The Rules for Working the Fortune Pier at Cleethorpes
The first sound my coworker heard, she said, was gulls fighting over chips down on the boardwalk. Three in the morning, nobody on the pier but her and the machines, so gulls made sense. It took her a full minute to notice they don't make a sound with a rhythm to it. What she was actually hearing was the fortune machine's arm, the mechanical one behind the glass, rising and falling against the case like it was trying to get out.
Her name's Denise. She did four winters on the graveyard shift at the arcade at the end of Cleethorpes pier, the one that still has the old cabinets nobody's bothered to strip out. Coin pushers, a crane game with a busted claw, and right at the back, the fortune teller. Wooden hand, glass eyes, a turban painted the colour of dried blood. Her manager gave her a laminated card taped inside the till when she started. She thought it was health and safety at first.
Don't put your own coin in the fortune machine. Feed it someone else's fifty pence, found in the till or the change bucket, never yours.
Only run it once a night. If a customer's already used it that day, leave it be till morning.
Whatever the card says, don't read it out loud in the arcade. Read it in the office, door shut.
The wish only takes if you burn the card after, in the tin by the fire door. Don't keep it as a souvenir. People used to keep them.
If the arm moves before you've put a coin in, that means it's already decided something. Walk away. Don't feed it that night at all.
If you hear it twice in one shift, go home. Ring in sick if you have to. It's owed someone, and that pay isn't yours to give.
She said the first five were straightforward enough, and she kept them for two winters without trouble, running it maybe once a month on a slow night for something small. A decent tip. Her mum's hip getting better. Denise swears the hip did get better. She's not superstitious, she told me twice, which is the kind of thing people say right before they tell you something that isn't. Her mum's hip is fine now, by the way, still fine, that part never changes when she tells it.
The trouble started the night she broke rule six for her sister. Her sister's fella had left with the car and half the furniture, and Denise wanted, more than anything, for something good to land on her for once. She'd already heard the arm go, low, before she'd touched a coin. She fed it anyway, someone's abandoned twenty pence from the crane game tray, and it gave a card that read, in that machine's cramped serif type, YOU WILL RECEIVE WHAT WAS TAKEN.
Her sister got the car back within the fortnight. Insurance write-off, the fella's fault, rear-ended on the A180. He walked away with a limp he still has, last she heard. Nobody in the family talks about whether that counts as the wish working or the wish taking its cut, because both things happened, and there's no controlling which one lands first.
Denise doesn't work the pier anymore. Signed off for her nerves, officially. Unofficially, the new manager caught her at four in the morning holding the machine's wooden hand still with both of hers, whispering to it that she hadn't meant her sister's fella, specifically, when she fed it that coin.
I went down to the pier myself last month, off season, just to look. The arcade's shut Tuesdays. Through the glass the fortune teller sat where it always has, turban chipped at the shoulder, one glass eye gone milky. Its wooden hand rested flat on the little brass tray where the card comes out, palm up, fingers slightly curled, like it was waiting for someone to put something into it.