The Palm Reader's Warning

Mara had become a zombie at thirty-two, moving through her days in accounting with the gray, shambling routine of the undead. Her job was what her mother called "responsible" — crunching numbers for a corporation that manufactured weapons components, each spreadsheet another small death of the soul.

The only thing that made her cubicle bearable was the bear.

Not a real one, though sometimes, in the fluorescent hum of 3 AM, the taxidermy grizzly in the lobby seemed more alive than she felt. It stood on its hind legs, glass eyes frozen in a perpetual snarl, paws raised as if demanding something from the corporate visitors who walked past it without glancing down. Sometimes Mara would bring her coffee down there just to sit near it, imagining what it might say if it could speak.

"You're bearing up," it might tell her in a low, rumbling voice. "But barely."

She'd started seeing Julian at the palm reader's booth near the farmer's market. He wasn't a psychic — he sold essential oils and gave aggressively mediocre relationship advice while she ate lunch on the bench outside. He had kind eyes and a cat named theory who wandered his apartment like a small, fuzzy philosopher.

"Let me see," Julian had said on their third meeting, taking her hand across his scratched wooden table. "I'm not actually psychic, but I can pretend."

He'd traced the lines of her palm with surprisingly gentle fingers. "You've been through something. You're still carrying it. This line here — it's deep, like a trench."

Mara had almost laughed. Almost told him about the abortion at twenty-five, or the marriage that dissolved like sugar in water, or the way she woke up most mornings wondering if this was all there was.

Instead she said, "Everyone's been through something."

"True," Julian said, and his thumb pressed into the center of her palm. "But not everyone carries it like a wound that never healed."

They'd ended up at his apartment that night. Theory the cat had jumped onto the bed during, orange fur glowing in the streetlight from the window, and Julian had laughed against her mouth.

"He's judging us," Julian whispered.

"Cats always do," she'd replied, and for the first time in years, she'd felt something stir behind her ribs.

Now it was six months later, and she was standing in her cubicle, spreadsheet glowing on her screen, when the realization hit her: she didn't feel like a zombie anymore. The gray fog had lifted, slowly and without her noticing, like fog sometimes does.

She walked down to the lobby on her break. The bear stared at her with its glass eyes, mouth open in that eternal snarl.

"I'm not bearing it anymore," she told it quietly.

And then she did something she'd never done: she walked out the doors and kept walking.