear fell to earth a lotus flower grew and the girl plucked it.

Another eye blink and the Djinn looked and saw her grown, a man at her side, holding her hand at the waterfall. Unbelief was sweeping the world; worse still was indifference and those of air and fire were fading slowly in their bright pavilions. As if he dreamed a dream within a dream, the Djinn looked again and saw the man was one he had long ago shaped and he saw the woman’s swollen belly.

He had made the mother, made the father; this was his grandchild. Had humankind learned to create a soul; could those of earth and water build life? The Djinn felt reality slipping; there was no longer a purpose to his kind and, slowly, his spirit dissipated. A sigh, a last prayer breathed: may they learn, may they be trusted.