I believe there is an advertisement inside of my fortune cookie, but I can’t be sure. The waxy red slip is hardly thicker than crepe paper, talking in 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.

‘You got a napkin?’

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

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

Now well-flowing, blood puddles on the laminate countertop. The schoolboy looks down at the mess and then back up at me, exhausted. As if in punishment, he seizes my still-steaming bowl and disappears, though I hear the soles of his shoes start up a distant sticky song. 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 face in the shine of a parked car and, with heat-thick fingers, scrunch up the fortune to clog the flow. I think of mahjong as I find no meaningful change in my reflection.

A woman on the street calls out to me for a light, and I oblige.

‘I think your nose is bleeding.’ She exhales.

‘Yeah. Not the best time for it.’

‘Never is. But if you’re the sort of person who gets nosebleeds,’ she takes an inelegant 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.