Teddy opened his eyes on grey day. The thin curtains did not hide the sound of rain cascading down the window of the drab room he rented in an HMO (House of Multiple Occupation). The sounds of his neighbours were obvious through the thin walls as they got ready for work, and left.

Jenny in the room next to him was a legal secretary and had to dress well to be on Receptionfrom time to time at the law firm where she worked. He knew the click of her heels as she went down the staircase over the carpet that had seen better days. She always had a smile for him if they met on the stairs, but he knew little more about her.

The only other resident on his floor was George who was a night watchman. His hours meant that they rarely met. He was probably fifty or so, greying at the temples and large enough to be a threat to anyone trying to access the Works where he sat night after night in a small lit booth or patrolled a darkened building with a long heavy torch for company. The torch had been replaced several times when it had been bent over he head of some unwelcome unfortunate who had breached his empire’s defences in the small hours.

Teddy had had a late shift at the Supermarket where he worked. He was not due in to work until noon that day, so he snuggled up under his duvet until the morning seemed more acceptable.

He had been through an uninspiring life so far. Born as a single child to a single mother in a row of terraced houses filled with single mothers and their swathes of children. A supportive environment certainly, but he was bereft of male roll models in his adolescence, and drifted through school with examination results that were modest, to say the least. A job filling shelves at a supermarket was all he aspired to and rent and utility bills consumed most of his take home pay. When it came down to it, he was in a dead end job with no prospects.

When he eventually rolled out of bed, the rain had stopped, but his room was bedecked with his drying washing. Yesterday’s dirty clothes had got as far as a pile by his bedside but no further.

His room had a sink, a gas fire, and an electric kettle, but that was as far as creature comforts went. The gas fire in the grate cost too much to run and it was used infrequently. This day was not cold so his room was tolerably warm.

The cracked mirror over the sink showed a man with the body of a boy. Slim to the point of emaciation; scant body hair over a pallid complexion and sandy fine hair that refused to take any sort of shape. His strikingly blue eyes were the dominant feature when you saw him. Everything else blended into the background. It took the claret coloured tabard that the supermarket provided to make anyone notice him at all.

Teddy had never been satisfied with his body. He had seen too many women and girls in various states of undress as a child in his exclusively female street not to aspire to their gentle curves. He also aspired to what seemed to him to be exciting social lives. He didn’t see the single mothers stretching every penny to feed their children or the lives of exhaustion and drudgery. As a puny boy with no money he was avoided by any girls he knew. His social prospects were as miserable as his employment prospects. He faced a life one step above poverty in an HMO like this one, that is, until someone eventually noticed that he had died alone, when it would be up to the State to dispose of his remains hygienically.

Whilst an outsider might see his life, and eventual death, as typical of a life one rung above the lowest tier of human existence, at least he had a home. He saw the homeless every day. They clustered around the entrance to his Supermarket laying out grubby sleeping bags under the entrance overhang keeping themselves away from the worst of the weather.

As Teddy walked around his drying washing to the kettle, he stood for a moment in front of the mirror. He had had a fancy to push the skin over his chest into a shape resembling a very modest bust. It was poor imitation, and he knew it, but girls seemed to have a better deal than he did. Their social lives were better and they actually had friends. Even if they were poor there seemed to be a camaraderie that made them feel better about themselves.

Whether Teddy actually wanted a girlfriend or even a boyfriend, was something he rarely considered. What he actually wanted was a friend of any sort who would care if he lived or died.

After only a few seconds he returned to normal, ate a bowl of cereal that was beyond its ‘Best Before’ date and a cup of black coffee. He lived on Out of Date food because the Supermarket allowed staff to take away food that would otherwise have had to be binned. He had last shaved a week ago, and there was little sign of any stubble as yet, so he just needed a strip wash in the basin before getting dressed in his usual uniform of extra small black teeshirt and black jeans. The tabard would cover the small hole in his shirt, he thought.

He was just folding the inner bag of the cereal packet when he saw a sealed pouch poking out of the rest of the cereal.

“I didn’t think cereal bags had gifts any longer.” he said to no one in particular.

The pouch had no marking on the outside but one edge was serrated and was clearly meant to be torn.

It took little effort to tear the pouch open and inside was a small scratch card. Teddy smelled it and there was no smell. As soon as he scratched it there was a rather small flash of light and a dull popping sound and a rather small imp like being emerged and stood on Teddy’s unmade bed.

“I am glad someone found my sachet.” the being said. “I do hate being thrown away. Trying to convince a rat to take a magic wish is a problem as I am sure you will understand.”

“I am sure talking to rats is a bit of a problem, but who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“I am the Genie of the Cereal of course.”

“I don’t know about it being ‘of course’. I have never heard of a Genie of the Cereal.”

“I shrink when no one opens my cereal box.”

“Thankyou for opening the sachet, by the way. Another few weeks and I would have disappeared for good.”

“My pleasure.”

“It still doesn’t explain why you are here.”

“In my diminished state I can only offer you one wish. I used to be able to offer three wishes hundreds of years ago, but that was when I lived in a lamp. Now I have to live in a cereal packet and my powers have shrunk as has my status amongst Genies.”

“Are there more of you?”

“I haven’t come across any recently, but there used to be more of us.”

“What is this about a wish?”

“Yes, I can give you anything you wish for, but you cannot wish for more wishes. One wish and that is your lot.”

“Really. Anything I want?”

“Yes, but I do offer guidance if I think something is unsuitable. After all I have been alive for millennia and have a lot of experience.”

Teddy sat down on the bed and the Genie sat beside him and swung his short legs with embroidered Persian slippers that slipped off his feet every so often.

After some minutes, Teddy asked if he could be turned into a girl.

The Genie looked surprised, and scratched his head under his turban for a bit. Took the turban off, looked at it and put it back on again at a rather jaunty angle.

“The answer is yes, but I think you need to give that option more thought.”

“I have thought about it many times over the last few years. I see girls having friends and going out to the pub or to clubs. I have no friends, and no one notices me. The last time I asked a girl out, she laughed then gave me a kiss on the forehead and suggested that I grew up a bit.”

“Let me give you my opinion for what it is worth.”

“You need confidence and experience to be a successful girl. Having a successful social life doesn’t just fall into your lap. There is a lot of expense and skill in choosing and using clothes and makeup and such like, and you need experience in dealing with all the social chit chat that makes up a successful life as a girl. You are fairly undeveloped as a boy both socially and bodily, and you haven’t had to have strategies to discourage any boys from taking advantage. You need to be able to control boys’ baser instincts or someone unsuitable will get you pregnant in short order, and he will forget you even had a name within minutes. You may appreciate that lust is a strong driver in most boys.”

“You would certainly be a girl anatomically if I change you, but you wouldn’t necessarily be pretty or have a very feminine silhouette. You haven’t much flesh to deal with. Your male organs would become female but there is no flesh to make a bosom. Lots of girls are fairly flat chested and it is certain that you would be one of those. Does a double A cup bra size cut the mustard, as it were. Your hair wouldn’t get any longer until you let it grow out. I cannot have any sort of impact on what sort of girl you would be. You wouldn’t be any more educated or confident as a girl than you are as a boy. I think you would be just as lonely and would feel even more inadequate as a girl as you do as a boy.”

“If I cannot be the girl of my dreams with a nice figure and attractive hair and lots of friends, then I don’t know what to choose.”

“If you take my advice, I think you would do much better choosing more self-assurance, a more manly body and a better education as your one wish. They come as a job-lot by the way. It is called the ‘Lifestyle’ wish. They will take you a lot further in life, but if you really want to be a girl however much of a challenge that would be, then I will do as you ask.”

Teddy looked at the rather scruffy bed-sitting room and his skinny undeveloped arms and wept just a little into the shoulder of the small ornamental robe the diminutive Genie was wearing. As they were both sitting on his unmade bed, the Genie could pat Teddy on the head in consolation, then he made an incantation and disappeared in a puff of blue smoke with a rather unexciting squeaking sound. Within minutes a young man with bulging abs and a well developed six-pack, strode out of his rather tatty room in clothes that were rather too small for him. He moved with purpose to the Supermarket and applied for the job of assistant manager that very morning, with qualifications that just seemed to appear on his CV.

Customers began to notice the young man in his claret coloured tabard. His black singlet emphasised his muscles and various well-dressed ladies of a certain age, made appreciative noises in his hearing. When he was on the tills, his queue seemed to be longer than those of his female co-workers and the customers spoke to him as a human being for the first time. Even the shoplifters who normally laughed if he challenged them over the bottles of spirits or pieces of fillet steak they were stealing, were more respectful.

Jenny from next door noticed him straight away.

She chatted away to him as she stroked the outlines of his biceps with one manicured finger nail and she licked her lips very suggestively. Both stopped in the entrance lobby by the letter rack for any post and somehow held hands going up the stairs.

That night they shared a lukewarm, but fiercely spiced curry that had been delivered by a scrawny and very disinterested schoolboy on his moped. Subsequently Teddy found that he was adept at seduction as well, although it must be said that Jenny was not hard to seduce.

It was a good thing that Teddy remembered one of his mother’s final comments to him before the cancer carried her off. “Always listen to good advice.” she said, “particularly when it is well meant.”

As Jenny wrapped her legs around his naked thighs for the third time that night, he thought his ability didn’t seem to be diminished at all.

Another of his mother’s sayings came to mind as Jenny and Teddy lay together basking in postcoital bliss. “Start every day with a good breakfast."