Page 12 of The Wishless Ones
“Never, Rohan,” Jafar whispered, and for whatever reason, he looked betrayed when he said it. “He was never good to me.”
His voice was laced with pain, a cold and bitter kind of sorrow that Rohan felt in his bones.
“You can still be the better person,” Rohan countered. “You can still choose to respect the dead.”
Jafar looked away. “You’re right. I’m sorry. He was my father before all else.”
His tone and demeanor had changed so thoroughly, Rohan had to look away, too. He hadn’t expected Jafar to respond likethat. He’d braced for a dismissal, perhaps, or even some chagrin, not full-out regret. It was almost hard to believe.
“It’s all right,” Rohan forced himself to say with a feeble smile for Jafar’s sake. Jafar was trying, and so should he. “No one—no one really teaches us how to get through the death of a parent, let alone both. But why the sudden interest in the genie lamp?”
There were only certain stories of Mama’s that Jafar had ever paid attention to, and Rohan hadn’t thought the genie was one of them. Jafar rarely seemed to dream or indulge in fantasies like Rohan.
Jafar gave him a look. “To make our wishes, of course. We just lost everything. Don’t you have anything you want?”
“I—I do,” Rohan stammered. “Of course I do. I just—I guess I never thought you believed in the lamp.”
Rohan watched Jafar snatch one of the maps from the basket in the corner and unroll it across the main table. As the silence dragged on, Rohan felt a twinge of distrust.
“You didn’t tell me what you want,” Jafar said at last.
Rohan didn’t know how to say what he wanted. “It’s like you said. We lost everything. I know Baba was never good to you, but we can get him back.”
“You would use a genie wish to get Baba back?” Jafar asked, and Rohan was relieved he sounded more curious than angry.
“I would use another to make him a better man. And then the last to bring Mama back.”
“You’d be all out of wishes then,” Iago pointed out, tilting his red head.
Rohan was well aware of that. “We’d be the wishless ones, but we’d also be happy because we’d have everything we could ever want or need.”
He looked at Jafar while he said the words, trying to see past the cool mask of his features. Did Jafar agree with him? Did he want the genie for the same reasons? He might not miss Baba, but Jafar certainly missed Mama.
Jafar spread his hand across the map, tamping down the curling edges.
“For Mama,” he said, meeting neither Rohan’s nor Iago’s eyes.
“Anyway, how do you plan on finding one tiny lamp in an endless desert?” Iago asked, peering down at the papyrus. “You’ve got Agrabah, Maghriz, Hulum.”
“You can read, too?” Jafar asked, incredulous.
“I can fly, Jafar. Are you really surprised I can do all those other things?” Iago replied.
“Because you’re a parrot!” Rohan exclaimed.
“And?”
Rohan sputtered, “And parrots can’t talk or read, or move their feathers about like they’re—they’re human fingers.”
Jafar paused, scrutinizing Iago as if for the first time. “Why are you like that, anyway?” He held up a finger, stopping Iago’s protest before it began. “If you didn’t want to be questioned, you shouldn’t have spoken.”
“Why, I oughta leave you two here in the dust,” Iago huffed, and when neither brother budged, he sighed, his chest deflating. “I don’t know. Everything in me feels wrong, like I don’t fit in my body, but I’ve been a parrot for as long as I can remember. Which isn’t very long, by the way. I remember the bazaar and the shopkeeper feeding me stale crackers, then you two bought me, and here I am. If I try to recall anything from before the bazaar, the memories turn hazy and give me a headache. Happy now?”
It didn’t make Rohan happy as much as feel he could understand Iago in a way. He never felt like he belonged, either.
“For now,” Jafar said, and Rohan thought he could have been nicer, but Iago didn’t seem to care.
He dismissed Jafar with a flap of his wing and shifted his focus back to the map.
