My temper flared at that – I’ve never had a very good temper. “What do you mean? What the hell kind of genie are you if you can’t grant a wish?”
“I can grant the wish, and I will,” he said, his demeanor placid, “but you have to do something for me, first.”
Well, all right, I guess that’s fair. “So, what do you want?”
“Bones,” it said immediately, as though it was the most obvious choice in the world.
“Bones? What the fuck do you need bones for?”
“Does it matter?”
Wow, okay, yeah. Oscar was an ass. But, hell, if a few bones could get my student loans paid off, I was game. “Okay… what kind of bones?”
“Doesn’t matter, just make sure you have a nice pile here by sunrise.”
Sunrise? Shit. I stood up and grabbed my keys, dashing out the door as fast as I could go. Because when someone is willing to just give you forty thousand dollars, you fucking move, you know?
Of course, once I got to the ground floor of my apartment and out the door, I realized that I had no idea where I was supposed to gather all these bones. Cemetery? Nah, I wasn’t gonna break my back digging up bodies, fuck that. I supposed that I could go dumpster diving, maybe hope that someone had thrown a dead pet in there?
I started pacing on the small patch of green lawn in front of my apartment building, trying to come up with a semblance of an idea, when I saw the neighbor’s cat.
It was a real ugly little thing, some kind of hairless whatever. It wasn’t too friendly, either, but luckily for me it was slow and declawed. I almost felt a little bad about what I decided I was going to do to it in that split second, but in the grand scheme of things, thousands of dollars of debt is more important than the life of one ugly ass cat.
I grabbed it and raced back up to my apartment. It was hissing and spitting, trying its damnedest to wiggle out of my arms. Little shit. I finally got in my apartment and locked the door, as if I was afraid it was going to figure out how to twist the knob.
But there was one thing I wasn’t afraid of twisting. I grabbed the cat’s head with one hand, the rest of its body held captive by my other arm. I twisted – hard.