The Palm Reader's Last Run

Marcus made me promise to keep taking that damn vitamin D supplement even after he was gone. 'Your bones will crumble, Eli,' he'd say, shaking the orange bottle at 5:30 AM while I laced up my running shoes. 'I'm not carrying you up these hills forever.'

That was six months ago. Now the bottle sits on my bathroom counter, pills rattling like loose change every morning when I open it. Some mornings I take two. Some mornings I take none. Marcus would know the difference; he always noticed everything.

We'd been running together every Tuesday and Thursday for seven years. Through his divorce, through my promotion that never came, through that year when winter wouldn't end and we ran in freezing rain because neither of us could admit we were lonely. He called me his friend like it was something sacred, not casual. Not the way people at work say it while scanning the room for someone more important.

The palm reader had set up her folding table near the finish line of our last race together. She grabbed my hand before I could pull away, tracing the lines on my palm with yellowed fingers. 'This life line,' she murmured, 'forks twice. First branch dies young. Second... second goes far.'

Marcus laughed, bought us both vitamin waters from the cooler, and never mentioned it again. Three weeks later, the aneurysm.

Now I run alone. The hills are harder without his stories, without his rhythm. But I keep moving, one foot in front of the other, because the palm reader also said something else, something I didn't tell Marcus: 'The second branch only grows if someone else plants it.'

So I keep running. And I keep taking the vitamins. And I tell myself that somewhere, Marcus is still waiting at the top of the hill, shaking that orange bottle, reminding me that bones don't break if you keep moving forward.