Fortune
18 May 2019Today’s prompt: “Honesty”
“Let’s start with your life line,” the fortune teller says. Her left hand cradles your hand, and her index finger traces the line next to your thumb. She stops. She frowns. She slowly draws her hands back from yours, then shoves the $20 bill you handed her earlier back across the table.
“What’s wrong?” you ask.
“Oh, nothing really,” she says. “Your future is … cloudy. I can’t get a good read on it.”
She can barely meet your gaze. It’s obvious she’s lying.
“I don’t believe you,” you say. “You saw something. You figured something out.”
“I just remembered I have somewhere to be,” she says, rising and adjusting her skirt. “I’m sorry, but I can’t finish our session.”
“Oh, come on,” you say.
“Shop’s closed.”
“Please. We both know you don’t have an appointment or anything. Whatever it is you saw, I can handle it.”
She sits down and crosses her arms, not exactly resigned, but at least done with the charade. “You know, knowing the future is kind of overrated,” she says. “Some things can’t be changed, and knowing the truth about what’s going to happen in those kinds of situations will only make you anxious. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to be able to prepare for or redirect.”
“If you leave me in suspense with a warning like that, don’t you think I’m going to be imagining things even worse, and making myself even more anxious?”
“No.” A pause. “I’ve said enough.”
“Look,” you say, pushing the money back across the table, “I already paid you. I’m not leaving until I get the honest truth from you. And don’t bother trying to make up something else. You’re a terrible liar.”
She sits in silence, sullenly blowing a stray hair out of her face. Finally, she speaks. “Your life line ends next Wednesday.”
“Next Wednesday? How?”
“Look, you don’t really want to–”
“Yes, I do.”
“You can’t stop it.”
“I still want to know.”
A long pause. “I see … creatures.”
“Creatures?”
“Horrible creatures. Massive, with pale skin and long, spidery limbs with multiple joints. Barbed claws. Three rows of sharp teeth. They move fast. There’s a whole swarm of them. Dozens. They chew into your stomach. They pull the skin from your face and arms with their claws. They leave your body shredded.”
A long pause.
“You’re making that up,” you say weakly, but you can read in her face that she isn’t.
“Keep believing that,” she says.
“I’ll get a gun,” you say.
“I saw you with a gun,” she says. “You’re still overwhelmed in the end. There’s too many of them.”
“I’ll lock myself in my home. No. I’ll run away.”
“I saw them crashing into your house to attack you, swarming around you in Tijuana, and reaching between the bars of a jail cell after you purposely got yourself incarcerated. The where isn’t fixed. The when and the what and the how are. I told you. There’s no escape.”
You sit in stunned silence.
“Well? Now do you wish you’d settled for a lie?”
“Yes,” you say.
“I’ll never understand why people think honesty is the best policy,” she says.