His real name was Kim Seokjin, but everyone who knew him referred to him as Jin.  In Korean, Jin meant ‘precious’.  In Chinese, it meant ‘gold’.  One would think a child with a name like that was treasured by his parents to the point where they felt the need to voice that adoration whenever they spoke his name.

Wrong.

Not entirely, however.  Jin was valued by his parents, but not exactly for the expected reason.  His father was an avid gambler, his mother was jobless, and his brother was frequently put in prison because he was a kleptomaniac and couldn’t control himself very well.  To put it simply, he was a thief.

Jin was a twenty-three year old college dropout who still lived with his parents because he couldn’t find it within himself to abandon them and let them fall into financial ruin.  Jin was the family’s breadwinner.  He took care of them all, took online courses at home, and juggled several part-time jobs all at the same time.  It had been that way for years now, and Jin knew that that was the way things had to be because his family couldn’t be trusted to manage themselves.

Even so, one man could only handle so much, and Jin was near his breaking point.  If there had been another way out, Jin wouldn’t be sitting here, polluting his lungs with incense that smelled strongly of lavender.  Not the good kind of lavender.

The room he was sitting in was draped in Bohemian tapestries and tribal-patterned scarves.  Brightly colored glass bottles hung from the ceiling, and tinted fairy lights s their way across the walls.  Hundreds of unusual looking trinkets and gewgaws took up every available space on the shelves and tables.  Floor cushions and futon couches covered almost square foot.  Seated on a bright pink cushion with intricate silver embroidery, Jin picked at the loose threads as he watched the pinky-purple haired woman in front of him.  When he had first entered the shop, she had introduced herself as Kim Taeyeon, the local fortune teller.

Who would have expected shrewd, sharp-witted Kim Seokjin to turn to a so-called psychic for help?  Jin mentally answered his own question: no one.  It was common knowledge that fortune tellers almost always turned out to be frauds.  Fortune telling itself was a complete joke.  After all, who in their right mind would ever believe that leftover tea leaves could dictate the future?  Jin was more than aware of these facts, but he was desperate.  Desperate enough to see a strange lady with strangely-colored hair, at least five beaded shawls on her thin shoulders, and enough gold jewelry on her arms to feed an entire

household for several weeks.

Namely, a household like Jin’s.  But Jin didn’t dwell on the thought because he knew that stealing anything from anyone was wrong, and he would never stoop to that level.  Even the idea of seeing a fortune teller was less ridiculous.

Ms. Kim-- or Taeyeon, as she insisted he call her-- was carefully arranging a jar of white lily petals on the low table in front of her, head down and muttering under her breath.  All of a sudden, the muttering stopped and she moved her hands away.  She looked back up and gave Jin a smile that he found rather creepy.  Maybe it was the flickering oil lamps on the table and the way the dim light threw most of her face into shadow.

“It’s almost ready,” she said in a low voice.  “Don’t you worry, in just a little bit, I’ll have everything I need to give you the advice you need to get your life back on track.”  She reached underneath the table and took out a small velvet box, taking off the lid and revealing what looked like postcard-sized prints of abstract art.

“Pick a card.  Any card.”

Jin wanted to snort in laughter.  It was as if Taeyeon wasn’t the trained fortune teller she claimed to be, but rather a cheap carnival magician who performed cheesy tricks for small children.  But this wasn’t the time for laughing.  As much as Jin doubted Taeyeon and her antics, he didn’t have another choice but to do as she asked.

Just yesterday, his father had blown all the money Jin had made in the past month.  Hours of making cappuccinos, days of cleaning public toilets, weeks of dealing with impatient customers at the grocery store-- all gone to waste.  The fact that he still needed an additional $3000 to bail his brother out of jail did not help in the least.  He had no idea what his mother had doing because she had gone out of town again to visit her sick parents, but that didn’t matter to him.  Regardless of whether or not his mother was present and if anyone in his family approved of him seeing a fortune teller for his financial and personal problems, Jin was willing to do whatever it took to, as Taeyeon had just told him, ‘get his life back on track’.

He carefully selected a card that had overlapping neon pink and baby blue triangles and put it into Taeyeon's outstretched hand.  Her dramatic eyebrows furrowed together as she stared long and hard at it.  Jin shifted on his cushion.  The longer the silence got, the more nervous he became.  And then--

“Cantaloupe,” she said abruptly, dropping the card onto the table, amidst the white petals.  She clasped her hands together and looked at him expectantly.

“Sorry?”  He blinked.

“I need a cantaloupe from the supermarket.  Could you buy one for me?”

“Err-- why do you need a cantaloupe?”  He asked in bewilderment.

“It’s for the next step of the ritual.  You know where the supermarket is, right?  Go down this street and turn left at the smoothie shop.”

Jin knew where the supermarket was but didn’t know why on earth she would need a cantaloupe for her ritual.  He opened his mouth to question her further, but decided against it.

Twenty minutes later, he walked back in with a cantaloupe.  It wasn’t entirely ripe and was a bit smaller than average because the supermarket charged fresh produce by the pound.  And considering that Jin had already handed over $50 for an initial reading with Taeyeon, he was reluctant to spend more money on her.  Money was hard for him to come by.

As Jin passed the cantaloupe to Taeyeon, she wrinkled her nose at it but nodded carefully.  She set it on the ground and rummaged for something.  Re-emerging with an antique-looking matchbox, she inspected the contents before taking out a match and looking Jin directly in the eye.

“You’ll need to stay completely silent until I give you permission to speak again, is that understood?  If an untrained mortal speaks in the presence of a powerful spirit such as the one that has brought your family so much pain, it’ll only make things worse for you.”

Her words sounded ridiculous to his ears, but Jin didn’t have time to object to anything.  Before he had a chance to react to what she had said, Taeyeon threw the cantaloupe smack in the middle of the table, creating a loud bang.  Jin jumped in his seat.  Having seen just how hard Taeyeon had slammed the fruit against the bamboo table, Jin thought it was a wonder that the poor table hadn’t split right in half.

The fortune teller closed her eyes and bowed her head, chanting what sounded like complete gibberish.  The words were expelled from her purple-lipsticked mouth faster and faster and right when it looked like she was about to run out of breath, she opened her eyes.  There was a strange, almost crazed look in her them as she struck the match, set the card Jin had selected earlier on fire, and tossed it onto the table.

To Jin’s horror, the entire table caught fire upon impact.  He drew back sharply as the flames engulfed everything on it: the lily petals, the oil lamps, and the cantaloupe.

“Shh!”  Taeyeon brought a ringed finger to her lips and gestured frantically for Jin to be quiet.  Well, not that he had been about to say anything in the first place  He didn’t really have anything to say because this entire process was so strange that he didn’t know where to start asking questions.  As the fire-covered table continued to blaze and crackle, Jin began to inch his cushion backwards.

He could feel the heat in his face, uncomfortably hot.  He didn’t know what to make of it.  It couldn’t be real fire.  She wouldn’t just set a table on fire like that… would she?  Taeyeon had given him specific instructions not to talk.  He couldn’t have talked even if he wanted to.  The sight of the fire seemed to mesmerize him.

Seconds after the thought crossed his mind, Taeyeon, who had been focusing intently on the fire, stopped chanting.  She ripped off one of the shawls she was wearing and threw it on the table.  And to Jin’s surprise, the fire slowly died down and disappeared altogether.  When the shawl was whisked away and the table was visible again, Jin’s mouth fell open.

Nothing was charred.  Not even the skin of the cantaloupe.

Did fruit even char when it was set on fire?  He wasn’t really sure.  Had Taeyeon covered it in some sort of fireproof chemical when he hadn’t been looking?  No, that couldn’t be it.  He had been watching her closely the entire time.

“Look here, Mr. Kim, look!”  Taeyeon's excited voice interrupted his thoughts.  “What do you see?”

“… A cantaloupe?”

“Anything else?  Look carefully.”

Jin stared at the table but couldn’t see anything special.

“Everything else that was on the table when the ritual was taking place?”

“Exactly,” Taeyeon said matter-of-factly.  “The reason why nothing was burned is because the evil spirits surrounding you took things into their own hands.  They threw themselves into these objects in order to protect them from the fire’s anger.”

Spirits throwing themselves into flowers?  Angry fires?  Jin cocked an eyebrow.  It was utterly preposterous to think that fire could feel emotions.  But even though he doubted her, he went along with it because he had no other explanation for the phenomenon that occurred.

“Is that good or bad?  The evil spirits covering the objects?”

“Bad of course, my dear.  These objects represent you and your family.  Your favorite color is pink, correct?  And your brother’s favorite color is blue?”

“Well, yes,” he said, puzzled.  He realized that those were the colors of the card Taeyeon had been burning.

“You… played the triangle when you were younger?  In… let me think--”

“My middle school band,” Jin said, finishing the sentence for her.

“Yes, that’s right.  The school band.  And I believe that your father’s favorite card game is Big Two?  A relative of your mother is gravely ill?  Perhaps a disease that seems to run in the family, although it isn’t genetic?

“Yes, tuberculosis.”

“Of course.  I suspected it was some sort of mycobacterial infection.  And you know, of course, that white lilies are commonly associated with death.”

Jin stared.  He had dismissed Taeyeon's statement about the colors as lucky guesses.  But playing the triangle?  The information about his parents?  How could she have known that?  He had never even mentioned his parents to Taeyeon until now.  When he walked in, he had asked for a reading because he had issues with his life that he didn’t know how to deal with.  That had been it.

His eye twitched.  It was uncanny.

“Y-yes,” he confirmed at last.  “All of those things you said are true.”

“Ever since the moment you walked into my humble abode, Mr. Kim, there’s been a very negative presence floating around you the way fog clings to mountaintops.  Now, I’ve managed to trap your demons into these objects.”  She gestured towards them.  “But that’s not the end of it.  They will come back.”

Jin was still reluctant to believe her entirely.  Sure, Taeyeon knew things and it perplexed him exactly how she knew about them, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily a real psychic.  Maybe the two them had a mutual friend?  After all, it was common knowledge among their neighbors that the Kim family wasn’t doing very well of late.  Furthermore, he was very well aware that if he continued to ask Taeyeon for advice and begin relying on her, the cost for her services would increase.  Fortune tellers weren’t cheap.

On the other hand, however… if Taeyeon could really help him…

“What demons?  And how do you know that for sure?”  The truth was, Jin was already partially convinced.  But he wanted to make certain before taking any action.

“Do you see the card?”  Taeyeon pursed her lips together and passed it to him.

He nodded, studying it carefully.

“It represents three members of your family: you, your brother, and your father.  Your mother on the other hand,” she said, brandishing a lily petal rather enthusiastically, “is represented through this flower.  Notice how the card and the flower are not entirely connected to each other.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but has your mother been very distant of late?  Leaving the house for weeks at a time?  Distracted-looking?”

Another valid statement.  Jin nodded, drawn even further in.

“I sense an upcoming conflict between your parents.  Eventually, between you and your father.  Then last of all, between you and your brother.  These conflicts will tear all the relationships you’ve built up over the years to the ground.  I have seen all that I need to.  The proof of the great evil in your family is overwhelming.”

“Proof?”  As much as Jin didn’t enjoy living with his family very much because they were the reason behind all his stress, they were still his family.  The ‘great evil’ Taeyeon was talking about didn’t sound very pleasant at all.

Taeyeon didn’t say anything.  Instead, she took out an ornate, silver knife from her pocket and slid it from its sheath with a small shhinggg.  She began to chant again in her low voice, and Jin tensed up as she raised it over her head.  Bringing it down very slowly, Taeyeon dug the blade into the cantaloupe, which Jin had nearly forgotten about because she had been focusing on the other items.

Turning the cantaloupe over, Taeyeon continued to slice through it.  Her face was tensed up and her arms were quivering with the effort it took to cut it in half in one go.  It was another ten seconds before the fruit finally split in half, displaying the sweet, orange flesh inside.

Only the fruit wasn’t orange.  It was almost entirely black, and looked the exact opposite of sweet.  And that was all the evidence Jin needed to decide that he had completely misjudged Kim Taeyeon and her abilities.

Hi my readers/subscribers ^^

I really have nothing to say besides what I already said in the foreword... but I hope you enjoyed reading, and whether or not I continue to write (and start thinking of a legitimate plot to go with this O.o) depends on the feedback I get...

Thank you for reading, comment, subscribe, and upvote if you haven't already, and have a lovely day everyone ^^

*Edit (5/16/16): Previously Dara, now Taeyeon.