Fiction by Nikoletta Gjoni

Small Fortune

The porcelain cup, delicate and miniature sized, moves gracefully in short, circular motions as the old woman swirls the remnants of the coffee sludges against the walls. She flips the cup upside down on the tiny saucer and lets it sit for a few minutes, just long enough for the coffee granules to dry. The boy sits across from her and squirms in his seat, embarrassed at having resorted to women’s antics of fortune telling nonsense. But she is supposed to be the best and he thinks how his friends can’t know about this visit—the teasing would be relentless. He was cautious on his walk over, taking a tight path behind the village’s walled in yards, slipping once and scaring himself into thinking he was hurt. But he got up, inspected his knees, and kept walking.

The old woman silently flips the cup back right side up and holds it close to her face. Milky eyes the color of the Ionian on a cloudy day slowly inspect the fragmented patterns and crusted lines that unlock the boy’s future.

“Hmm,” she mutters.

The boy thinks of his mother laid up in bed, breaths short and rapid, sweat pearled on her forehead. The boy thinks about his father’s grave, not remembering the last time he had visited to brush off the debris and dust nature carelessly dumps on it; not remembering when he had last placed a fresh bouquet of flowers.

His mother tells him if he ever dreams of a loved one who has passed, to do a good deed in their honor to put their soul at rest. He had dreamt of his father every night in the last week and didn’t know what it meant, didn’t want to understand why his mother had entered the room and taken her place alongside her husband.

Dreams have a way of plucking the inevitable from a pile of the absurd and polishing them new for you to take a hard look at, forcing you to acknowledge its slow and steady arrival.

“It looks like you will be going on a long journey,” the old woman says, her soft, crackling voice permeating the boy’s thoughts. “You see this here,” she continues, knobby pinky finger pointing at one spot in the cup where little pointed patterns traverse along the bone white wall like little waves. “That’s water,” she adds. “It looks like it will be a long journey indeed.”

The boy pinches his eyebrows together as if in deep contemplation, nodding slowly to assure her he is listening, though he doesn’t quite understand how she could know of his plan to head to the edge of the village where the pebbled road ends and the sea begins, dive in, and swim towards a fragmented future, whatever the rising sun might reveal beyond the horizon.

He had hoped the cup would skip over him and instead reveal his mother’s fortune—a turn of luck, perhaps. He had hoped the old woman would tell him to return home quickly, that there was nothing to see here, and he’d do just that; walk into his stone cottage and see his mother at the kitchen counter kneading bread for the first time in months, telling him to wash up before sitting at the table for dinner. The hope died like soured grapes on the vine.

The boy gets up to leave the old woman’s house, steps out through her front door and walks down the main road, no longer caring who may have seen him.

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Nikoletta Gjoni’s work has appeared in the 2023 London Independent Story Prize anthology and has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She was a 2024 scholarship recipient for the Salty Quill Writers Retreat and will be a 2026 Chateau d'Orquevaux resident.