Fortune

“Oh please”, she said, crumpling the fortune and tossing it into her water glass. It fell in as if it were coming hone. Weirdly specific fortune there…and almost like a speech from a tea bag or a yoga teacher.

The year was 2018 and such obviously encouraging, pro “we’re all in this together” propaganda plus the dramatic reference to a plague didn’t make any sense to her; it was still two years early.

Lucy broke the cookie into a million or so pieces by sandwiching it in her cloth napkin and pressing down with the heel of her hand. She started eating the individual pieces, enjoying their crunching. The buttery cookie was satisfying until she looked up and saw a girl in the front of the restaurant staring at her through the fishtank. Lucy tried to pretend that she didn’t see her, but she was so startled by the attention that she forgot to look as nonchalant as the times called for.

The girl stepped out from behind the fishtank, apparently standing in line to pick up food but still paying extra attention to Lucy’s table. The girl had long blue hair, larger than average eyes and was wearing a t-shirt with young Cornelius from Planet of the Apes on it

“Ah, kind, sweet Cornelius. He was earnest and brave and was the true friend of Charlton Heston. ” She remembered seeing the movie as a child and experiencing an existential crisis at the ending when she saw Charlton Heston and the wild girl ride up on horseback and nearly naked, crashing through the waves giddy with their freedom, and there is the Statue of Liberty, half sunk in the sand. The world is not what we thought it was.

“That’s what time traveling feels like”, she thought, “you see something that you experience as permanent, as a fixture completely changed and in such a radically different context and that seeing it caves in your mind.”

She looked at the fortune floating crumpled in her water glass and speared another green bean.