“There are just too many -- too many -- for me to be concerned with each individual pair and each specific person and how the two interact throughout their lives. I honestly don’t know what happens between soul mates. When I was younger, a kid, just learning, I followed a pair or two a little more closely, but,” she flutters her hands dismissively, “I don’t do that anymore.”

“I concentrate on the facts now,” she says. “I’ve got you right here, Mr. Kim Jong Kook.”

She gestures to the string still directly in front of her.

The men say nothing. She could light the spaaace on fire right now and they’d probably just watch it burn.

“Shall I remind you what I do with these?” Ji Min lifts a single finger, extending it toward the string representing Jong Kook’s life.

“No! NO! No!” All four men answer at once, Kwang Soo flailing his arms in the air emphatically.

“Just get on with it, please.” Jong Kook’s jaw is tense, set, and his eyes focus unwaveringly on the plain woman a short distance away.

Ji Min laughs lightly. “All right. All right. Moving on. As I said, while anyone can look at the Soul Map --”

She pauses.

“IT’S A STUPID NAME!,” Kwang Soo cheers enthusiastically.

“Right?!?” Ji Min throws her hands in the air. “I know! Think of all the missed opportunities here.”

“Like the Freak Show?,” Gary mutters under his breath.

Ji Min points directly at Gary, saying nothing, just staring with her oddly cold, evaluating eyes, then laughs suddenly. “Maybe!”

“YAH!” Jong Kook’s fists flex by his side. Haha jumps, then eases away ever so slowly. Jong Kook clamps a hand on the back of his neck and draws him close again, just to remind him.

“OKAY,” scowls Ji Min.

“It is a stupid name, though,” Kwang Soo consoles her.

“Right?,” she whispers, before turning her attention back to the matter at hand. “So, Mr. Kim Jong Kook, here you are, and somewhere out here --” she gestures to the rest of the hazy space “ -- is your perfect match. Your soul mate. The one person created and born specifically for you. And you for that person. As I said, there’s no reason why this way, or maybe there is, I wasn’t --”

“Reminding us about how you’re the D student of fortune tellers isn’t exactly inspiring confidence,” Haha injects.

Jong Kook’s fingers flex on the back of his neck.

Ji Min narrows her eyes, takes a deep breath, and forges on.

“I will tell you now that you’re going to have questions, and I probably won’t have answers. I haven’t looked into you before now, I haven’t done research on your pairing. I didn’t find your thread until you were standing here before me tonight, it’s not possible to do any other way. As you can deduce, it follows that while your match is somewhere in here --“

She gestures again to the millions -- billions -- of strings filling the haze, their true number dizzying to comprehend.

“ -- it’s obviously impossible for me to make that match without having looked over your string first.”

The subject of all the action tonight swallows thickly, his inner thoughts warring with skepticism, hope, and alcohol. What Ji Min’s saying doesn’t seem possible, but after her demonstration earlier, it’s hard to draw the line where possible and impossible divide. Especially with his mind fuzzed by who knows how many drinks. He curses himself silently for the crack in his normally iron will. Birthdays. So maudlin.

He lifts his head to refocus on Ji Ji Min.

“I’m telling you this because I want to make this clear, and I want you -- all of you -- to understand. I don’t know where Mr. Kim’s life has been or where it’s going. I didn’t look. I won’t look. I will not tell you your future. I will look at the twists and turns and curves and bends that this string takes, and, like all women in my family, will be able to instantly find the single other string that pairs with it.”

Here, she makes eye contact with each man individually, holding it for an extra long moment with the oldest. He stares back silently.

“The string I pull out -- the same holds true. I don’t know anything about the person. I don’t know anything about the person.”

“But --” Gary bursts out, then thinks better of it, silencing himself.

“But what?,” Ji Min asks. “Please, go on. While I know this big one over here is about to jump out of his shorts and wring my neck, over time I’ve found that it’s best to get everything laid out and expectations as clear as possible before moving forward.”

“Ah…,” Gary hesitates. “You say you don’t know anything about the people in these strings, but… obviously, that’s not true. I mean, you can just touch them and see their lives. Even if what you can do ends there --” Gary eyes Ji Min and she eyes him right back “-- can’t you just investigate that way? Check things out? Find out who is who and match people up?”

Ji Min laughs, throwing her head back and sounding like a lunatic.

“You suspect I’ve got a lot more woo woo than I’m letting on, Mr. Kang Gary.”

“Ha! You must!” Gary pounces. “I never told you my name!”

Ji Min looks at him like he’s an idiot.

“You’re a celebrity.”

“Oh.”

“Idiot.” She snorts.

“You’re right, though, even if you are an idiot. I could do that. In fact, I said earlier that in the past, I’d even followed the lives of some pairings as they unrolled. I’m not interested in doing that anymore. At all.”

She’s firm.

“But I do have quite a bit more woo woo. Let’s not worry about that today, though. Does everyone understand what I’ve said here?”

“Frankly, no,” Jong Kook says challengingly, his limited supply of patience long since run out. “But do you really expect anyone to understand? This is nuts. Woo woo!”

He throws his arms in the air in a sarcastic Ji Min imitation.

The fortune teller doesn’t respond. She eyes Jong Kook. She eyes the string floating in front of her.

She pauses, still, as if completely frozen.

Then she moves, suddenly and all at once, driving her hand into the haze and yanking it back just as quickly.

A second thread is beside Jong Kook’s in front of her.

The impatient shuffling of the men stops. She has their full attention once again.

Jong Kook’s hand drops from Haha’s neck and the shorter man doesn’t even notice, so intent is he on the scene in front of them.

“This is it,” Ji Min declares. “This is the one.”

“How… how do you know?” Kwang Soo queries, moving up behind his solid friend and draping his arms over the older man’s shoulders. He has a sort of sixth sense for when he’s needed by his friend and it’s proven right once again as Jong Kook leans back against him almost imperceptibly.

“Born this way,” Ji Min shrugs.

The men look at each other. They shrug and turn back to Ji Min.

“Like I showed you before, not ever pair matches up the exact same way -- obviously. Does everyone get where they’re going the same way? Of course not. Some of them go straight --”

She bats her lashes at Gary.

He flushes.

“-- and others bounce around a bit before they land where they’re meant to land.”

She nods to Haha. Jong Kook and Kwang Soo turn and tilt their heads questioningly at him, both at the exact same angle, like a couple of pugs.

He shakes his head and quickly looks away.

“But a match is a match and this is the match.”

She pulls the two softly glowing strings close together in front of her body. Jong Kook looks at his, on his right. It comes up from below where he assumes the floor still is from behind them, at an angle, almost as if it’s being stretched from his proper location. The bottom of the string on the left also approaches from a slight angle, but quickly fades into the mist behind Ji Min.

Jong Kook’s thread is jaggedy to look at. The back and forth movements are at harsh angles, sometimes coming one on top of the other as if the string itself is folded. As it drifts upward, the changes in direction become more spaced out, longer stretches of straight paths unbroken by turns. Eventually, it even looks like the sharp angles start to gentle into softer curves, but even craning his neck back onto his shoulders, he can’t see where it goes or what it does, not that he could interpret any of it anyway.

The other is much different. The string is almost entirely straight at first glance, only closer inspection yielding a view of soft swells and gradual undulations over the visible length. There’s no more information to glean from this one than the one now hovering beside it other than the fact that they don’t seem to be especially similar in any way at all.

“They don’t match.” Jong Kook lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, relief washing through him, followed quickly by an emotion he brushes away quickly without allowing himself to examine it closely, the bitter clench in his stomach too familiar. “They don’t look alike at all.”

“Why would they look alike?,”