“Ah, yes,” she says. “Now I tell you truthfully: in this gravest of situations, you have only one destiny that awaits you …
Know this,” she says, her voice scraping low. “Destiny is the thing you see in the mirror, merely a reflection of reality, an idea that can never be held in the hand.”
Sure, sure, destiny talk and grim pomp from a total stranger. Quite a bit of that in the air lately. And really what of the air lately? One day pours into the next, every day another drink from the same cup, the same tepid water.
Yet … what is this now?
Suddenly you are not where you were a moment before. There are walls around you–and they appear to be canvas. A floor, too, but unconstructed—rather, it’s spatchy grass. You are somehow in a tent. Through a slit in the canvas comes a bit of daylight, and feet passing outside, the murmur of voices, a call to games, to play, to food.
You are at a carnival, in a fortune teller’s tent.
“You,” she says, “are no one special.”
You shrug. Fair enough. The fortune-teller or whatever she is glares at you. Whatever. Her outfit is clichéd—bit fake nose, a hairy mole quivers on her chin, a bandanna wraps her skull, her eyes are now green. Has to be contacts, you think. Yawn.
Then she does something pretty damn gross.
She spits into her palm and rubs her hands together. The scant light in the tent glooms. The outside voices gather into a soft chant. The witch reaches toward her left eye and presses her fingers into the cavity and plucks her left eye from her skull. Blood spits from the twitching optical nerve as she sets it in a metal bowl. She lights a match and sets flame to the eye. The eye sputters; ooze oozes; you are repulsed but cannot look away; she is whispering, her (one good) eye shut, the other, in the bowl, open wide, opening wider, vanishing into a sputtering flame, charring down to nothing.
She chants. The world chants. Lightning. Thunder. Etc.
Then she gasps and slumps into her seat.
Get the hell out of here already!
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