The afternoon had been dull, the customer traffic had been slow and for the few who had entered, Yira could see nothing but a mundane existence in their fate. She passed the time on simple games, amusing herself with what her phone could offer, but when the final grain of sand passed through the hourglass, she tucked the item away, aware of something to come.

  The shop keeper’s bell tinkled musically outside as the door opened, and heavy footsteps sounded on the wooden floorboards, growing a little louder with each step. He passed the woman greeting him at the counter; pass the many shelves lined with trinkets, and the stairs leading to the upstairs, before stopping behind her door.

  She pushed back on her chair, balancing the seat on its hind legs as she waited for him to enter, counting down the seconds in her head.

  “Three…two…one…”

  Like clockwork, the door swung open, revealing a rather disgruntled looking Taehyung in the doorframe, wearing a tight frown. His eyes turned to her and neither of them said a word, and Yira let the time drag on, testing to see if he’d speak first.

  After it was evident that he’d remain silent, she opened , and the voice that came out was smug, with a sing song like quality while her face remained the same. “What can I do for you, Kim Taehyung? I never thought I’d see you as a repeat customer.” Although her tone was mocking, there was honesty laced within.

  Bearing a look of all seriousness, he replied. “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, acting clueless.

  “I mean, what did you do?” he repeated.

  Yira tilted her head. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  “Explain to me why weird things have been happening.”

  “My, what happened? Did a spotted dog take your lunch?”

  His stern expression did not change, but his silence rang clear and loud. Yira’s uncaring face twitched, revealing for a brief second a genuine look of shock and disbelief. She had intended for that prediction to be a joke, an obvious falsity that would discourage his return.

  "A lot of weird stuff has been happening,” he explained, glaring at her as if she were the culprit. “Some of them I can just brush off as lucky guesses or vague statements that happened to cover what happened today, but this afternoon this pitbull actually snatched by sandwich out of my mouth. I don’t even know how, I was standing up and the thing was barely the height of my knee. It ran under a bus stop bench, dropped the sandwich, barked three times, then shot off across the street, and poof! It was gone.”

  Yira hid the urge to frown, instead looking up at him with unconcerned eyes. “So?”

  “So I want answers,” he demanded with the authority of a policeman.

  “Thirty dollars with additional charges for added information.”

  “I’m not looking for a psychic fortune.”

  “I know.”

  He opened his mouth but was left stuttering for an answer. He couldn’t believe her gall. He had half the mind to just leave right there, but the side of his personality craving answers wouldn’t let him, and he dug into his pocket. “Fine.”

  He dropped thirty dollars onto the table. Unaffected by his glares, Yira picked up the cash and stored it behind the table, before resting her elbows back onto the table, and staring at the door in silence.

  “Well?” he questioned.

  She held up a finger to him, before bringing it to her lips. “Not right now, and move to the side.”

  Before he had time to think, the door swung open and jammed into is arm, making his curse profanities as the wood hit his bone. The face of a pretty girl with impish features and flicked black hair poked through the beads, bringing her hands to as she realised what she’d done.

  “Oh my God, I am so sorry, I didn’t know someone was behind here! I should have knocked- are you okay!?” she spat out at rapid speed.

  At the sight of the girl's face, he swallowed his swears and levelled his voice to a polite tone, flashing her a forgiving smile. “It’s fine, it was an accident.”

  “Come in, sit down,” Yira welcomed, gesturing to the seat.

  “O-oh, but what about him?” she asked, bringing a hand to .

  “No need to concern yourself with him, think of him as part of the room, or a coat rack,” she said, making Taehyung glare at her in disbelief. “He’s apprenticing.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, ducking passed him and sitting down on the chair.

Taehyung tapped an irritable finger on his arm, wondering what Yira had planned, but her professional face revealed nothing. True to her word, she was treating him as part of the room.

  “I charge thirty dollars for a basic reading and additional charges for more information,” she informed the customer.

  “Oh, no problem,” she said, pulling out a few bills from her wallet. Yira took the money and placed it behind the table. “Now, what do you wish to know?” she asked.

  The girl squirmed in her sear, pushing her knees together and tucking a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. “Oh um…I’m Oh Ju Yeon and I’m actually new to this. My friend suggested this place and I just wanted to try it out.”

  “That’s no problem, how about I just do a basic reading of your palm?” she suggested.

The girl nodded and she reached out her hand to be clasped gently between Yira’s, almost as if she were holding a butterfly. She angled her hand so that her palm faced up and she traced her fingers over every line. Taehyung watched intently from the shadows, suspicious that she was going to do the same routine she did with his girlfriend.

  “What does it say?” Ju Yeon asked nervously; sweat forming from the heat of the stuffy room.

  “Your current life is content,” Yira began, still looking closely at her hand. “You have no struggles, financially, socially, health wise, or any wise. You are doing well for yourself, and you have no significant hardships upcoming in your near future.”

  “Oh, well that’s good.”

  “But,” she said, marking a change in her tone. The candles in the room seem to flicker, making the shadows cast by every object writhe. “You are dogged by a heavy weight that has followed you for a long time. An old wound that has clotted but never healed. Old memories, no longer relevant.” Ju Yeon’s face grew rigid and her eyes wide, but she said nothing, instead, glancing back to Taehyung, suddenly conscious and concerned about his presence.

  “Family related I believe,” Yira continued. “Things that happened in your childhood. Nobody else around you notices because they don’t know, and the people who were there pretend it never happened. For the most part you don’t think about it, it isn’t a constant in your life, but when it resurfaces, you still feel it. Although it doesn’t show, you are concerned that it expresses itself in strange ways, unusual behaviours, perhaps repetitive.”

She looked to her lap, her hands balling on her skirt. “You carry resentment, and you’ll carry it for a few years more. The weight won’t disappear, but it will grow lighter bit by bit,” she concluded. “Your feelings are valid and justified, but it will be with you for a little while longer.”

She let go of the hand and she pulled it back to her lap, her head down and her voice low.

  “…Thank you.”

  “Is there anything you wish to know?” Yira asked, although she already knew the answer.

  Ju Yeon shook her head. “No.” She pulled out of her chair and gathered her things before walking to the door. As she put her hand on the brass door knob, she turned briefly to Taehyung, offering him an acknowledging, but shy nod, before opening the door and stepping outside. “I might come again,” she said.

  “You’re always welcome.”

  The door shut, leaving Taehyung staring at Yira in a look undecidedly between astonishment and admiration. “How did you do that?” 

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Okay, even if you were making things up as you go along, you could not have struck such a strong nerve. Why did you say those things? Did you see her face?”

  “That’s my job.”

  “But how? Or are you going to tell me you have legitimate psychic powers?”

  Yira breathed out a sigh and sat back, as if she had all the time in the world. “For most cases, you don’t need to have any sort of other worldly power to understand someone. All it takes is a little reading.”

He looked sceptical, but Yira paid him no mind. She held up her hand to him, almost as if she were extending help. “The hands are usually the easiest indicator.”

  “So what, you got all that from her hands?”

  She pointed to the crease cutting across her entire palm. “There were two callouses on her hand right here, specific points of darkened and hardened skin.” She twisted her hand into a fist. “Exactly where the middle and ring finger meet with the palm when you make a fist. The fact that there are callouses there, suggest that she pushes her nails into her flesh when she makes a fist.”

  “So what does that have to do with-?”

  “There are similar markings on the back of her joints, raised red skin. You saw how she had her hand to most of the time, correct? This means they are caused by biting. Not only that,” she pointed to the part of the hand between the first joint of the thumb and the wrist. “She has hardened, darkened skin here, but it’s elongated, so I believe they are scratch marks.”

She leaned forward onto the table, looking up at him with unmoving, but challenging eyes. “Now tell me, since you wish to be a future detective, what are the reasons for a person doing that to themselves?”

  Taehyung struggled to find an answer, a sweat forming on his knitted brow. “Uh…habit?”

  “Yes, but what causes such a habit?” she asked. “You saw how she fiddled with her hand and brought it to when she got nervous during the palm reading, this means it’s anxiety related, it gets worse when she’s stressed. And scratching herself if obviously painful, so there’s a small element of self-harm in it. Far from severe but it’s a method of avoiding emotional pain and or to punish herself."

  "Now, you can see from her appearance that she is well groomed, healthy, and taken care of, so her current self appears to be doing fine, this means that her behaviour stems from something in the past. Her compulsive behaviour is relatively minor so the event that happened probably wasn’t massive, which leads me to believe that it’s something along the lines of family conflict. Perhaps a divorce.”

She sat back and crossed her legs. “So, does that answer satisfy you?”

  His face was a painting of speechlessness, his thoughts swaying from differing emotions. “I-I find it hard to believe you got all that from just her hand,” he said.

  Yira shrugged. “Well, it is some parts intuition and some parts experience.”

  Taehyung tried to find a flaw in her logic, but had little to say, words failed to rise to his lips.

A moment of silence passed by and Yira turned to him with an uncharacteristic smile, although different from her professional one, Taehyung still suspected it to be fake and lacking in any genuine feelings of happiness.

  “How’s your girlfriend?”

  A scowl flashed in his face, remembering the observation from yesterday.

“If you’re wondering how I figured that out, it was just simple body language. When you kissed her, there was a wide gap between your bodies; you actually leaned forward to avoid getting close to her.”

  “I’m not here to listen to you talk about my relationships,” he replied quickly, supressing the anger in his voice. “I want an explanation for what happened today.”

  A smug smirk lit up on her tan face and she rubbed her fingers together to make a money making symbol. “That’d be twenty additional dollars.”

  “What?!” He yelled. “I just paid you thirty dollars!”

  “And I just gave you information about how I work,” she replied. “Additional information will cost you extra charges.”

  “Are you kidding me?!”

  The unchanging smile on her face beneath blank eyes told him she wasn’t. 

  “You can’t do this! You purposely did that girl before me didn’t you?”

  “Twenty dollars,” she reminded him.

  He balled his fists and his face hardened, but he threw his arms up in the air. “God damn it, fine!”

  He dug into his pocket, but his face fell as seemed to find nothing, emerging with only a five dollar bill and some loose change covered by fluffy grey balls of lint.

  “It appears you have insufficient funds,” she told him.

  He growled in frustration like a dog, internally cursing at her and his luck.

  Beneath the slowly spiralling hanging ornaments casting elaborate lace like shadows on the table, Yira leaned back onto her chair and blew out a breath of air.

  “What will you do now, Kim Taehyung?”