1
The Pendant
"You will be making a choice between two young men." The crazy fortune teller held my hands in hers. She eyeballed me to the point of discomfort. "Yes. I see one with hair like the golden sun." She closed her eyes, contemplative perhaps.
Why did I let Kelli-Anne talk me into this craziness? A fortune teller at the Gala Days sideshow. Yeah. This wasn’t gonna be good.
"And one with raven black hair." Her voice reminded me of a giddy girl on the Ed Sullivan show during the first Beatles performance in the states. "You will choose him."
She brought me back to where I sat in a colorful tapestry chair, in a humid hot tent, a gazing ball on the table between us.
"Huh?"
She opened her cerulean eyes and stared into mine. "Have you not listened to anything I have spoken to you?"
I nodded, but thought about the five dollars I'd wasted on a five minute guessing game.
"The man with raven hair. He is the one you will choose. Must choose." She squeezed my hands with her clammy, boney ones and smiled, her lips deep red over what teeth she had left.
My mind calculated her prediction and it didn't compute. Jasper had golden hair, er, blond hair. I pinched my thigh with my free hand. Do not talk like this gypsy woman, I scolded myself. There were no dark "raven" hair men in my life. I was a one man kinda girl.
"Thank you. I'll remember what you told me." Emelia didn't remember. And she would remember when it was too late.
"Here. Wait." The scrawny psychic stood and went to a sea chest covered with a burgundy and gold tapestry. It creaked like my grandma's knees when she walked the stairs. She delved inside and rattled the contents of the chest.
I inched my way backwards towards the tent entrance. The gypsy fortune teller didn't turn around. "You wait. I have something for you. You not listen. You may need this." She stood, one hand on her mid back. In her other hand dangled a gold chain with a pendant.
"It's fine. Really. I don't have any more money." I didn't need a cursed object around my neck.
"No charge. I see you have a good soul. But good souls are magnets for evil."
I swallowed hard at the lump that rose in my throat.
"Our lives cross paths with many others. Some good, we no see. Some bad, we blind to." She shoved the pendant into my hand and closed my fingers firmly around it. I opened them to see what I now held and prayed it didn't carry any bad juju with it.
"What is this?" I twirled the gold filigree pendant. "What are the words here?"
She smiled. "The cycle ends where it begins."
"Okayyy."
"It is Latin. That is what it says roughly." She shrugged her hunched shoulders.
"And? Why do I need this?"
"You have many choices in life. But so young. You will have a difficult choice. One between your heart and your head." She tapped her kerchief clad head.
"I don't need..." I tried to put it into her hand but she pulled away.
"It belongs to you now. It will only respond to your touch."
God help me! Where was Kelli-Anne?
"When you realize you have come to the dead end, of where the wrong choice was made, you can choose to go back to the beginning."
"Of what?" I rubbed my sweaty palms on the legs of my jeans.
"Only you will know the answer to that. And it will take you there."
"Like a time portal?"
"Something like that. Remember, once you use it, it cannot be undone. Only once back to the beginning of the wrong path, but always a way home."
I opened my mouth to argue, tried to drop the thing on her table, but she shoved me towards the tent entrance. "You go. I see more people now."
I stumbled out of the tent and into Kelli-Anne.
"Whoa. Walk much?" Kelli-Anne grabbed the rope anchored to the tent to regain her balance.
"No. That old fortune teller pushed me." I re-gained my footing and ran a hand through my hair.
"What fortune teller?" Kelli-Anne looked behind me.
"Duh. The one you coerced me to see." I hitched my thumb over my shoulder.
"She's over by the elephants." Kelli-Anne pointed across the midway to a hand painted sign that read 'Madame McMurdy - Fortunes told here.'"
"But, I just talked to her. In here." I opened the tent flap I'd been shoved through; Kelli-Anne peeked over my shoulder.
"You're crazy." Kelli-Anne walked off towards the Tilt-a-Whirl.
Was I? Because the only items inside the tent were packing crates, sacks of peanuts, and an empty table with two burgundy, tapestry chairs.
Yet the pendant in my hands was quite real.
2
Photograph
"She really said that?" Henry tossed a rock into the metal bucket.
"Yeah. Like, what a waste of five dollars." I tossed a stone at the bucket and missed. "Lame. How are you so good at this and I'm so bad?"
"I play on the basketball team." He tossed another rock from my front porch steps and sunk it.
"Yeah, but...okay, good point."
Henry's walk home from school took him past my house and if I was on the porch, writing in my notebook, he'd stop and we'd sit on the steps and throw stones at the metal garden bucket. I don't know how it started. Either he needed help with an essay or it was the day my dad left and I'd been crying on the porch swing. They happened about the same time. However it happened, I found our ritual relaxing.
"Anyways, this gypsy gave you a cursed object? Did you throw it away? Better, did you burn it?" Henry juggled the stones that remained in his hands.
I slid my hand into my pocket and retrieved the pendant. I held it out for Henry to see.
"It doesn't look so bad. Let me see it." He held out his hand.
I handed it to him and he flipped it over a few times. "This is cool." He fingered the filigree and engraved writing, and tried to spin it. It didn't move. "It's broken."
"It worked when she gave it to me. Let me see it again." I held it and moved the pendant inside of its delicate gold circle. "See." I handed it back to him and again he failed to make it move. "Well, the fortune teller said it would only work for me anyways." I laughed.
"What does it do?" He placed it gently in my palm. He pulled his hand away and grazed my fingertips.
"I don't know. The woman talked in riddles." I shoved it back into my pocket.
"Yet, you're keeping it?" He raised an eyebrow at me.
"Well, yeah. I want something for my five dollars. Besides, it holds a memory. And a reminder I should never go to a gypsy fortune teller again." I laughed.
"And she told you to choose the boy with dark hair and not Fabio."
I pushed him and he toppled off the top step. "Hey! What'd ya do that for?"
"For being a dork."
He righted himself, and brushed his hand through his shaggy, medium length brown hair. "I have dark hair."
"So do half the guys in school."
"Hmm." He tossed another pebble and missed the target.
"Ooh. First time for everything." I teased.