The Living Room Disco Ball

The Fortune Teller

“Farewell! Good fortune be with you!”

The man, walking with far more of a pep in his step than he had when he entered, gives an exuberant full body wave before I shut the door. I can see his figure through the stained glass window skipping off like Gene Kelly and shake my head.

Being a fraud was a delight.

//

The Man

My life had been catastrophically unlucky. I had been born on a boat in the middle of a tropical storm, and when we finally landed safely on shore we were robbed. When we were at last able to return home my father’s business partner had stolen all his money, and the salon my Mom owned had burned to the ground. On my first day of school I managed to topple over every desk like a set of dominoes, and when I graduated from high school the stage collapsed as soon as I stepped on it, taking down our principles and every district official. My college dorm had flooded, my first house was occupied by raccoons that wouldn’t leave and when I walked on stage at my college graduation the whole stadium lost power, a fire siren started wailing, and the sprinklers opened up and poured down on top of us.

I was catastrophically unlucky.

I thought being a skeptic would’ve helped. If I didn’t believe in supernatural reasoning behind why my life was constantly and consistently terrible, then it wouldn’t happen. The simple, childish reasoning that closing your eyes and blocking your ears would make the bad thing go away. 

The bad luck kept coming, so I turned to religion. Every religion. I battled demons and bad karma and a cosmic reckoning with God, and came up empty handed and unluckier than ever each time. 

So now, after my car broke down for the 7th time that week, every sink and bathtub and faucet in my new house had broken and dripped irritatingly all night long, and the last three places I had applied for a job had casually gone bankrupt a day after I got the email saying I was hired, I went to the fortune teller downtown. 

If she couldn’t help me, no one could.

//

The Fortune Teller

I don’t use crystal balls. They’re too expensive and too gaudy. And while I am running a fraudulent business practice of reading vibes and auras based off intuition and supplemented by eloquent descriptions thanks to my creative writing degree and minor in communications, I don’t want to come off as tacky. 

I tell people who they are based off how they answer the seven prying questions I ask them when they sit down at my table. I look at body language, what they wear, how they fidget, the way their voice fluctuates. I tell their fortunes based off observation and a whole lot of guessing.

Lots of people come in asking questions about love and careers, which are simple enough to answer. I have them tell me about their dilemmas and fears, and then I give them solid advice, which is enough of a reading of the future for most people. They walk out happy, or distressed, or inspired to change, and I make 80 bucks and get to wear long patchwork dresses and blue eye shadow to sell the character of ‘Fortune Teller’. Its a winning situation for everyone involved.

But this man was different. He believed he was cursed and wanted answers, which was a bit of a stretch for my imagination, as well as my creative storytelling abilities. He wanted to know why he was cursed, how to get out of it, what he had to do, and all I could say was that he was a Pisces with a serious case of paranoia served up with a side of Daddy issues. 

“Tell me how you were born again?” 

He shifted a little uneasily in his seat. I had noticed this when he first talked about when he was born, it made him uncomfortable. “Um, it was in a boat actually.”

“Oh, very interesting, so a surprise birth. Was that a positive experience for your family?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean exactly what I said. Was your birth, on a boat no less, a stressful event or an easy one?”

He took a bit to respond. I could tell he was wrestling with something in his mind and I knew I had hit the jackpot. The answer to this crazy curse was right here in this fishy story of his birth. It almost got me excited, like this was all a bit more legitimate than I had originally thought.

“It was… stressful.” He sighed the last word, like saying it out loud had taken a great burden off of him. “It was in the middle of tropical storm Chris. We had gone out on vacation and took off on a houseboat for a while, just ignorant to the warnings somehow, I don’t know. My Mom told me she tried to talk my Dad out of it but he insisted it wouldn’t be bad. We weren’t in the middle of the storm, but it was still awful anyways. My older sister talked about how awful it was. As soon as we made it back to land I had been born and we were robbed at gunpoint on the docks. They took everything. And that's where the bad luck started.”

Hmmm, what to make of that. “Any family members with history of bad luck, or just you?”

“Just me.”

“So the curse isn’t generational, its just on you.”

His shoulders slumped over and he said, “Yeah,” with a defeated tone.

“Well then I’d say the storm is the source.”

“What does that mean?”

“The storm! Its the cause of all your troubles! Remove the storm and the woes from your past, and you’ll be lucky.”

“How can I remove the storm?”

“Get creative. Look at all the clues. It was a storm named Chris. That is the physical manifestation of the storm, the name. Names give things power, that storm is alive out there somewhere because of the name Chris. You just need to find where, and end it.”

//

The Man

I puzzled over the way to end my curse for a week until it struck me one day in the elevator of my apartment. The night janitor was riding up with me, as he did almost every evening. He carried a mop and a yellow wheeled bucket, and he looked tired but not sad, like the woes of being a janitor were beyond him and he was working peacefully for a living. He had life and fervor, and he always smiled.

I wrote the word once on a sheet of paper, Chris, and looked at it for 5 days straight. On the sixth day, it finally struck me, Chris.

I turned to the janitor and slipped a pen out of the briefcase I carried to work. It was a nice pen, given to me as a gift for graduating high school from my godmother who never really knew me too well. My pens constantly broke and leaked in the most inconvenient places. They would explode over projects and essays the class period before they were due, and I would always forget them in the pockets of my best clothes and put them through the wash where they’d break and ruin everything that was new and nice and expensive. My aunt had gotten me this one with the joke written inside the card that it was leak proof and indestructible, “So it shouldn’t give you any trouble.”

It was also sturdy and dare I say pointy, and it nearly had the weight of a knife as I held it in my hand and looked at the janitor.

“Hey man, you okay?” He asked. He was leaning on his mop that was in his yellow cleaning bucket with wheels, and within a second I plunged the pen into his neck and was out the door as they opened onto the quiet apartment floor. I didn’t even turn back to see if he had died or was going to, I just assumed he’d have to. Chris would die there in that elevator.

Chris was obviously found and chaos erupted in the apartment the following day. I managed to stay relaxed, since I had followed the advice of the fortune teller and had nothing to worry about. My bad luck was gone.

I only remembered when I heard a short, sharp knocking on my door that the pen had been engraved, because I had always been unlucky about my pens being lost, or stolen.

//

The Fortune Teller

I typically sent out a follow-up email a week after my consultation. Its a final grab for money, a reassurance that if clients still had any questions they could return for sessions at a reduced rate and in the meantime fill out a review on our website about the experience. It worked fairly well, since usually if they didn’t make another appointment they’d at least fill out the review for me online.

I got an email response from the man who thought he had been cursed claiming that I had already changed his life, and he was sure he had cracked the mystery, ended the manifestation of the storm and was due for a long life of good luck ahead of him. He had sent it even before my follow-up email got to him. 

I chuckled at the thought that he had fixed his ‘curse’ and wondered for a second what he had done. I even almost typed out a response asking him, but hesitated. I enjoyed the mystery of it. What could he possibly have done to end that curse?