The Battle of the Jinn

The Battle of the Jinn

1

My name is Rose Baker. I’m twenty-seven and I live with my family in the kingdom of Shakila in the seventeenth century.

Now, I was hanging out with my Mom, Bianca. We hung out all the time. We were sitting in Mom’s room. I loved the fact that I looked like Mom because we both had brown hair and brown eyes. I was telling Mom a story because I loved doing that. I was telling her the story of the Jinn.

“Thousands of years ago, there lived a lot of Jinn in Shakila,” I began. “There were good ones and bad ones. The bad ones attacked humans. The good ones helped humans fight back. They also needed humans in order to be able to fight back, just like humans needed them.”

Mom gave me a skeptical look and started waving her hands.

“I understand why humans needed the Jinn to fight other Jinn,” she said. “Because you can’t defeat something that has magic without having magic yourself. But why did the Jinn need the help of humans?”

“Because the Jinn can only use their magic to affect humans, if humans make wishes for them to grant,” I explained. “They can use their magic on each other. But they can’t use it to protect the city unless someone makes a wish. Aside from that, they live their lives almost the same way we do. As in, without magic.”

“Then, who made the wishes the evil Jinn were granting?”

“Some cruel citizens. The good Jinn and the innocent citizens defeated them and the whole population banished them. After another few years, the good Jinn decided to find a place of their own to live. So they left the kingdom.”

“Are they alive today?” Mom asked.

“Yes, Jinn live for thousands of years.”

Someone knocked on the door. Mom and I went to answer it. It was one of my uncles. He gave us a dirty look. We greeted him politely.

“Where is your brother?” he demanded of me. “I didn’t want to have to be greeted by your inferior faces.”

“Our faces are not inferior,” I said, calmly.

I didn’t let my anger show.

“Why don’t you make yourself useful and go cook something for a man,” my uncle said.

“I want to get a job.”

“Are you drunk?” he yelled. “Women do not belong in the workplace. You would get in the way. You would do everything wrong and a man would have to waste time correcting your mistakes.”

“Men make mistakes too.”

I was still talking calmly, even though I was angry.

He pushed me to the ground.

Mom’s eyes widened.

“Don’t compare yourself to us,” my uncle said. “We make mistakes because we’re human. You make them because you can’t do anything right.”

“Don’t push her again,” Mom told him angrily.

“I can do whatever I want. You’re our property.”

Mom and I left to get my brother, Matthew, because we already knew why my uncle was here. Our family owned several stores in the kingdom that sold clothes. My uncle was here to talk to Matthew about the business. We told Matthew and he went to talk to my uncle.

“Why did you have to tell him that stuff?” Mom asked me.

“Are you saying this is my fault?”

“No. I just don’t understand why you said that when you knew it wasn’t going to do any good.”

“Well, I was hoping if they hear it many times, they will see reason.”

Our family thought women were inferior. Everyone except my immediate family thought that. Many people in Shakila and the king himself hated women. Everyone who was related to us was cruel to the women in the family and the ones they met somewhere else.

My parents, my brother, my sister and I weren’t like that. Other women in the family were repressed, but they thought that was how it should be. They were treated like property. My Dad, Winston, wasn’t close to his family because they were cruel to women. They were also cruel in general. They were not pleasant to be around. Lots of other people in the kingdom hated them, especially a family called Kent. But the Kent family themselves were good people. And they didn’t discriminate between anyone in the kingdom. They hated my family. And my family hated them because the Kent family disagreed with them on a lot of topics.

There were almost no places in Shakila where women were allowed to get a job. Mom, my sister and I were the only educated women in the family. Mom came from a different family that was more enlightened, so they allowed women to be educated, just like the men. There were some families like that in the kingdom, but women were for the most part second class citizens. My family took it even further than anyone else and saw women as property and they were cruel to us. We had to deal with cruelty from lots of people. This was not the first time someone got violent with me or Mom or my sister.

My parents fell in love because they were able to see eye to eye on a lot of things, not just this topic. They understood each other. Dad gave Mom a sense of safety that she couldn’t get completely from living in a kingdom where everyone treated her like she was inferior and like she didn’t have any skills. This was one of the reasons she loved him.

Like all the women in the kingdom Mom had baggage from sexism, but she confided in Dad. He and Matthew were always there for us.

Dad had a hard time finding a wife because there were almost no educated women in the kingdom. He wanted to find love and someone he could connect to. Dad loved Mom because of her skills. She loved him for his own skills.

Mom still didn’t feel safe whenever she left the house, even though that didn’t stop her from leaving whenever she needed to.

I had trouble getting a job.