The fortune-teller was a toothless woman with eyes like a crow’s—bright, black, and hungry. She sat beneath the stone façade of the old church, where the Virgin Mary’s face had been worn smooth by four hundred years of rain. When I showed her the hairpin, she laughed. It was a dry, rasping sound, like wind through bones.
My name.
“Wait for what?”
I stood there, holding the card and the hairpin, in the middle of that gilded, decaying palace of chance. The roulette wheel spun. The cards shuffled. The rain began again, soft and warm as a forgotten promise. jade venus
She was gone.
