Palm Reading at the End of the World

The goldfish had been dead for three days before Maya noticed. It floated at the top of its bowl, a bloated orange satellite orbiting the plastic castle she'd bought it from a vending machine during a conference in Vegas. She'd won it the same night she slept with her boss, the same night she decided to stop feeling anything at all.

Now she sat at her desk at 7 PM, the office empty except for the hum of servers and the janitor's cart in the hallway. She'd been a zombie for months—moving through meetings, responding to emails, laughing at the right times, all while something inside her had curled up and died. Nobody noticed. That was the thing about being high-functioning: the better you got at pretending, the less anyone saw you.

Her phone buzzed. Her sister's bachelorette party. Palm readings and overpriced cocktails at that new place downtown. She should go. She should want to go.

Instead, she opened her hand and stared at her palm, tracing the lines there the way the fortune tellers did. Life line. Heart line. Head line. They all looked the same—just creases in the skin, meaningless paths written before she was born. She'd spent thirty-three years following them.

"You're going to die alone," someone had told her once, drunk at a party. It was supposed to be a joke. Everyone laughed.

Maya stood up. She carried the goldfish bowl to the restroom and dumped the water and the fish into the toilet. For a moment, she considered flushing it—sending it on to whatever came next. But she couldn't. It felt too much like giving up.

"I'm quitting," she said aloud to the empty office. The words felt foreign in her mouth, like a language she'd forgotten she spoke. "I'm quitting him too."

Her phone buzzed again. The palm reading place. Come on, the text said. It'll be fun.

Maya looked at her palm one last time, then made a fist. The lines disappeared entirely, hidden in the curve of her fingers. She grabbed her coat and walked out, leaving her keycard on the desk. Somewhere, a fortune teller was waiting to tell her what her future held. She couldn't wait to prove them wrong.