The Palm Reader's Dog

The gray hair had started appearing at her temples three years ago, right around the time Mark left. Elena had considered dyeing it—God knows the women at the office did—but something about the silver threads felt honest. Like evidence of survival.

She pressed her palm against the cold window of the fortune teller's storefront, mostly to feel something real. The sign said MADAME ZORA in peeling gold letters. It was her fortieth birthday, and she'd spent the last decade moving through life like a zombie—showing up, smiling the right smiles, completing the necessary tasks, feeling increasingly certain that some essential part of herself had been left behind in her twenties.

"You have fire hands," the old woman said, not looking up from her tarot spread. "Long palm, long fingers. Creative, passionate, but you've been sleeping."

Elena laughed, a dry sound. "Sleeping? I haven't slept properly in years."

"Not that kind of sleeping." The woman's eyes, clouded with cataracts, locked onto hers. "You've been moving through your days on autopilot. Going through motions. Waiting for permission to live again."

A dog barked somewhere in the back room—a rhythmic, insistent sound. The fortune teller smiled.

"That's Buster. He only barks when someone's about to make a choice."

Elena thought about the novel she'd started writing in college and abandoned when her father called it impractical. The backpacking trip through South America she'd canceled when Mark got sick. The pottery class she'd registered for three times but never attended because something always came up.

"What choice?" she asked.

"The one you've been avoiding since you were twenty-five." The woman closed her hand over Elena's palm. "Your lifeline is strong. But you keep cutting it short yourself."

Outside, rain began to fall against the glass. Elena thought about going back to her apartment, where the dishes were done and the emails were answered and everything was perfectly, suffocatingly in order. Where she would age incrementally into the kind of woman who had always meant to live.

She stood up. "How much for the reading?"

"On the house," the woman said, already shuffling the deck for someone else. "Buster says you're not coming back."

Elena stepped into the rain, her palm still tingling where the old woman had touched it. She didn't go home. She went to the community college instead, where enrollment for the fall semester was still open. The dog's barking followed her all the way down the block, wild and relentless, like something finally waking up.