Palm Reader's Tuesday

Maya traced the lifeline on her palm, the skin there creased from three years of entering data into spreadsheets that nobody would ever read. She felt like a zombie going through the motions of her Tuesday, undead but still expected to be productive.

The office goldfish, a pathetic creature with Orange Crush colored scales, swam in endless circles in its bowl on the reception desk. Maya had named him Existential, because his three-second memory span seemed like a blessing. She caught her own reflection in the glass—dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back too tight.

"You're doing that thing again," said Julian, the new marketing director. He leaned against her cubicle wall like a fox who'd just spotted an unguarded hen house. His eyes were too sharp, too knowing. "Palm reading yourself into a quarter-life crisis?"

Maya quickly dropped her hand. "Just thinking about the Henderson report."

"The Henderson report's been filed since last Thursday," Julian said. "You know what you need?"

She didn't answer. Julian was twenty-five to her thirty-three, all optimism and MBA energy. He probably still believed in things like five-year plans and genuine human connection at work.

"You need to actually get your palm read," he continued. "There's a woman at the night market on 5th. Supposedly she predicted my cousin's promotion two weeks before it happened."

"I don't believe in that stuff."

"Neither do I. But sometimes you need someone else to look at your lifeline and tell you it's longer than it feels." He checked his watch, too expensive for someone who'd just started. "Happy hour at O'Malley's. You should come. Existential can survive one evening without you staring at him through the glass."

Maya looked at her palm again. The line did look short, but maybe she'd just been pressing it too hard all these years.

"Pick you up at six?" Julian asked, already walking away.

"Sure," she said, to the empty space where he'd been standing. For the first time in three years, she felt something like possibility stirring beneath the zombie-like routine of her days. She dropped a piece of tropical fish food into Existential's bowl and watched him eat, grateful for the small hungry things that kept swimming forward, even when they'd forgotten why.