DWC Short Story: The Fortune Cookies That Knew Too Much - Love, Lies and Chaos

The first time the fortunes started coming true in Market Bray, we put it down to coincidence. This was the sort of town where coincidences piled up like leaves in November. People married people they had sat next to in Reception. The vicar’s dog always found its way to the butcher’s on Tuesdays. A tractor once towed the 7:42 to Birmingham out of a snowdrift. So when the old Chinese shop on the corner—shuttered since the seventies—lit up at last and began to hand out fortune cookies, nobody felt alarmed. We felt curious, which is our T-shirt slogan if we ever get one.

The shop had been Lin’s Oriental Emporium back in the days when a pineapple at Christmas could bring a crowd. It re-opened as Golden Fortune with a hand-painted sign and a bell that sounded like a teaspoon in a tea cup. The window showed paper umbrellas, neat blue jars, and, in the middle, a wooden bowl stacked with cellophane packets of biscuits. A card beneath said:

ONE FORTUNE EACH. FIRST WEEK FREE.

Behind the counter stood a woman as slight as a willow twig, with grey hair pinned in a tidy knot. She wore a red cardigan and looked like every grandmother on earth, which is to say she could gut you with a glance and then send you home with stew. A brass name badge read MEI.

“Welcome,” she said, when I went in at lunchtime on Monday, because nosy is my spiritual gift. “Choose with care.”

“I’m Libby,” I told her. “From the Gazette. I might write a small piece.”

“Choose with care,” she said again, and pushed the wooden bowl towards me.

The biscuits were all the same, but my fingers slid between them as if there might be a warm one, a special one, a shy one. I picked one that had a crease like a smile. The cellophane crackled. The bell rang again as someone else came in, and I stepped to the side, broke the biscuit, and pulled out a strip of paper.

YOU WILL BREAK WHAT YOU MEAN TO MEND.

I laughed because it sounded like me. I had a whole shelf of glue in the kitchen. Mugs chipped in the wash. Friendships patched with long texts. Shoes held together with tape when payday took its time. I tucked the fortune into my pocket, ate the biscuit, and made notes for a cheerful column about small joys in small towns. I did not think any more about it until that evening, when I decided to fix my mother’s garden gnome.

The gnome had been my father’s pride, God help us. A squat ceramic figure holding a fishing rod, with a daft grin and a green hat. A winter frost had split his boot. Mum wouldn’t throw it. “Your father loved that ugly thing,” she would say, which is not the tribute he would have picked. My plan was simple: glue, clamp, triumph, tea.

I had the boot in my hand when Mum called to say she’d fallen out with Jean from church over a cake stall rota. “I tried to mend it,” she said, “but I think I made it worse.” I told her I’d be over after I fixed the gnome. I picked up the tube, pressed it, and watched the nozzle split. Glue bubbled out like lava. It caught the gnome’s face and slid down into his grin. I reached for a cloth. The cloth stuck to the glue. I pulled harder. The gnome cracked neatly in half.

I looked at the two pieces. One half grinned; the other half scowled. I thought of my fortune and felt that small tug behind the ribs you get when a joke stops being funny.

By morning, Market Bray had begun to share.

On the residents’ Facebook group, Sophie at Scissor Sisters wrote: “Popped into the new shop. Fortune said: A CUT ABOVE IS IN YOUR FUTURE. At 3 p.m. I get an email: I’ve won Midlands Hairdresser of the Year finalist. What is going on?”

Underneath, Nigel from the council posted a photo of his fortune: YOU WILL CLEAR WHAT OTHERS CANNOT. He’d opened a blocked drain on Mill Lane with one poke of a stick after the water board had shrugged for a week. The comments ran: “lend us your stick, Nigel,” and “is the stick on the council asset list,” and the inevitable “does anyone know what time the tip opens on bank holidays.”

Then it turned. By lunchtime, Prisha from the pharmacy wrote: “Mine said: YOU WILL BE TAKEN AT YOUR WORD. Spent the morning joking to customers about ‘magic pills’. Now have eleven people claiming I offered them free vitamins. Send help.”

At the post office, the line doubled because Mrs Dawkins had opened her biscuit to find: SOMETHING LONG AWAITS YOU. She thought it was a parcel. It turned out to be the wait.

When I popped in to see Mei again, a bell chorus rang as everyone came and went. She poured tea into paper cups and watched us like a shepherd watches sheep. She neither hurried us nor slowed us. She seemed to listen to something behind our chatter.

I put my paper on the counter. “They’re coming true,” I said, in the same voice people use in church when the organ hits the high note and you realise you can feel your own heart.

Mei considered me. “Do you like it?” she asked.

“The town likes a fuss,” I said. “The town will make a fuss out of a breeze.”

She nodded. “Fortunes are a breeze,” she said. “But breezes move the clouds.”

I wrote my piece. I kept the gnome halves on the kitchen table, as a joke and a warning. I avoided glue.

By Wednesday, the real trouble began with The Masons.

Everyone knew the Masons were not happy. You could hear them in the queue at the chippy, a ping-pong of barbed words in neat sentences. Diane’s laugh had a crack in it. Paul’s smile showed the wrong teeth. They came into Golden Fortune together like people going into the cinema—arm in arm, not quite looking. They each took a biscuit.

Diane’s fortune read: WHAT IS HIDDEN WILL COME TO LIGHT.

Paul’s read: YOU WILL CATCH SOMETHING YOU THOUGHT WAS GONE.

They froze. Everyone in the shop went silent. Even the bell decided to rest. Then Diane stuffed the paper in her bag and said too loudly, “Hilarious,” and Paul said, “Brilliant,” and they left.

On Thursday at eleven, Arlo the window cleaner found a pair of tights under the Masons’ water tank when he was clearing their guttering. At noon, Paul sprinted down the High Street with the tights in one hand and his heart in the other. At two, Diane’s mother shouted from an upstairs window, “It was me. Spanx. From Christmas.” At three, the police arrived because Mr Cragg had called them to report a man waving hosiery near his mobility scooter. By four, the tights had become a baton passed from hand to hand in a farce. By five, they were evidence in a domestic row. By six, they were in the hedge outside The Admiral Nelson, shining in the sun like a very thin flag.

The Masons separated. Then they un-separated. Then they separated again. They became our weather. When they were fine, the town felt easy. When they were not, the bins blew over. Everyone had an opinion. Most were bad.

“Is this because of the fortunes?” Mum asked, when I told her. She had forgiven me for the gnome and put his happy half on the mantle. “Or are the fortunes because of this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think the fortunes are like those maps you get in museums. You are here. They don’t move you. They tell you where your feet already are.”

“That’s a shame,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.

On Friday, the school took Year 6 to the shop after a geography trip to the river. The head teacher, Mrs Coe, had cleared it with the governors because she was brave. Each child took a biscuit. Some opened them right there and showed their friends with shrieks. Others hid them in pockets. By the park gate, little Sebastian Green read his out and went pale.

“What’d you get?” asked Callum, who liked to act hard and knew all the words to Postman Pat.

Sebastian showed him: YOU WILL BE KING FOR A DAY.

By Saturday morning, the Green household had turned into a constitutional crisis. Sebastian’s mother, who taught Pilates, supported the crown if it meant no screens at breakfast. His father, who ran the garage, said this country had no business telling him when to salute. Sebastian, a gentle boy keen on frogs, put on his paper crown from last year’s crackers and told his parents that they were to be kind and call him Your Majesty until bedtime. He did not abuse the role. He knighted his dog. He pardoned his sister from washing up. He declared the slide at the park a public joy. Parents smiled. Children bowed. Mrs Coe issued a statement to say that while Market Bray valued democracy, it also valued imagination, and in this case we could do both. That afternoon, the town band played “God Save the King” outside the Co-op until Mr Howard came out with a bag of peas and reminded them it was not a request line.

A fortune that made us happier sat beside one that broke a house. We did not know where to put our hands.

Meanwhile, other fortunes did the small work of turning the day.

Derek at the chippy got: A FISH WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE. He started using cod from a new supplier in Grimsby. People said the batter sang.

Ava at the florist read: PREPARE FOR A WILD BOUQUET. That weekend the cricket club ordered a funeral wreath. It was shaped like a wicket and cost three hundred pounds. Ava took a picture and made a mint.

The vicar opened: YOU WILL FIND YOUR VOICE. He sang the dismissal in church on Sunday and hit the notes so sweet that even Jean from the cake stall clapped.

And me? I tried not to break things I meant to mend. Which made me slow to try.

I kept going into the shop. I told myself I was gathering quotes. I told myself the town needed a record. The truth was I liked it there. The air felt shifted, as if someone had lifted a heavy rug and shaken out the dust. I liked Mei’s calm in our bustle.

“Are the fortunes yours?” I asked her, the second week, when she had begun to sell jars of something golden that she called ginger honey.

“They’re themselves,” she said. “The paper listens. The biscuit invites.”

“Can I buy another?” I asked. “Or is it greedy?”

“It is human,” she said, and held out the bowl.

I didn’t try to think. I picked one near the bottom, broke it open, and found:

A FRIEND WILL TELL YOU WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR.

That’s not a fortune, I thought. That’s a Tuesday. I put it in my purse and forgot it until Mum cornered me after the Sunday service and said, “You need to call Tom.”

Tom had been my best friend since we were five. We had ridden handlebars down Church Hill and cut through the alley behind the bakery to pinch warm rolls. At seventeen we had a kiss that was good enough to ruin us for three years. At twenty-six we tried living together. At twenty-seven we learned that love can be true and not be kind. He moved to Leeds. I tried not to think about it.

“He’s back in town,” Mum said. “His father’s hip. He asked after you.”

“Did he,” I said, a sentence that can mean ten things and never means the right one.

Mum gave me a look like a sharp peg. “You broke something you meant to mend,” she said. “Don’t make it permanent.”

I opened my mouth to argue. I closed it again. Later, walking home through the rec, I took the fortune from my purse and read it out loud. “Fine,” I told the sky. “I’ll call him.”

I did not call him. I texted him: How’s your dad’s hip? He replied: Like a rusty hinge. I replied: Want a walk? He said yes.

We met at the river. The weeping willow bent to listen. We did the neat work of two people who remember everything and need to say some of it anyway. He told me Leeds was big and lonely. I told him the Gazette paid in tea and gratitude. He asked about my mother. I asked about his father. We circled the thing.

“Why did we make such a hash?” he asked at last.

“Because we thought love was a bag of tricks,” I said, feeling brave. “We thought if we did the right ones in the right order, the rabbit would appear.”

“And now?” he said.

“Now I think love is a shed,” I said. “Full of tools that look obvious until you try to use them, and then you hit your thumb.”

He laughed. “Still the poet.”

“Still the fool,” I said. “I broke the gnome.”

We walked in step. He reached for my hand and then didn’t. I felt that odd tug again. The fortune had done its job. A friend had told me what I didn’t want to hear, and the friend was me.

By the third week, the fortunes had a rhythm. If you stood on the corner by the bus stop, you could watch the town breathe. People went in low and came out taller. Or they went in tall and came out bent. The papers got wind. A man with a microphone came and tried to get Mei to say it was a stunt. She sold him a jar of ginger honey and said the biscuits were baked on site. He sniffed and left.

That Wednesday, Gary from PlumbRight opened: YOU WILL BE IN HOT WATER. At noon he drove a spade through the main in front of the dentist. His van became a fountain. The town became a paddling pool. Children cheered. The dentist, a gentle man with a calming poster of whales, put on his wellies and ushered in patients anyway. By two the water company had arrived with road signs and shrugs. By three, Nigel from the council appeared with his stick and a sense of destiny. He poked the ground. The water slowed. We applauded as if he had slain a dragon.

On Friday, Bev at the bakery got: OLD DOUGH WILL RISE. Her sourdough starter, which had slept in the back of the fridge since lockdown, woke up like a teenager at noon and took over the kitchen. She sent loaves to the care home and pulled faces through the window like a vaudeville star. People queued around the block. The town smelt of toast and hope.

Then the disaster arrived that made the Masons’ tights look like a warm-up.

Mr Harold Kemp, eighty-two, ex-head of maths, collector of stamps, opened: YOUR PAST WILL RETURN IN A NEW OUTFIT. He thought it meant a reunion. At two, a woman walked into Golden Fortune with a face like a photograph of a face, and said, “Hello, Dad.”

She was Sian, sixty, long lost. When she was nineteen, she had left Market Bray for London with a boy who said nice things on a motorbike. Her parents had called it a phase and refused to pick up the pieces when he revealed himself to be the sort of man you cross the road to avoid. Letters had gone unanswered. Shame had done the rest. She had turned into a ghost you didn’t name at Christmas.

And there she was in a blue coat, with hands like Harold’s. The town took a collective breath and decided not to breathe out in case it blew her away.

Harold stood still. Mei put a stool by his knees. He did not sit. He said, very carefully, “We have some years to talk about, Sian.”

“Forty-one,” she said, as if she had counted them like coins.

It turned out she had three children and a laugh like Harold’s wife, bless her, who had been buried in 2011. Sian had come back with a suitcase and a belief that she didn’t deserve kindness. She was wrong. The town made soup. The town made lists. The town remembered her as a girl who had danced at the fair by the river, and decided that was still true. The Gazette ran a story about second chances that made even Jean from the cake stall tear up behind her raffle book.

“Did your biscuits do that?” I asked Mei, when the shop had closed and we were sweeping up bits of foil and sugar.

“Sometimes a town does its own magic,” she said. “Sometimes it needs a nudge.”

“Who nudges you?” I asked.

“Customers,” she said, smiling. “They bring me their stories. I only hold the bowl.”

I went home and wrote late. The gnome halves looked at me like theatre masks. I put them together, not with glue, but with a band of ribbon. It held well enough if you didn’t breathe on it.

Saturday was carnival day. We have a carnival whenever we remember to. This year we remembered because the primary school had a new head and she liked a project. Stalls lined the High Street. The brass band played. The WI sold fudge that could floor a horse. The cricket club hosted a coconut shy where Mr Cragg could bash something with civic approval. Children ran. Dogs tangled. Someone juggled. I wore a Gazette lanyard like a medal and took photos of people holding up their fortunes for the camera, faces tilted, eyes bright.

Sebastian wore his paper crown again and shook hands like a politician. Ava made a floral arch shaped like a biscuit. Gary ran a “Guess the Leak” game with copper pipes and a bucket. The Masons arrived separately and left together. They had the look of people who know the work they must do, which is as close to a happy ending as grown-ups get.

Mid-afternoon, a coach pulled up and tourists poured out like rice from a bag. They had heard about us on a travel blog. They took pictures and bought jars of ginger honey. They tried to buy fortunes. Mei shook her head. “One each,” she said. “Only if you mean it.”

I found Tom at the lemonade stand. He had flour on his sleeve because he had helped Bev with the sourdough when her starter tried to start a union. We stood side by side and watched the town do that thing it does, which is look like a postcard until you notice the coffee stains and the jam on the edges and love it all the more.

“What did your last fortune say?” he asked.

I told him.

“Did you get your friend?” he asked.

“In progress,” I said, and this time when he reached for my hand, I let him take it.

At five, the mayor made a speech from the steps of the library about community spirit. At five past, the library cat walked across his shoes and the crowd cheered, which put the speech in its place. At quarter past, the sky went that soft silver that means you should be carrying an umbrella but won’t be. At half past, a ripple went through the crowd like wind through wheat. It began at Golden Fortune and came towards us. People turned and went quiet.

Mei stood in her doorway holding the wooden bowl. The bell hung still. She looked out at us as if she were counting us in. Then she lifted the bowl like a toast.

“Thank you,” she said. “For listening.”

We did not know what we were listening for, but we all heard it at once: the hush of a town waiting for a story to end and another to begin.

“Are you leaving?” I called, because someone had to say the unsayable.

Mei smiled. “Shops like mine don’t stay,” she said. “They visit. You know what you need now.”

“What do we need?” shouted Mr Cragg, who liked a clear brief.

“Each other,” she said, and that silly answer, that true answer, made my throat burn.

“Will the fortunes stop?” asked Sophie at Scissor Sisters.

“No,” said Mei. “You’ll write your own.”

She put the bowl on the counter. One by one, we filed past and took a last biscuit. This time we did not open them there. We tucked them into pockets. We took them home, to kitchen tables, to back steps, to bedsides. We waited until the house was quiet and then we cracked them and read what we already knew.

Mine said: YOU WILL MEND WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU’D BROKEN.

I looked at the gnome on the mantle, still held by ribbon, and I thought of my father who had loved ugly things because they were true. I thought of my mother, who had forgiven me for glue and grief. I thought of Tom, whose hand had felt like something you pick up again after a long winter.

The next morning, Golden Fortune was shut. The sign had gone. The bell hung silent. In the window sat a jar of ginger honey with a label that read in careful script: FOR SCONES, STORMS, AND COURAGE. A second card said: BACK WHEN NEEDED.

Market Bray adjusted. We could not help ourselves. The Masons began couples’ counselling with Gwen from the yoga, who had once done a weekend course and now had more business than sense. Sebastian returned to being a duke, which is to say a ten-year-old with muddy knees. Harold and Sian took slow walks past places that had kept their shape without them. The vicar kept singing the dismissal and improved a bit. Nigel’s stick got a plaque.

In the weeks that followed, fortunes still turned up. Jean from the cake stall found one in her purse that said: LET OTHERS HELP. She handed the raffle book to Martha with shaking hands and went to sit down for the first time in a decade. Prisha taped hers above the till: BE PRECISE. She never gave away vitamins again. Derek framed his fish.

I kept mine next to the kettle. I liked to see it when the water boiled.

One evening, Tom and I stood on the bridge and watched the river do its patient work. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a creased slip of paper.

“I got this the day we met on the path,” he said. “Didn’t tell you. Thought it would jinx it.”

He handed it to me. I read: SOMEONE YOU LOVE WILL STOP RUNNING.

“Meaning you or me?” I asked.

“Either,” he said. “Both.”

I slid my hand into his, and for the first time in years, I did not think of what might crack if I held on. The willow shivered. The streetlights blinked on. Somewhere down the High Street, the band practised “On Ilkla Moor Baht ’At” because they liked to show off. Somewhere else, a fox found an overturned chip box and thanked the gods for Fridays.

We walked home the long way. Outside the empty shop, we stood and listened. The bell, which was not there, did not ring. The window held our faces like a faded photograph. I thought of Mei and her steady hands, of the bowl and the hush.

“You know what I think?” Tom said at last.

“What?”

“I think the fortunes were never magic.”

“No?”

“I think they were mirrors,” he said. “Just round ones you could put in your mouth.”

I laughed. “You always were better at metaphors.”

“And you were always better at people,” he said. “When you write this up, don’t make it soppy.”

“It’s not for the paper,” I said. “Some stories are for the town.”

He nodded. We stood for another minute, which is a long time on a pavement when you are not actually doing anything, and then we went on.

There are places you leave, and places that leave you. Golden Fortune was the second sort. It slipped away like a stagehand who never wanted applause. It left behind the scent of ginger and the sound of paper breaking.

When I tell this story now—at the pub, at weddings, over the washing line—I say that our fortunes came true because we wanted them to. Not the lottery ones, not the “be a zebra by Friday” ones. The other kind. The ones we write when we put the kettle on and decide to be braver. The ones we read when we look at the person in front of us and offer them a seat.

And if sometimes, late, walking past the corner where the sign used to swing, I hear a bell, I do not go in. I go home. I have scones. I fetch the honey. I pour tea. I make plans I might keep. I mend things I broke.

The gnome, by the way, smiles from the mantle. His ribbon holds. When the rain hammers and the gutters sing and the town does its warm, silly dance, I wink at him and he—well—he grins like a fool. Which is not a bad way to carry on.

As for the last fortune I took—the one I keep tucked behind the magnet on the fridge, the one I look at when the day stumbles—it says:

SAY WHAT YOU MEAN AND LISTEN WHEN THEY DO.

It’s not much. It’s enough.