• “Oh, we have an audience!”

    My friends giggled. They huddled around my folding chair staring. I shrugged. “Yeah, we do.”

    The woman on the other side of the card table pushed up her batwing sleeves. In front of her on top of a felt tablecloth were a box of tissues, pens, and a stack of Tarot cards.

    Her fingers flexed. “Give me the hand you use to write with.”

    I was less nervous at the moment with my fortune, and more for the fact that she chose a purple non-washable pen to dictate with. Two customers had already been checked with her ballpoint, and I supposed I would have to bare the tattoos of my curiosity as well. My mother was visiting soon – that would be a story.

    Once my palm was splayed in hers, she began. The candlelight from a wick in the corner made my shadows pop, and easier to see. Outside, the sun had set, and the atmosphere buzzed in tambourine claps and chattering voices.

    "Is everyone going away or something?” she muttered, and traced a large line down the center of my hand. It split at the bottom into two.

    “Were you thinking about joining the military, or going oversees?” she asked. The word ‘military’ had a special meaning to me; however.

    “Actually, I was sort of forbidden to join the military,” I confessed. I hated telling readers when they were wrong for some reason. She raised her eyebrows.

    “Well it says here you have a trip abroad in your future,” she explained. “What your purpose is could go either way. Something in the Peace Corp. maybe? Do you enjoy helping people?”

    That’s the fallback. Who says no?

    “Yeah, I had a little sister. I was the helper, I guess.”

    Satisfied, she changed topic.

    “Do you enjoy writing?” she asked when she paused. I sat up straighter.

    “I love to write,” I said. Yay! I’d love to hear something about that – fame and fortune, maybe?

    “You have a bit of a writer’s fork here,” she replied. Through what I found out was my career ‘line’, there was a wrinkle that looked like a base and two fork prongs. Here it comes:

    “…I don’t really see you pursuing that as a career though. Maybe one publication, but your pursuits seem to be medical.”

    My heart crashed to the bottom of my ribcage. “M-medicine?”

    “Mmhmm. Did you think about being a doctor?”

    I had to be honest. “I was going to be a doctor for awhile,” I said. Before, that is, I found writing. No longer was my ambition picking up a stethoscope.

    My thoughts weren’t on the reading, so when she smugly announced, “Ah, your love life,” I was caught completely off guard. What love life?

    “You don’t date much, do you?” she asked. Ha! That was an understatement.

    “No, not much,” was all I said. I had a puny and indirect notch of a love line on the side of my hand up near my fingers.

    “You’re going to be one of those people that doesn’t really until later. Maybe in college or afterward. But when you meet that person, you’ll know fairly quickly if he’s ‘the one’.”

    This was getting cue card-ish. I couldn’t let my romantic side buy into the possibility of catching someone’s eyes across the room.

    In the space of ten minutes, then, I found out that after college I would be a failed writer travelling to escape my woes in some foreign country with an aid organization and no social life.

    That’ll be ten dollars. Next!