The Palm Reader's Prescription

The fluorescent lights hummed their corporate lullaby as I arranged the **vitamin** bottles on the shelf—C for cognitive function, D for despair, B for burnout. Three years at NutriLife Solutions and I'd become something resembling a **zombie**, shambling through aisles of wellness products that promised to fix lives neither broken nor whole, just undernourished in ways no capsule could address.

My boss, Marcus, sat in his office like a **sphinx** carved from middle management and expectation. He'd mastered the art of asking riddles without answers: "How do we increase market penetration while maintaining authenticity?" "What's our value proposition to the spiritually malnourished demographic?" I'd stopped trying to solve them.

I traced the lines on my left **palm** during lunch breaks, learning chiromancy from YouTube videos between performance reviews. The head line curved toward the lunar mount—creative but scattered. The life line broke at thirty, then continued fainter. The heart line, predictably, was a mess.

"You should do readings," Chloe said, sliding a protein shake across the break table. She was twenty-six, still believed in things like transformation and quarterly bonuses. "People love this mystical shit."

She didn't know I already was.

On weekends I met customers in coffee shops, tracing their futures while they confessed about dead marriages, dead mothers, dead dreams. Prescribed D3 for the windowless accountant whose life line hinted at early heart trouble. Suggested magnesium for the divorcee whose heart line fragmented under my finger.

"Do you see anything?" Marcus asked one Tuesday, extending his hand across his desk.

His palm was smooth, unmarked. No life line. No head line. Just blank skin stretched over possibilities he'd never chosen.

"Nothing," I said.

But I lied. I saw everything he'd refused to become.

That night I packed my belongings into two boxes and walked out into the rain. Some futures, I'd learned, you have to carve into your own skin.