OMG! Oh My Genie!

Chapter 2: The Ghost

As Sam reached his home, he saw that his mother had fallen asleep on the rocking chair, so he walked quietly pass her and into their large and spacious living-room, whose cracked ceilings held oscillating ceiling fans of dark wood, and whose walls were solid shelves of darker wood filled with plaster Jesus statues, crucifix charms, feather fans, dried roses, glass and brass ashtrays and encyclopedic leather tomes with roman numerals on them. As usual, the long sash of glass windows on both ends of the living-room were closed shut, the wispy white trails of the curtain dead and ghostly from the lack of wind. Ever since his father died, his mother had closed off all their windows from the outside world, afraid to be seen, even though they didn't have any neighbors for several canyons away, and even though the weather was scorching hot and they were in oppressive heat. Sam crossed the living-room with one quick stride off the dusty antique rug, afraid, it seemed, to look at the larger than life framed portrait of his father in the army that decorated the far wall of the living-room, standing tall and proud in his uniform sparsely scattered with innumerable medallions, numerous badges and lots of awards, his brilliant blue eyes the same shade as Sam's, like the rushing running water of the canyons, but always looking gravely down, as if everyone who viewed the portrait was inferior to him. Sam bounded into the kitchen, where he set the bottle of red wine down, debated with himself whether or not to wake her from her deep slumber, and decided against it, and so quickly slipped into her bedroom, where he retrieved her duvet blanket and wrapped it warmly around of her sleeping form.

He then entered the house again and climbed up the spiraling set of staircases up to the second and third floors of the house and into the fancy sitting-room with its chequered ceiling, floral print wallpapers, high beams and hardwood floors which quartered the space with four doors leading to the Master's Bedroom, the bathroom, his bedroom, and to the attic. He walked slowly and sullenly to the unpainted, cracked door with the gilded doorknob, which led to his bedroom, a small and tiny room which he swore was made to be originally a storage closet, but when his parents had him, a surprise they weren't initially expecting, they decided to hastily remove the wooden shelves originally adorning the walls and stuff him in there and called it a 'bedroom', although it was extremely cramped, even for him, who was small and short and lacking in height and weight due to malnutrition- because since the beginning of time immemorial his mother was a terrible cook and he kept trying to avoid her meals by throwing away the pasty peas or the undercooked meat so hard it had to be cut with a diamond drill.

As he entered his bedroom, he looked the shelved walls containing his priced possessions- a careful collection of impossible bottles, a mechanical puzzle with bottles containing objects initially too large for them to fit in in the first place, such as ships, matchboxes, decks of cards, tennis balls, racketballs, Rubik's cubes, padlocks, knots, and scissors. Most of the bottles on his wooden shelves contained ships and galleons, his favorite kind of impossible bottle, mostly because this was the first kind of mechanical puzzle his father introduced to him, and they spent innumerable summers trying to fit ships into bottles. It was his father who taught him how to make impossible bottles, and it was his father who grew the passion inside of him to make them. Now, several summers after his father had went and gone into the war, his rickety wooden shelves still contained the ships they fitted into the bottles, amid the collecting cobwebs and dust.