Penance in the World Hereafter

Fortune cookies. I've been making them for eons, directing entire Chinese restaurants in the delicate art and penning the predictions down myself. It was all supposed to be one big hoax, just a fun family thing to do. Never had I thought that I would be judged after death for it.

Death was an unremarkable event, at least in my case. Old age, a brief illness, blackness... Consciousness, of a kind, came to me and with that came beings of light who guided me into a vast hall. "WE ARE DISPLEASED WITH THE FORTUNE COOKIES YOU MADE DURING YOUR LIFE!"

I stared at the light beings. “I’m...sorry?” I said. “I just produced what the fortune cookie company told me to. I didn’t make them up.” Suddenly one being—glowing brighter than the others—floated toward me. “Ah, but you had a magical gift when you were alive,” it said. “All of

the things you wrote would inevitably come true.” I thought back to all the fortune cookies I’d written and frowned. “I wish I had known that were the case,” I said. “I never would have taken that job at the fortune cookie factory.” I wondered how many lives were permanently

ruined by my uncaring pen, scrawling foreboding messages on tiny slips of paper, to be stuffed between the cracks of a dry cookie. "I must make things right," I said to myself. I now had a purpose in life: to

find all the cruel fortunes I had written whilst I had been possessed by that evil demon, and replace them with the most loving of affirmations. Locating all the Chinese restaurants to which they had been distributed would be the most daunting of tasks, but

It was the only way I felt I could possibly redeem what shards of goodness were left in my now blacked soul. I often found myself wondering if I had fought the possession hard enough, while also pondering the ability of those unpossessed to write equally as cruel fortunes as I

can write on my worst days. People wonder how our fortune cookie bakery, Fortunes 500, became a cultural force. That’s my doing.

The secret's out. I was in fact the one responsible. I turned our little company into an international juggernaut overnight by utilizing mass crowd appeal. No one cared about fortune cookies at the time. I changed that in one massive advertising push. Taking us all the way to the

top restaurants. I was the one who’d thought up the numbers and fortunes. Those numbers weren’t lucky. Those fortunes weren’t that profound. Now it was out. My reputation was in jeopardy. So was my job!