He took the tray of raw sea creatures from the chill case and disappeared into the kitchen. While he was preparing the limpets, I ignored the calm sea and counted the wintry-looking flies lying around the display unit instead; those flies must be frozen, just like Ismael, or rather: Ismael was capable of freezing at a temperature that kept the limpets free of bacteria, although there was nothing to indicate that the flies were frozen rather than simply dead. In the latter case, their perfect stillness could be explained by the grime stuck to the surface of the glass. The flies had settled there and had then been unable to unstick themselves. I ate my dish of limpets without feeling nauseated by their connection to the flies’ bodies or Ismael’s illness and I left the bar with a holder of strawberry and vanilla ice cream cones, my non-husband’s favorite flavors; I ran back to the hotel terribly afraid that the ice cream was going to melt, and when Ismael saw what I was carrying he asked why I’d paid for them when ice cream was available for free from the buffet.

“Try one,” I said, ignoring his observation. Then I made sure that he bit into the ice cream using the side of his mouth nearest the decaying flesh; the tension between us eased as the stink mingled with the sweet scents of vanilla and strawberry; neither Ismael nor I asked ourselves why the extra-strength mints, the chlorophyll strips for bad breath, and all those other oral remedies didn’t have the same effect.

After a while I asked him to show me the inside of his mouth. The strange shell was covered in unmelted ice cream that refused to mix with his saliva and looked like the flies in the chill case: it had some trick for retaining its composition during the process of decomposition. I felt triumphant, and believe Ismael did too, despite the fact that he couldn’t spend all his time eating scoops of ice cream and that the effects were short lived. The next day, after lunch followed by a tub of chocolate and hazelnut ice cream, I plucked up the courage to return to Timanfaya and bury my hands in the sand in search of the shells; the weather was warmer than it had been on previous days, the earth looked closed in on itself, everything seemed tinged with nostalgia, and there was nothing where the shells should have been except for the pile of sand I’d dug up. I lay down on it, put my ear to the ground and, for the first time, thought seriously about Ismael’s wedding plans, about attracting a more real form of bad luck. I allowed the calm to wash over me.

The Fortune-Teller

THE FORTUNE-TELLER

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