Left Palm Itching

The dead goldfish floated to the top of the bowl on the nightstand, its orange scales catching the television's flicker. I'd been watching it struggle for three days—three days since Maya walked out with her suitcase and her half of the rent.

"Can't bear it anymore," she'd said, not looking at me. "The way you drift through everything like you're waiting for real life to start."

The sublet apartment smelled like someone else's life—faint vanilla and old paper. I'd killed the cable package first thing. No sense tempting myself with the sweet anesthesia of reality TV when I was supposed to be figuring my shit out. But the cord still dangled from the wall like an amputated limb, and I found myself tracing it with my eyes during the long evenings.

My palm itched. Superstition from my mother: right palm itches, money's coming. Left palm, you're about to lose something. Maya was the one who'd believed in palm readings, in astrology, in the idea that the universe might bother to send us signals through minor bodily irritations. "Your life line's unusually fragmented," the psychic at the street fair had told me, with Maya nodding solemnly beside me. I'd spent twenty dollars to hear a stranger describe what I already knew.

I found myself at a dive bar six blocks down, watching a baseball game on a screen above the bartender's head. Some team in gray uniforms against some team in red. The men moved in that graceful, futile way they do—swinging at balls they'd miss, running toward bases they might not reach. The beautiful, orchestrated failure of it all.

The guy next to me smelled like whiskey and workplace resignation. He noticed me watching.

"Your team?" he asked.

"I don't have a team."

"Everybody's got something they're rooting for." He signaled for another round. "Even if it's just hoping you don't strike out."

Outside, a single palm tree stood in the bar's parking lot, its fronds brown at the edges. This far north, palm trees always looked like refugees from a climate they no longer belonged to—beautiful, stubborn, and ultimately doomed.

"Left palm's been itching," I found myself saying, surprising myself. "My mother used to say—"

"That means you're about to lose something." He nodded like this was obvious. "Or you already have, and you're just slow to notice it."

The bartender slid over our drinks. The man clinked his glass against mine.

"To endings," he said. "The ones we see coming and the ones that sneak up on us anyway."

I looked at my palm, still itching, and realized I wasn't waiting for money at all. I was waiting for the courage to acknowledge what I'd already lost—waiting for the universe to send a signal clearer than a minor skin irritation, clearer than Maya walking out, clearer than a dead fish in a bowl on a stranger's nightstand.

The baseball game droned on, another inning of another game between teams I'd forget by morning, and somewhere in a sublet apartment I'd paid for through the weekend, a goldfish floated in water I'd need to empty before I could leave.

The itching stopped by the time I finished my drink. Some kind of sign, maybe. Or maybe just the end of something that had been ending for a long time.