The Reading

I had a friend who turned his life completely around in only a couple months. He went from being a scruffy loser with a dead-end job, absolutely no ambition in life, and no social life further than his bong, the pizza guy, and myself, and he became a well-groomed yuppie with a half-decent job and a drop dead gorgeous girlfriend. Now before you roll your eyes and get it into your head I'm pushing an anti-drug spiel: I'm not. Dude went from smoking ditchweed to smoking species of pot that were triumphs of horticulture and hydroponics. As far as I could tell, it all just dropped into his goddamned lap like he was Forrest Gump.

Once, half jokingly, I asked him what his secret was. He leaned in real close and told me he was going to a fortuneteller. He hadn't told anyone else, and he was dying to rattle off miracle after miracle after unimpressive miracle, attributing each to the fortuneteller. I bit my tongue. No one likes a know-it-all jackass, especially in matters of faith. I figured I'd just watch, and stomp his shit if it ever got out of hand.

Over the months he became more and more zealous about the soothsayer, and since I was the only one who knew his secret I got the privilege of hearing it all. Several times over. The more I learned the more I admired the schtick. She wasn't psychic, couldn't read minds, she couldn't talk to the dead. That was really odd, since it takes a pretty good cold reader to pull off a fortune telling more accurate than a newspaper horoscope and if you're going to forecast the future you might as well do the whole package, preferably with a graduated price scale. Truth be told, I was hooked. When he finally asked me if I wanted to watch one of his sessions I was slobbering at the mouth. I wanted to see the act, and I was kind of concerned about how much he was spending on this whole thing.

I had expected to be taken into the den of some nondescript house and have someone with a pentagram and gargoyle fetish do the vague and guess. We pulled into a strip mall. From the outside the place was rundown and the signage of all the shops was in Vietnamese, Chinese, or something along those lines. As we entered one of the shops the smell of the suddenly tropical air told me we were entering a fish store. There were tanks lining all the walls, all filled with bizarre fish of every description, and it seemed like the only light came from the fluorescent tanklights. There were piles of aquarium knickknacks in the center aisle along with a shallow pool on a table choked with aquatic plants.

My friend walked over to the counter and started whispering to the hunched Asian crone behind it. I figured that was the reading, but at that point I was more interested in the fish. A short time later money was exchanged and he walked over and started watching the fish with me. After a while, when I figured we were about to leave, he looked over his shoulder and announced, "That one." The crone hobbled over, plunged her whole arm into the tank, and dragged what looked like a pet-sized grouper with a reddish hue and an overbite to the surface.

The crone handed the fish over to my friend. He had a death grip on the fish, and he was profusely bleeding because the damned thing had spines all the fuck over it. After he got a good grip on it, she plunged a three inch long thumbnail into its belly and with a flick of the wrist she slit it from tail to gills. I'd been struck utterly, utterly speechless. He handed the no longer struggling fish back over to her. The crone then grabbed hold of the fish's lower jaw and gills and with one swift movement ripped out all its organs. At that point there was person and fishy blood everywhere. She turned slightly and dropped the gutted fish into a tank filled with piranha-looking fish. It was enveloped in a frenzy almost immediately. I got the sense there was some sort of unspoken ritual going on, but I didn't care because HOLY FUCK.

The crone walked over to the counter, balled up the fish guts, spit on them, and threw them against the wall behind the counter. They hit with a wet splat and began sliding down the wall. My friend was standing beside the crone quietly and she had begun to study the pattern the guts left. I was the only one acting like something out of the ordinary had happened. That is, until what happened next.

The crone turned deathly pale and freaked the fuck out. She started screaming at my friend to get the hell away from her. He started screaming at her to tell him what's going to happen. I was still in shock over the whole fish evisceration thing. And suddenly there's a muscular Asian guy with a baseball bat in the middle of the room. Things got quiet real quickly after that. There was some rapid fire Asian between the crone and the guy with the baseball bat. He walked calmly behind the counter, retrieved my friend's money, and as he handed it back to him he said, "I'm sorry sir, my grandmother can't tell you your future. Please stay away from here."

My friend only responded with a frantic "Why?! What is it! What's going to happen?!"

The Asian guy shot a look over to the crone and said, "She says you have no future. Please, you have to leave. Go now."

We left then. The ride back was dead silent. We were both in shock over the experience, although it was due to significantly different aspects. When I hopped out of his car I ducked down to say something, but I didn't know what to say. I was pale, shaken, and somehow he looked even worse. We made eye contact and left without saying a word.

That was the last time I saw him. Three days later I received a frantic message in my inbox from his girlfriend. After the fortune reading he'd eaten two barrels worth of buckshot and she'd just then walked into the resulting mess. I never mentioned the fish shop to anyone.

I don't really sleep anymore.