I believe there is an advertisement inside of my fortune cookie, but I can’t be sure. The deep red slip is hardly thicker than crepe paper, talking with yellow letters. Everything on sale! There’s no signature, and the cookie itself isn’t distinct from the others in the jar. My nose starts bleeding. Can a colour be taken as a name? Blood hits the paper, and is quickly lost in the red.

‘Can I have a napkin?’

‘Fifty cents,’ says the schoolboy behind the bar.

I gesture at my face and hold up the fortune. ‘Really?’

Blood falls from the paper. The schoolboy looks down at the mess and then back up at me, exhausted. He takes my bowl off the counter, still half-full, and walks away. I pinch my nose and leave; a bell-chime plays me out.

I’m damp in the outside air. It’s heavier than usual, and it’s got a sheen to it, like an oil slick. I check my reflection in the window of a parked car. I’m only bleeding from the left nostril, so I ball up the fortune and clog the flow.

A woman on the street asks for a light, and I give it to her.

‘I think your nose is bleeding.’ She exhales into my face.

‘Yeah. Not the best time for it.’

‘Never is. But if you’re the sort of person who gets nosebleeds,’ she takes a drag, ‘you better make peace with the fact that your nose is gonna bleed.’

I shrug. ‘Wish I could choose when it happens. Yesterday would've been nice. I wasn’t busy.’

She slips my lighter into her coat pocket. Its yellow body pokes through a tear at the bottom seam. Watching my face, she yawns, and the smoke in her mouth tells me to grow up.