The Palm Reader's Warning

The neon sign flickered above me—MADAME ZORA, PALEMISTRY—while I stood running late, again, for yet another appointment I'd rather skip. My palm had been itching for days, a superstitious dread I couldn't shake, not since Richard left me for that twenty-something from accounting.

She was ancient, her skin like crumpled paper, eyes milky with cataracts. She took my hand, her gnarled fingers tracing the lines on my palm with surprising gentleness. "You're running from something," she said, not a question but a statement. "Your life line is fractured."

I almost laughed. Running was all I did anymore—from empty apartments, from well-meaning friends, from the mirror. But I said nothing.

"And here," she tapped my heart line, "you're carrying something. Something that's been rotting inside you for years."

That afternoon, I found myself sitting on the balcony of my mother's condo, watching the sunset turn the sky the color of a rotting orange—the same shade as the dashboard light in Richard's car the night he told me he'd never loved me, not really. Not enough.

My mother had left me a small wooden box. Inside: a dried orange slice, pressed flat like a flower, with a note in her handwriting. "For when bitterness tastes too sweet."

I remembered then—she used to say that about grief, how it could become addictive. How you could keep running from pain until it became the only thing you recognized.

I ate the dried orange. It was terrible—sharp, acrid, overwhelmingly bitter. But it was real.

The next morning, I went for a run. Not away from anything, just forward. My palm no longer itched. Some lines, I realized, you could trace yourself. Some stories, you could finish your own way.