Things the Fortune Teller Didn’t Tell You When She Read Your Fortune

Iona Rule

that your secondary school boyfriend will snog your best friend at a Coldplay gig while you are in the toilet queue consoling a drunk stranger who has vomited in her handbag, that everyone else will know before you, that he’ll tell you in a text the night before the Biology exam, where you’ll sit at an uneven desk between the two of them and wonder if this is where you always were, that you will be become old friends with the stain on your bedroom ceiling in halls shaped like Australia, that you will stare at it as a drunk boy tries to heal your heart, or interprets your silences as consent, or when you wake beside a stranger and the night before is a dark hole of Jaeger bombs and you have never felt so alone, that when you meet him in the club having lost your friends his crinkled smile will make you stop searching, that his kindness will disarm you, that you will love him, in a way you will never love anyone else, that you will break his heart in a type of self destruction when your father dies in a car accident and you want the whole world to hurt too, that you will realise your mistake on graduation day, that you will tell him when he has already found someone else who looks so much like you that even you will need to look twice, that you will carry that what-if for as long as you live, that you will move from job to job until you start to move up rather than sideways, that you will swipe right on a whim and find your husband between the fuck boys, creeps and ghosts, that on your wedding night you will head to the shore and paddle in the waves sharing a bottle of champagne, look at the dead stars and feel small, that you will learn that a child is not as easy a thing to make as you always feared, that you will try and try and lose and lose until you have a daughter, that you’ll wish she won’t turn out like you and your wish will be granted, that the relationship you had envisaged will never happen, that there will always be a void between you neither of you can bridge, that your husband will die of a heart-attack the week before his 60thbirthday, in the dairy aisle at Morrisons and the last words you say to him will be “Don’t forget the toilet roll”, that you will be choked by the things you never said but hope he knew, that you will cough crimson droplets onto the chipped porcelain at your granddaughter’s dance recital, that you will return to the auditorium to your uncomfortable chair beside your silent daughter, that you will watch your granddaughter’s bourrée that matches your frantic heartbeat, that you will clap and that you will keep clapping long after the lights go out.


This story won First Prize in the AFTER themed flash competition in December 2021.

About the author: Iona Rule lives in the Scottish highlands and once went on a date that involved getting her fortune read via tarot cards. She can’t remember any of the predictions. She has been shortlisted by Fractured Lit and TSS Publishing Cambridge Flash Prize. Her writing can be found in The Phare, Popshot and Perhappened ( and in other magazines not beginning with P).

Photo by Shreyas shah on Unsplash