The Fortune Teller Is Guessing

How it begins

Mina Keene predicted a handsome stranger because the market was full of them if you were generous about handsome. She predicted a small windfall because most purses lost a coin eventually. For rain, she consulted the sky. For love, she consulted the customer. It had been an honest enough living until Tuesday, when she accidentally told the truth.

'I'm guessing,' she said.

The woman across the table blinked. 'About the inheritance?'

'About all of it.'

Paul Saye stopped playing his fiddle three stalls away. Mina heard the silence as clearly as a snapped string. The woman gathered her gloves. Before she could stand, a solicitor hurried into the market carrying a small wooden chest.

'Mrs. Pell?'

Inside the chest lay four gold coins, a ring and an apology from a cousin everyone had assumed penniless. Mina looked at her crystal ball. It had begun to glow.

By noon she had correctly predicted an escaped pig, an engagement and a spectacularly unwise haircut. Every prediction followed the words I'm guessing. Every certainty failed. When she told a suspicious merchant the sun would set, the western sky became stuck in a blazing, uncomfortable afternoon.

Paul packed his fiddle and came over.

'What did you do?'

'Apparently, I developed professional ethics.'

He looked at the line forming beside her stall. The butcher wanted a profitable winter. The schoolteacher wanted peace. A man with a broken engagement wanted someone else's marriage to fail. Wishes crowded the air, each wearing its owner's most reasonable face.

Mina covered the crystal ball. It shone through the cloth.

'You should close,' Paul said.

'I think I already told someone business would improve.'

Above the market, the sun moved backward by the width of a coin. The line grew longer. Mina reached for the little sign she had never needed before and turned it toward the customers.

QUESTIONS ONLY.