Flossie finds a bottle

I got a frantic phone call the other day from my friend Flossie. “Nancy!” she whispered so low I could barely hear her. “You have to get over here right away! It’s not safe for me to leave the house, and I’m afraid to stay here alone. Hurry!” She hung up after these few hurried, hoarsely spoken words.

I was pounding on Flossie’s front door within 10 minutes.

I saw her face peering out the front door window. The door opened a crack and her skinny hand reached out, grabbed my shirtsleeve and pulled me into her house.

Once inside, she shut the door, locked it, double locked it and pulled the chain closed.

We crawled to the couch and sat on the floor. I noticed Flossie already had a pot of coffee and fixings on the coffee table.

Flossie poured out coffee and after she had put in her sugar and cream she lightly stirred it. Wow, I thought, she must be scared to not be digging her spoon into the bottom of the cup.

Finally she spoke. “Don’t talk too loud. Thanks for coming over. I don’t know what to do, but even if I make a mistake, I’d rather you be here with me to make it.” She sighed and took a long drink of coffee. “You remember I was going to clean out that old root cellar out by the little house?”

I nodded that yes I did remember.

She glanced around the room, then set down her coffee cup. She opened one of the cabinets and pulled something out of it; but I couldn’t see for certain what it was.

She crawled back to her sitting position near me and set an old bottle in front of me. I reached for it, but she lightly slapped my hand. “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!”

I leaned forward to see it better. The bottle was about 8-inches tall, made of dark brown glass tapering from a 4-inch circumference at the bottom to a half inch mouth. There was a seal of some kind of wax covering the mouth of it.

Flossie watched my every move. “Now look at that wax!” she commanded and I obeyed. “Do you see those markings? What do you think of them?”

I strained my eyes but only saw disjointed lines and circles – not any kind of language I could figure out.

I leaned back, took a long drink of coffee and turned to see Flossie’s look of excitement. Here it comes, I thought. Be prepared for anything.

She tapped the air above the bottle without touching the bottle. “I can tell you what it is. But you listen to my whole story before you say something stupid.”

I must have made a “humph!” sound without knowing it.

Flossie snorted and continued. “Well, Miss Know-it-all, this is something neither of us have seen before and we had better be ready to deal with it. Now pay attention and don’t talk!”

She finished her cup of coffee in one gulp then continued. “I’ve done a lot of research since I’ve found this thing. Here’s what I’ve found out. Those markings on the top were put there by King Solomon himself! Yes! I can prove it! Look at the bottle closely and you’ll see it has copper strings tied around the wax seal to hold it shut. Why did it need to be tied and sealed you ask. Because it contains a disobedient genie! Put there for not helping build the temple way back in history. It’s been sealed up in there for thousands of years!”

I gulped, poured us both more coffee and said, “I bet it would like to stretch its legs a mite.”

Flossie grinned, then became sober faced again. “Now we can’t make any assumptions about this. We can laugh it off and say it’s nothing but an old snake oil salesman’s bottle of shine, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s a real, downright smack to the ground genie in a bottle? Then what?”

I decided to go with the flow. Why not? So I miss an episode of Monk for once. This could be fun and what could be the harm?

“So what do we do now? Do we rub the bottle and get three wishes? We need to plan those out carefully if we decide to do that.”

Flossie shook her head. “Can’t rub the bottle, can’t free the genie. I told you I had done the research and every article I found on the Internet said genies are not friendly toward humans.”

“Well, Solomon was the wisest man ever created and if he thought it needed sealed up in a whiskey jar I agree with him.” We drank coffee.