Roars the wind, cackles the lady.

Boils the steel pot, hisses the cat.

Swirls the crystal, ‘round n’ ‘round.

The fortune teller and her mysterious orb. Floating and declaring your far and near future. A token, a coin, a bit. Put it in her palm and watch her hands move over the glass ball in rhythm.

Sitting in a tent of red, east of this old town. She’ll tell you your wildest dreams. She’ll read your future and burn it down with those purple ambered eyes of hers. Asian, Mexican, Indian, Choctaw, no one knows what she is, switching forms from old to young, infant to adolescent.

She purrs like a cat, quiet as a mouse, quick as a cheetah. She’s everything but nothing, well known but a stranger. She’s Velma, Nareese, Anita, Georgia and Jane. But most of all- she’s the fortune teller in the woods off of CottonWood Avenue.

Mumbling and milling about, she pours a bottle of clear liquid over the ball. It steams and smokes around her curled hair, plumes swirling into pictures in the oxygen-filled air. She waves a pale tan hand over it, her nails, crimson red like blood from a wound. Her eyes pierce through you from across the globe she strokes.

“What have we here?”