Cornicello

First of all thank you very much for the kind comments and stars for yesterday's Blip, you are really the best !

With thanks to KangaZu for hosting Tiny Tuesday and setting some wonderful themes, for Tiny Tuesday and for my Photo & Short stories 'Leaving prints' year project, my short story for January with accompanying image. Here's a working version of the true story of this charm:

Deciphering the lines

Strange things happen all the time, sometimes you take them for granted at the moment it happens and don't think about it until much later.
When you're young everything looks different anyway, at least it seemed so for me.
I do remember I wasn't worried at all, just surprised.

I was 17 and on my way home from Varese town to Gavirate, waiting for the train at Varese's main station.
There were not many people around, I sat on a bench and a young gypsy woman came to sit next to me, offering to read my palm.
I was not sure how to handle this, didn't believe in palm reading or in the good intentions of most of the wandering gypsies around, but luckily
I also didn't have much money left, I recall only having a 500 Lire bill after buying the train ticket and in the early 70s 500 Lire's worth
was less than one US dollar. So I told her 'no, thank you, I don't have enough money with me, only 500 Lire'. She insisted she wanted to see my hand anyway and I didn't know how to refuse.

One look at my hand and she let it go, said rather flustered that there were too many lines to see the future and started digging into her purse.
Where she found a gold coloured cornicello charm, pressed it into my hand, told me to keep it, refused the 500 Lire I offered in return and left abruptly.
I knew enough about Italian symbolism to know it was a charm to ward off evil and did wonder what kind of ploy this was.
I was young with a whole life before me, there was no reason to think that she had seen a very dark future, evil, disaster waiting around the corner. I did keep the charm and even wore it for a time, I still have it.
It's only now that I do wonder more sometimes.
Did she really see something and if so, what?
Or was it indeed a palm line defect?
(c)Ingeborg Grandia, 2019