The Palm Reader's Storm

The humidity in the restaurant was thick enough to touch. Outside, palm trees bent under wind that hadn't quite arrived yet, their fronds trembling like nervous fingers. I watched distant lightning fork the sky—too far to hear the thunder, close enough to make the candle on our table flicker.

Mark chased a lone goldfish around the aquarium in the center of the room with his fork, a tiny metallic harpoon. "Ten years," he said, not looking at me. "That's how long we've been doing this. Same vacation spot, same restaurants."

"Eleven," I corrected.

"Right. Eleven." He finally speared a piece of tilapia instead. "Maybe we should try somewhere new next year."

Maybe we should try a new marriage, I thought. Maybe we should try being honest about why we stopped touching each other six months ago.

The old woman who'd been reading palms at the bar approached our table. Her face was weathered like the driftwood that lined this coast. "I see storms coming," she said, gesturing toward the window. "But not the kind outside."

Mark waved her away. "Not interested, thanks. Save the fortune-telling for tourists."

She didn't leave. Instead, she studied my hand where it rested on the white tablecloth. "You've been waiting for lightning to strike," she said softly. "But lightning doesn't just destroy. Sometimes it illuminates what's been there all along."

I looked down at my palm. The lifeline, the heartline, the fate line—all those stories people pretend to see in random creases of skin.

"Your goldfish," she said, nodding toward the aquarium. "They live their whole lives in circles. They don't even know they're swimming nowhere."

The first real storm broke then. Lightning shattered the darkness, turning the palm trees into skeletal silhouettes, sudden and violent as a heart attack. The restaurant lost power. In that darkness, I felt Mark's hand cover mine.

"Elena?" he whispered. "Are you happy?"

The question was more terrifying than the storm, more blinding than the lightning.

I watched the goldfish continue their endless circuits in the dim emergency lighting. They would never know there was an ocean beyond their glass prison. They would die thinking this was the world.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

The storm raged outside. Palm trees thrashed in the wind. And inside, finally, the real storm began.