Palm Reader's Warning

The company retreat was held at a resort in Fort Lauderdale, where palm trees swayed like indifferent witnesses to our collective burnout. I was thirty-four and already felt like a zombie—walking through meetings, responding to emails, fucking my girlfriend with the same mechanical efficiency I brought to quarterly reports.

The second night, some coworkers gathered around a palm reader the resort had hired for entertainment. When it was my turn, the old woman took my hand, traced the lines with surprisingly rough fingers.

"You're not dead," she said suddenly, "but you've been pretending to be for a long time."

I laughed, but something tightened in my chest. "That's what they all say."

"No." She tapped my palm. "This line here—it stops and starts again. Something broke you, and you decided not to feel anything anymore. But the line continues. You haven't given up, you're just... waiting."

Later, I found myself at the hotel bar watching a baseball game on the TV above the bottles. The Marlins were losing, which felt appropriate. A woman sat beside me—another corporate zombie, judging by her untucked button-down and the way she stared at the screen like it might offer answers.

"You got your palm read too?" she asked.

"How'd you know?"

"You've got that look. Like someone just told you you're not actually dead inside."

We talked until closing time—about layoffs we'd survived, promotions we'd taken, marriages we'd ended or were too tired to fix. She told me she'd played baseball in college until an injury ended it. I told her I used to write poetry until someone told me it wouldn't pay the mortgage.

"We're all zombies," she said, "until we're not."

We kissed in the elevator, desperate and clumsy and nothing like the mechanical efficiency I'd been living with. For the first time in years, something in my palm started itching—where that broken line was supposed to continue.

The baseball game ended while we were still kissing. I never even checked who won.