PALM PLOT
bryan jones
When I was younger, strange things used to happen to me. Once, while crossing at night through a confusing grid of dark alleys cut between the tall buildings of a strange city, a wild woman with a knife darted out from behind a dumpster and pushed me up against a dirty brick wall. She held the blade to my throat and said she wanted to read my palms. Her face was partially covered by a veil of black hair, but her lower lip quivered as she spoke. She had read too many palms, she said. She knew too much about the future, she said. A distant light mounted high on a wall made the knife gleam in her shaking hand. She ordered me to hold up my palms and I raised them to her. She looked closely at one, then the other.
It’s impossible, she said as she withdrew the knife.
I asked her what she meant.
You have no future, she said. She backed away from me in that alley until she reached the corner. Then she turned and was gone.
I never saw her again.
Nothing has happened to me since.
Bryan Jones
Encounters
Juan Garcia Ponce