Fortuneteller

Fortuneteller

The Fortuneteller’s monkey was clawing deep into her shoulder as she was laid out a deck of Tarot cards. The fortuneteller sat stoic and silent even as the monkey’s claws began to draw blood. Bare candlelight flickered throughout the tent. She didn’t even look up at me as I walked in, but the monkey wailed and screeched as it noticed me. I was nervous, the gaudy neon light was grating, and the monkey’s wail was incessant and piercing. The tent was large, but kitschy, and had a section in the back behind a black curtain, obviously the part of the tent she called home. I shouldn’t be in here, I thought to myself. The fortuneteller was a redneck in a faux astrological dress, and I was an idiot in a faux expensive suit; stupid enough to pay the five dollars to get into the tent.

I didn’t care what the fortuneteller said, and whatever the future was, most of me didn’t want to know it. Well, I reassured myself, she couldn’t predict the future, she wouldn’t be in a carnival if she could. So I sat down, hoping to be mildly entertained. The slight possibility that she could know my future, something that a small part of me, the part that believes in magic, always hoped for, abandoned me. With a smile suppressing a laugh at this ridiculous old woman, I sat down.

She looked up from her focus on the tarot cards, and mirrored my smile. She didn’t talk, just grabbed my hands and stared into my eyes. Her smile widened and I started to frown. Her stare was piercing and her eyes were deep, deeper than mine. She was older than I first thought, and I first thought that she was at least seventy. Her smile burst into a laugh, and I started to become more nervous than when I first walked in.

She laughed for what must have been three minutes. I should have walked out then, but her deep eyes and strange laugh held me in a trance. The fortuneteller stopped laughing, and her face moved back into the stoic statue I had seen when I walked in. As I was beginning to leave, something happened to her eyes. It struck me that the woman had not blinked since she began staring at my eyes. Stranger still was the fact that her eyes were becoming dark. I again tried to get up, but it was as if my body wasn’t connected to my mind, a separate entity entirely. I tried to close my eyes to stop myself seeing her darkening eyes, but I knew I couldn’t.

As her eyes succumbed to total blackness, my mind went into her stare. I don’t know how to explain it, some things are too frightening, too mystical to be put into words. I, or at least my soul, was trapped in the icy darkness of her eyes. I felt myself panic as I saw myself from the fortuneteller’s eyes. I observed myself slump over and go limp, as if dead. The fortuneteller stood up; I watched in horror as she picked my body up and with great effort dragged it through the tent toward the section in the back. My body was unresponsive, a corpse, and I dreaded what she would do with it behind the black curtain.

It took a long time for her to reach the black curtain, she was old and I was dead weight. When she first entered the room, for a room it was, I didn’t see anything. I could only see from her eyes, and she was backing into the room, pulling me in along with her. She stole a quick look over her shoulder, and I was amazed at what I saw. There were rows and rows of bodies, the room seemed to stretch on forever. They looked like they were sleeping, but none of them were breathing. As she went on through the room, it was obvious that some of these people had been here for eons. Some were dressed in clothes long since out of fashion, and all had an expression of horror on their face. The bodies, thousands? millions? billions? Of them, were stretched to infinity and organized in perverse order, like cans of food in a supermarket.

After what seemed like an eternity, the fortuneteller finally came across an empty spot in the chain of corpses. She dropped me like a sack of bricks, and with great effort lifted me to my place. She panted and caught her breath. My mind had gone past panic and was in utter and complete terror. After the fortuneteller had steadied her breath, she reached toward my body and plucked out my eyes. Keeping my eyes in her hand, she plucked out her own, and switched them. I could still steal from her (my?) eyes, and as she put them back in my body, my terror turned to calm. I would pretend to lie still, then, fully in control of my body, run away from this terrible room. Surely I would regain control of my body soon, I had been in control of my body for so long I didn’t consider any other options. As the fortuneteller walked away and out of sight I began to try to move my arm. Panic flooded my body as I found my arm was out of my control, immobile, stuck to the spot as if with glue. I realized that the bodies, all of them, were exactly as powerless as me. I would have screamed, but, of course, I couldn’t move my mouth.

I’ve been lying here for countless years, I feel no passage of time in this prison. I haven’t died, but I’m trapped here for ever. Staring at the same space of ceiling for all eternity.