The Tea-Leaf Reader by Cheryl Snell

We’re almost past a roadside carnival when Mother wants to stop. She was always attracted to carnies – especially ones with fortune tellers. She even dressed me like a seer for a few Halloweens growing up. “Did I ever tell you our Ouija spelled out the name of the man I would marry?” she would say, putting her gold hoops on me. “It was always the same name but I can’t remember what. It wasn’t your father’s.”  Was she still looking for her destiny, at ninety?

We get out of the car and wander around the fairgrounds until a fortune teller beckons us into her tent. We slide coins into the box and she sets down cups of tea for us. Massaging her crystal ball, she makes wild guesses about our lives as we drink down to the leaves. Her own mother had been an astrologer, always poring over the maps of the stars, proclaiming that astrology was a science, and perpetually disappointed in her daughter’s embrace of low-class versions of soothsaying.

I give her a chance to prove she’s as good as her mother. “What diseases are we dying of?” I ask.  The question, put that way, startles her. She ignores it in favor of squinting at the wet leaves in Mother’s cup. She glances over at the crystal ball before she says, “You’ll never get away from sickness.” 

Mother says, “I knew it!”

And then the woman looks into my cup. She flicks her papery fingers at it as if she’s arguing with it, and then closes her eyes. When she raises them to me, they are full of all the sorrows of the world. She doesn’t say a word, but hands me back the coins I paid her, the price of admission.

In the car, Mother says, “I don’t know what happened to my cup of tea. They just came and took it before I had even finished.”

Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has appeared in Anti Heroin Chic, 100 Word Story, Blue Unicorn and other journals. This year her work has been nominated for inclusion in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and BOTN anthologies. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.

Painting by Janet Snell – janetsnell.weebly.com