Horoscopes

“Dear me. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along.”

It was the anniversary of their marriage and Jeremy was at the local corner shop hoping to pick something up for his wife, as was tradition. In front of him were some rotting flowers with brown stems and sad, drooping heads.

“Is this all you have?” he asked.

“What’s wrong with them?” the store owner said, crossing his arms.

“They look dead.”

“They’re dead the second you pull them out the ground. But that’s the best you’ll find anywhere right now. Not really the season for them.”

“There’s gardens filled with nicer flowers than this all over here.”

The store owner sighed impatiently. “Then why don’t you go pick them instead? Where do you think you are? Times are hard, man. We don’t get flowers in very often. Outside of Valentines Day we don’t sell many. I’m trying to run a business here, and I could do without-”

He kept on like this for some time until Jeremy relented, buying the flowers along with a newspaper, and headed home.

Jeremy was an elderly man now, in his early seventies, and had lived his whole life in this little town, as did his parents before him. And his parents’ parents. Virtually everyone he knew and their parents had always lived here. Nothing ever really changed.

He took his usual detour on the way home by the pub, which by some miracle had managed to avoid going out of business for decades, despite constantly threatening to do so. Checking his watch and seeing it was noon, Jeremy popped inside with his newspaper and drank half a pint of bitter while reading the sports section.

He looked up from time to time at the regulars, all similar men to himself, doing the same thing he was doing.

He had a vague memory of better times when he was younger, way back when, but he couldn’t recall any specifics as to why, exactly, it was better. Assuming the beer had just gone to his head, he folded up his newspaper and headed home.

When he arrived, he quietly dropped the flowers on the counter by his wife, who was busy at the sink doing goodness knows what, and sat down by the fire.

“What are these?” she said, looking distractedly over her shoulder from the kitchen sink after a few minutes had passed. “They look dead.”

Jeremy regarded the sad looking flowers over his paper. “They were dead the second they were pulled from the ground, dear.”

“What was that?”

“Happy anniversary, dear.”

“Oh, is that today? Is it forty years now?”

“Forty one, dear.”

“Oh, what a long time. You were always good at remembering dates.”

Jeremy opened the door of the oven and poked around to see what was burning.

“What time is the coke arriving again?” he said.

“What was that, dear?”

“I think it was three,” he said, answering himself, closing the oven door again. “Yes, it was three.” Then raising his voice: “The paper has arrived as well, dear.”

“Can you read me my horoscope? I always forget to read it before you burn it.”

His wife continued at the sink, now scrubbing a rusty old pot stained with years of casseroles, while Jeremy flicked through the pages.

“Here we are. You will suffer problems with business partners and should be wary of your competitors,” he said.

“What was that?”

“It says: ‘you will suffer problems with business partners and should be wary of competitors’.”

“Who, me?”

“Yes, dear. Your horoscope. Sagittarius.”

“I don’t do business though, do I?”

“Not that I’m aware of, dear.”

“Then what does it mean?”

“It means what it says, that you’ll suffer problems with business partners and should be wary of competitors.”

“What competitors though?”

Jeremy looked at the pages in silence. “It doesn’t say.”

“Oh my,” his wife said, deciding the dish needed to soak a little longer, when in fact it needed to be thrown out years ago. She shook her head. “Yesterday was the same sort of thing. What did it say again?”

“What’s that?”

“My horoscope yesterday.”

“Oh, something like: ‘you will be faced with a difficult decision to make that will test your relationships’.”

“That’s right. That was it. Oh dear, first a difficult decision, and now problems with business partners. My luck must be due a change soon. What else does it say?”

“What?”

“My horoscope. What else does it say?”

“Let me see… Are you planning on travelling at all?”

“Travelling? What sort of travelling would I do?”

“Well I don’t know, dear. Just travelling. Any travelling.”

“I could go down the road to Jean’s I suppose, but I wasn’t planning on it. Why, what does it say?”

“Well if you aren’t going to be travelling, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’d still like to hear it. I might change my mind.”

“It says: ‘a planned trip abroad to see friends and family presents an unexpected difficulty’ ”.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know dear, it’s just what it says.”

“Well, I’ll certainly not be going abroad at my age.” She turned round and dried her hands on a towel. “Anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”

Opening the oven door and giving the embers a poke, Jeremy tore the page out, twisted it in to a spear, and fed it in to the flames.

He heard the tap start running in the kitchen again, and his wife mumbling to herself: “Travelling abroad? Dear me. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along.”

As far as Jeremy was concerned, they did just make it up. He couldn’t remember the last time a horoscope was even close to being accurate, but then again, horoscopes never say “nothing will happen today”, so they had little chance.

“What does yours say?” his wife said.

“What was that, dear?”

“Your horoscope. You read me mine, but what about yours?”

“Oh, I didn’t read it,” he said, looking at the blackening ashes in the oven. “Nothing I don’t know already, dear.”

He noticed that at some point, without him noticing, his wife had deposited the flowers in a vase and placed them on a table by his side.

“They are dead, aren’t they?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The flowers, dear.”

“Yes, they’re dead. Such a shame.”

And with that Jeremy opened the oven door and tossed them in, watching them turn to cinders as well.