The Palm Reader's Last Orange

The conference room in Miami smelled like stale air conditioning and desperation. Forty-five consultants sat around circular tables, our faces illuminated by the blue glow of laptops, all of us moving through slide decks with the automated precision of the undead. A zombie apocalypse of billable hours.

"You look like you need this more than I do," she said, pressing something cool and round into my hand. An orange. Her name was Elena, from the Buenos Aires office. We'd met in the hotel bar at 2 AM, both of us too awake to sleep, too tired to work.

"I'm giving my notice tomorrow," I told her, peeling the orange. "I can't do this anymore. I'm thirty-five and I don't recognize my life."

Elena reached across the small table and took my hand, palm up. "Let me see your future."

"I don't believe in that crap."

"Neither do I." She traced the lines on my palm with a thumbnail, her touch sending sparks up my arm. "But I see a man who's been walking around dead for three years. And I see someone who's finally ready to wake up."

The orange burst in my mouth, impossibly bright, impossibly alive against the taste of vending machine coffee and regret. Outside, palm fronds cast shadows against the sliding glass door, swaying in a breeze I couldn't feel.

"Come with me," Elena said. "Not to Buenos Aires. Just... away. Anywhere."

"I have a mortgage. A partner. A career path."

"You have a pulse," she said. "Everything else is just details."

I watched her walk away toward the elevator, back straight, somehow alive in a room full of ghosts. My palm still tingled where she'd touched it. The orange rind sat on the table, brilliant against the beige carpet, looking for all the world like a small, stubborn sun.

I packed my bags that night. I didn't leave a note. Some zombies, it turns out, can just choose to stop being dead.