I hide in my house now, looking through the blinds from the upstairs window where I can see genies on the street corners. They’re at all the stop signs where in the past you could only see crying kids, back in the years when urban legend held that if you left-brake stopped and launched yourself off your bike at one very particular sign, it would hold you in the air, just hold you, and for an hour you might feel like you were flying, if not moving. And every kid tried every sign, and the blood of our hands and knees stained the grass. But now there are genies, and the red grass is covered by the blue-green smoke that convulses below them. And kids can wish for air, and for flying. And here, in my house, I can’t wish for anything.
Sean Noah Noah is a fiction writer living somewhere in the United States. Their short stories have appeared in Eunoia Review, Bizarro Central, and Plus Literary Magazine. Find Sean at @SeanNoahNoah
