The Palm Reader's Daughter

Maya's hair fell across her face as she leaned over her mother's velvet table, scattering tarot cards like spilled secrets. The signs were obvious—the zombie-like hollow in her mother's eyes, the way she moved through rooms without touching surfaces, the thinning frame that had once held her father's attention.

"You should eat," Maya said, pushing a bowl of spinach toward her. "You look dead."

Her mother's palm rested on the table, fingers curled around nothing. "The dead don't get hungry, baby."

Outside, rain drummed against the window. Maya's iPhone vibrated in her pocket—another message from her brother, asking if their mother had finally packed up her father's things. She ignored it.

"He's not coming back," Maya said. "Six months, Mom. It's time."

Her mother looked at the lines etched into her own palm, as if reading her fate there. "Your father used to say I had hands meant for holding things. Children, mostly. Then he said I held too tight."

The spinach grew cold between them. Maya remembered how her mother had once gathered hair behind Maya's ears with such gentleness, how she'd braided stories into Maya's childhood before the stories turned silent.

"What did the cards say today?" Maya asked, though she already knew.

"Change is coming. Something new." Her mother smiled, a ghost of the woman who'd once read futures in coffee grounds and lipstick marks on napkins.

Maya's phone buzzed again. This time she looked—her brother, saying he'd found someone new, someone who made him feel alive again. She showed the screen to her mother.

"Zombies," her mother said softly. "All of us, walking around waiting to feel something real."

She reached across the table, her palm against Maya's cheek. "But you're not dead yet, baby. You're still here."

Outside, the rain intensified. Maya ate the cold spinach, feeling its metallic bitterness, and understood that some hungers weren't about food at all. She sent her brother a message: Come home. We need to make her feel alive again.

The first thunder rolled through as her mother began gathering the cards, her movements slightly less hollow than before. Somewhere, something new was beginning. It wasn't a future Maya would have chosen, but it was the one they had.