Frankenplot: Carny

Carny

They call her carny. She disagrees.

But deep down she knows it to be true. Deception runs in the family.

An emerald-coloured heavy tent flap billowing, a swirling storm threatening to halt further custom. Leaves, tan and curled, blow in through an intermittent gap. 

She peers into crystal, prescient in her solitude. Clouds form, pictures to be painted.

From the tempest, a figure peels back canvas, stooping then striding in from the outside world.

Halloween is a busy period. Usually.

Your fingers have rings, carved and golden. You note eyes focused on them.

“Your price for a reading?” He asks, maroon headdress crested atop a carnivalesque appearance.

This is no ordinary client, his satin shirt ablaze with colour, his saggy trousers made of silk. A long thin beard tapers at the bottom lending an oriental theme to the prismatic interloper.

“Will you pay me with silver? My palm can tell your future just as well as this ball of glass. ”

Coins are caressed into your waiting hand, curled into a ball by the stranger’s warm fingers.

With eyes closed, you trace crenulations, moving from heart to head, from life to fate.  Something stirs, something familiar.

You tell him his life will be long, will be happy. This is the story told by the creases in his youthful skin. This is the story you tell to anyone that pays.

After a while, he nods acknowledging his own theatrical manner of earning a living, then asks “Would you know me by your own patterns?”

You glance down at the lines in your calloused mitt, your entire body frozen for moments that stretch out to a great yonder. To an alternative existence. One never experienced. Never lived.

By the time you look up again, he has gone.

Left on the table, a sepia-stained photo, dog-eared in one corner. You stare at the people inside the picture. Parents with a baby cradled between them, mother and father smiling. That was the last time you saw your child. Taken in the dead of night by a duplicitous partner. Since told only lies about how you abandoned him at a young age.

Now you know where the sensation of familiarity came from when talking to the outsider. A familial connection broken long ago.

And yet, deep down, you knew.

An incident that was unforeseen because you are merely carny.