It all began when Simon woke up, one April morning...

Simon had a hangover. Prising one eye open with a handy metaphor, he looked around the room, wincing at the light coming in slantwise through his south-facing windows. There in the golden glow on a hassock sat a skinny little man wearing not much more than a green turban, loincloth and slippers with a black embroidered vest.

“You’re still here?” Simon asked.

The little man nodded. “Yes, master, of course. You still have the ring.”

Simon groaned. Struggling with the inertness of his own body, he pulled his left hand up in front of his eye. A simple gold band with a single green stone gleamed on his pinkie. “Son of a djinn, I do,” he said.

“You do,” agreed the little man. “But djinn is the plural, I am a djinni.”

The hangover wouldn’t let Simon expend the effort to sit up, so he rolled off the bed into a sitting position on the floor. “Then it really happened?” he asked.

“If you mean your acquisition of the ring to which I am bound as servant, yes, it did,” said the singular djinn.

“Not so loud,” Simon cautioned. He remembered coming upon the scene of an accident, a large luxury sedan crushed by an eighteen wheeler. He’d been coming back from his tech support job at the university and had to get off his bike to walk it around the wreck and the fire, police and ambulances that had completely blocked the road. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off the horror, it being obvious that the driver and passengers of the big car had all been killed.

He heard the truck driver talking to one of the policemen. “He just came out of the side street going...I don’t know how fast he was going. I didn’t see him until he came out right in front of me. No chance to stop. You can see, I didn’t leave no skid marks until after I hit him and he didn’t leave any at all!”

Simon had wondered vaguely what made someone take crazy chances like driving too fast and not stopping at stop signs. Maybe the driver had been distracted. He resolutely kept his eyes away from the wreck, not wanting to see any details of blood and dismemberment. The job of getting around the tangle of vehicles took all his concentration anyway. He had to go wide into the bushes to avoid being turned away by a policeman with a traffic wand.

While negotiating with some brambles for passage, he had been startled to hear a voice saying, “You almost stepped on the ring.” He looked around but no one was near him and so he had looked down at his feet. There in the green newly sprouted wild oats and mustard lay a glittering object, the ring he now wore on his pinkie.

He didn’t remember picking the ring up and putting it on but he must have. What all had happened after he saw the ring on the ground between his feet remained a mystery. Maybe the little man in the odd costume would know.

From his position on the floor next to his bed, Simon could look out the window into the beauty of the rose garden. He admired the sunlight on the leaves and flowers and marveled that nearly twenty hours of his life had disappeared without him remembering anything.

Mrs. Dumfries, proprietor of the April Morning Hotel and Bed and Breakfast, had been born in England and regarded the maintenance of a fine garden as one of the requirements of being a landowner. The building had been constructed as a single family dwelling more than sixty years before in a style nearly antiquated at the time. After only ten years, the original tycoons had moved on to residences in more stylish communities than rural Washington state; Mrs. Dumfries and her partners had been able to buy it at a bargain and promptly converted it into a prosperous boutique hotel.

The city had obliged by building out to meet them and now the April Morning sat in comfortable grandeur between a new satellite business district and several residential semi-rural developments. With only nineteen rooms, the April Morning catered to long time residents and enough business travelers with a taste for simple luxuries to keep the room count up.

Simon has moved in four years ago. He liked living in the garden suite, he had his own entrance around the back of the hotel and a small kitchenette he shared with the other room on the ground floor. The tiny gym for residents was just across the hall. The only drawback he had found was that he was directly under the kitchen and dining room traffic on the first floor.

He blinked, tearing his gaze away from the view of the garden. The sunlight had stopped hurting his eyeballs but the back of his neck still ached. The little man still sat on the hassock, watching him patiently.

“What happened after I found the ring?” he asked, examining the piece of jewelry again.

“You expressed a desire to get drunk, I obliged,” said the little man.

Simon shook his head and wished, silently, that he had not. “Ow. I didn’t go to a bar or even bring home a bottle, just poof, and I’m drunk?”

“It seemed efficient,” said the djinni.

“How did I get home?”

“I helped you.”

Simon stopped himself from nodding again by grasping his head with both hands. “I remember, that’s when I first saw you.” Remembering was good, nodding his head was not.

“You ordered me to let you see me,” the little man said, sighing.

“And you said you were a djinn.”

“A djinni, yes.”

“You don’t look much like Barbara Eden.”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind. Can you do anything about this hangover?”

“Certainly,” said the djinni.

Simon waited. Nothing happened. He peered up at the smiling little man sitting on the hassock in front of the too bright windows.

Slowly the idea penetrated to Simon’s painful brain that he had to express a desire more directly. He thought about it some more. Not too directly, perhaps. As he remembered it, what he had said when he found the ring and heard a disembodied voice talking to him was, “I must be drunk.”

The absurdity of the situation suddenly penetrated and skepticism reared it’s doubtful head. “You can’t be a djinn, a djinni. There’s no such thing.”

The little man shrugged in a very Middle Eastern manner, expressively and with evident ironic amusement.

“Are you an hallucination?” asked Simon.

“No,” said the djinni. “I’m Persian.”

“Huh,” said Simon. He peered carefully at the man. Other than his mode of dress, he looked fairly normal. Simon could not see the djinni’s hair but his neatly trimmed beard was dark brown and his eyes were the same green as his turban and breechclout.

“Huh,” he repeated. “How did you get here? In here?”

“You had a key,” the djinni pointed out. “We walked around the back of the hotel and I opened the door.” He glanced toward the window. “It’s a lovely garden out there, you know. I couldn’t see much of it in the dark.”

“Huh,” said Simon, sure that in his hangover state that he had already said that once or twice. “My bike? My backpack?”

The djinni gestured at the bright yellow and black backpack lying on the floor near the sofa. “Your vehicle is parked in the garden — with the chain lock securing it to a pipe — as you instructed me last night.”

Simon blinked several times. He had trouble believing he had said anything coherent at all considering the monumental drunk he must have been on to have such a fierce hangover this morning. “Ow,” he said. Even blinking hurt. Something else occurred to him. “Uh, you have a name?”

“Certainly,” said the little man.

Taking care not to blink again, Simon clarified his request for information. “What is your name? Tell me your name.”

The djinni obliged with a fourteen syllable five-barrel sobriquet in ancient Persian, complete with honorifics indicating cultural attainments and the respect due a favorite of kings. “But please, master, call me Habib. It will be simpler for both of us,” the little man ended.

“Habib,” said Simon. “Oh, thank you! Ow. Yes, that will be easier. Is that a Persian name?”

“No, it’s Arabic, it means friend. But it is easier to say for an American than any part of my own name.”

Simon nodded. “Ow, Habib, yes. I went to school with a fellow named Hamid, I think he was Arab. But his last name was Silvestre.”

“Probably from Algeria, a lot of French influence there,” commented Habib.

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Simon. “Uh, you said earlier you could do something about this hangover.”

Habib smiled. “Yes, of course. I could make most of the pain and nausea go away. Would you like me to do that?”

Simon remembered not to nod. “Yes, please?” he whimpered. And suddenly he had to run for the bathroom. Almost he thought he saw the little man still smiling as he left the room.

My entry in my own challenge. Feel free to use this part as another jumping off place, I'm having a lot of trouble getting enough time to write. -- Erin