A Girl Predicts the Future
For $1, you’ll learn when your mother will next prepare your favorite dish—in your case, chilaquiles topped with fried egg and avocado slices, available either in six weeks and three days or next Saturday morning, provided that you are patient and ask nicely after allowing her to sleep until ten a.m. for once in your life.
For $10, you can ascertain what grade you will receive on the upcoming history project if you pursue your plan of compiling an oral history of the migrant farm workers in your family. As a sign of respect for this choice, I will tell you for free whether this grade will be impacted by the teacher’s personal beliefs about immigration and the border wall, beliefs you already find suspect not because of what Mr. Calvin has said but because of what he has pointedly avoided saying, all those vast swaths of history untouched because he did not want to acknowledge U.S. interference in Latin American politics, for instance, or the real reason Oklahoma has a panhandle.
For $20, I’ll tell you whether you will get the job you just interviewed for—that interview you told nobody about, not even your best friend, because you do not believe in celebrating one’s capitulations to capitalism. You would rather clock in every day after class, wear a shirt that does not fit, and give nothing of yourself to that place, not even your name, not even on your nametag, because no one at that store will be able to pronounce Xochitl anyway, not unless somebody you know walks in, which seems unlikely, because your people don’t shop there and your classmates, if they do, will not recognize you in this context, in what they consider their domain.
For $40, you can preview your first trip overseas, which will be on vacation, a real vacation in the foothills of the Andes, where you will breathe the thin, thin air and amble through cobblestone streets with a cone of helado de canela, its deep orange color like a papaya’s flesh as a knife slices it down the middle. This, you think, is luxury: walking beside people who look like you, hearing no English, allowing the cinnamon sorbet to melt through your fingers as you pause at a bookstore and browse their window displays. All those beautiful worlds between pages. You will never stop daydreaming of places where you can feel safe.
For $70, I’ll tell you a little about the first time you kiss a girl: what the weather is like on that afternoon, what shapes the clouds take and what songs the birds sing, and whether the purple dinosaurs frolicking on her dress are her own design or a custom commission from a queer fabric artist she follows on social media, but not what her name is, not how you meet or when—nothing that could alter the delicate chemistry of the flirtation as it blossoms into something more. You will experience this all yourself, and it will be glorious. Trust me.
For $100, I can allay all your concerns about applying to college, those nagging questions about whether your SAT scores are good enough and whether you’re reaching too high or should apply to more safety schools and whether the fee waivers you requested will be granted, the toxic messages that if you don’t go to college you will never amount to anything, that this one decision could mean the difference between meeting that girl and not, heading to the Andes and not, being happy and not, to which I will say: none of these things are necessarily interdependent. Spending $100 here will not kick off a chain reaction that results in you not being able to afford to apply to two colleges, which turn out to be the only ones you would have gotten in to, which thus changes the course of your entire life. If that were possible, I would not offer you this information. I can’t see what can’t come true, and I’m not in the business of changing the future.
My augury services are all sliding scale, priced not by the difficulty of the precognition or the seriousness of the request but by the value of the peace of mind provided to my customers. In exchange for your $100, you will receive a window into your future: a perfect moment of clarity, when all the blocks inside of your brain clear and you finally allow yourself to believe in a future you already know is possible. A future you glimpsed in your dreams but never permitted yourself to embrace, because you know how this world likes to squash people who look like you and love like you, you know just how hard it is to survive (let alone thrive) under such conditions, and you know, too, that the knowledge of your future happiness is worth so much more than $100—more than anyone or anything can ethically charge or afford—but I’m offering it anyway, because you, Xochitl, deserve some relief. Enjoy it.
© 2022 Ruth Joffre
About the Author
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, The Masters Review, Pleiades, The Florida Review Online, Flash Fiction Online, Wigleaf, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She lives in Seattle, where she serves as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House.