In Her Web She Still Delights

by Tennae Maki

What will this woman's fate be?
 
Just as a gypsy pawns fortunes upon the willing, young and dying. There this woman did stand with her palm cradled in her left hand. She is yours and she is a vagrant. She is the stranger that you'll never meet.
 
Mindlessly, she drew circles with her thumb. Just there, there where the veins in her hand told tales of her future 'stead. Her lines of life, love, and logic. These webs, feint and strong, were just as she knew them to be: hers, a duplicate that belonged to no one.
 
Without guise or instruction, this woman's thumb left her palm and began to brush her right index finger from side to side, slowly migrating over to the other three tips. A motion with the intent to find the prints that she was bound to leave behind.
 
A far weighty task it was, one of focus and strict intent, searching for these lines best read from behind a scope of science, or after they'd been brought to ink and paper.
 
So it was, she couldn't say where she cared to wander with her thoughts. Her daydreams where set on nothing but the near invisible lines that had always been with her. The fault line seemed not to be embedded in her skin. Surly you'd pardon her if you thought the stars could speak of her future. The cosmologist's tale is far more lucid and true.
 
The day you met her, was the same day you missed her. The sky wasn't clear. It was blushing. The sun and the moon, they both hid behind clouds. Yet even these great languorous masses couldn't conceal the horizon line, nor the pink hues of dawn and dusk.
 
Surly now, you can see that these moments of searching and fateful questioning, lapsed the moment the hands on the antique wall clock stopped.
 
Finally, her thumb did press the vulnerable space, the one that harbors air when hands meet for prayer.
 
The pendulum is still swinging.
 
That is the only gold.
 
Never yield.
 
Not told.