"He Knows"

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must involve a fortune from a fortune cookie.

"He Knows"

Kim bowed slightly to the couple before leaving them to their menus. She had what she needed. The brief skin to skin contact with the man was all she required to do her job, a job she was at once gifted, cursed and born to perform. It had taken all of her training to keep from recoiling at the image in her mind’s eye, an image, not from her past, but from the seated couple’s future.

Tonight, the woman at the table would die at the premeditated hand of the man sitting across from her.

Kim would have to keep that from happening. Her only tool was a calligraphy pen and a small scrap of paper. Some might call her a writer of fortunes, little innocent notes found in folded oriental cookies. Those who knew better called her a Path Finder. She did more than write simple bits of wisdom. From a self-induced trance, she searched the dimensionless void for alternative paths, those trails of actions that would lead to altered futures. The notes were her way of nudging their recipients down those new paths.

She had seen that the man would kill the woman in a jealous rage. She tried to find the words that would stop him; something that he could read and thereby change the course of his future. Tonight, this proved to be more difficult than normal. Eventually, she had to admit that he could not be “nudged”.

There was a path, an indirect one, but a path non-the-less. The woman could be saved.

At the end of the meal, the couple opened their fortunes. His was something bland about the weather. Hers was the key. The woman opened the note playfully. Her heart jumped when she read the two words written in beautiful calligraphy.

Word count 299