The Dead Man's Palm

The conference had drained him completely. By day three, Mark felt like a zombie moving through the resort, shaking hands with people whose names he'd already forgotten. He sat by the pool, the June heat pressing down on his chest like a guilty conscience.

His phone buzzed—another Slack message from the team back home. They were running the final numbers for the merger he didn't even believe in anymore. He watched a palm tree sway in the artificial breeze, its fronds brown at the edges, dying from the inside out. The metaphor felt too obvious.

"Mind if I join you?"

He looked up to see Elena, the CFO from the Chicago office. She sat beside him without waiting, ordered two whiskeys from the waiter. They'd spent the previous night in his room, both of them married, both pretending this wasn't happening.

"You look like you're thinking too hard," she said.

"Just remembering."

"About what?"

"Baseball," he said. "My father took me to games every Sunday. He'd buy me a glove, promise to teach me to pitch. But he was always working. Always running to the next meeting. The glove sat in my closet until I threw it out when I was fifteen."

He traced the condensation on his glass. "I'm doing the same thing. My kid's twelve. I've never made it to a single game."

Elena's phone buzzed too. She checked it, then set it face down on the table. "My husband asked when I'm coming home. I told him Thursday. I'm not sure I meant it."

The water in the pool rippled—someone had jumped in, disturbing the stillness. Mark looked at his reflection in the dark sunglasses beside Elena's drink. A dead man's palm, lifeless and open, receiving nothing.

"What are we doing?" he asked, not really asking.

"Same thing everyone else is," she said, finishing her drink. "Pretending we're not already dead."

He watched a palm frond fall and float across the water's surface, carried by currents it couldn't control. His phone buzzed again. He let it ring.