The village where everyone spoke in tea leaves

Last night I'm back in the field — some village I never actually visited — and the elders are reading my life in the dregs of a cup I never finished. But the leaves keep rearranging themselves into constellations I almost recognize, and every time I lean closer, the cup refills itself and they hand me another one, patient as weather. I wake up with that chalky taste on my tongue and the feeling I'd gotten something profoundly wrong, the way fieldwork always ends.