Monsters & Demons: A Collection of Short Horror Stories by Rella Brian

Author:Rella, Brian [Rella, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Brian Rella
Published: 2015-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

THE FORTUNETELLER

THE PLASTIC HANDLE on the shopping bag cuts into my fingers as I walk down Eighteenth Street with a big grin on my face. I pass the laundromat and the UPS store, and see her sitting at a little round table with a cat in her lap in front of her tiny storefront. The sign in her window says $5 Readings. Seems like she’s always been there; at least, she has been since we moved in last year. She’s old and wrinkled and gray and rather ordinary looking. She could be anybody’s grandmother. I’ve passed her dozens of times and we’ve never spoken, until today.

“Big night tonight,” she says as I pass her by.

I stop. “What do you mean?” I ask. As soon as I say it, I know it’s a mistake. Now she’ll try and con me into thinking that she can tell me my future and I know better than to entertain a passing comment from a hustler. I’ve got a full bag of groceries in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. Anyone trained in the art of confidence could guess I have something planned for tonight. I should have kept walking.

“Don’t worry. She will say yes,” she says.

“She will, huh? What will she say yes to?” I ask, skeptically. But a little voice in my head is not so skeptical. Does she know that I’m going to propose to Gwyn tonight?

“You have her heart. You two have the true love. Very rare. You are two halves of a whole. Very rare,” she says.

The heavy grocery bag is still cutting into my fingers, and as I switch hands that little voice in my head is growing louder, considering the possibility that this woman is not a fraud and, in fact, knows I’m going to ask Gwyneth to marry me tonight. How does she know? She’s psychic! This little mental battle goes on within me—she’s psychic, she’s a fraud!—as I take a mental inventory of what I’m wearing and carrying to see if there’s anything that would give away my plan to propose. She’s a con artist, for sure. There must be something that’s giving me away. Must be.

As if she’s read my mind, she says, “I know things. Things about people. I can tell you things you want to know,” she says, with a smile that seems just a bit too big, too sincere.

I don’t have time for this right now. I took the afternoon off to make dinner before Gwyneth gets home from work. “That’s nice,” I say dismissively. “See you around.” And I walk on.

“You’ll be back,” she says.

I half smile and tell her to have a good night.

“I will,” she says. “See you soon.”

I keep walking.

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