The Palm Reader's Prophecy

Working at the firm had transformed me into something resembling a **zombie** — hollowed out by fourteen-hour days and fluorescent lights that hummed like trapped insects. My once-lustrous **hair** had started thinning at the temples, a physical manifestation of whatever soul I'd left at reception each morning.

The **bull** of a boss, Richardson, had been riding me harder than usual about the Peterson acquisition. His thick neck flushed purple when he barked about deliverables, veins pulsing with the kind of masculine aggression that should have died out in the eighties.

I found myself at a shady strip mall during lunch, standing before a neon sign that flashed "PALM READING" in colors that burned themselves into my retinas. The woman inside, heavily mascaraed and smelling of incense and stale cigarettes, took my hand.

"You're carrying something heavy," she said, tracing the lines of my **palm** with a nicotine-stained finger. "Something poisoning you from within."

I thought she meant the job. The mortgage. The suffocating weight of expectations.

She pressed harder. "No. It's simpler. You've had something stuck in your teeth for three hours."

I excused myself to the restroom. There it was — a small piece of **spinach** from my lunch, lodged stubbornly between my front teeth, visible every time I'd spoken to Richardson, to clients, to the mirror.

All those negotiations. All those serious conversations about mergers and acquisitions. I'd been conducting them with a piece of spinach advertising my incompetence to the world.

That evening, I sat in my kitchen, staring at the blender and my organic greens. Richardson's email flashed on my phone: "Don't disappoint me."

The palm reader was right, though not in the way I'd expected. I was carrying poison — but it wasn't the spinach. It was the realization that I'd become a man who could spend three hours smiling with food in his teeth rather than risk a moment of vulnerability.

The next morning, I walked into Richardson's office and placed my resignation letter on his desk.

"You're making a mistake," he sputtered, neck flushing purple.

"I'm finally seeing clearly," I said.

For the first time in years, I felt something that might have been hope stirring in my chest like a heartbeat.