The Palm Reader's Warning

Meredith stumbled into the narrow shop just as lightning fractured the sky outside, the flash so bright it turned the rain-slicked street into something surgical and exposed. She hadn't meant to stop. Hadn't meant to do anything except keep walking until her legs gave out or the feeling in her chest went away—the hollow, grinding ache that had been her only companion since Richard left, taking the dog and the last living thing in their apartment.

But her feet had carried her to this doorway, this narrow storefront with its flickering neon sign: PALM READER, SEE YOUR FUTURE.

The shop smelled of sandalwood and dust and something metallic, like old coins. A woman with hair the color of iron and skin like crumpled rice paper looked up from behind a lace-covered table. Her eyes were startlingly young.

"You're running," the woman said. Her voice was soft, uninflected. "Or you think you are."

Meredith sat without thinking, extending her left hand across the scarred table. The old woman took it, her fingers cool and dry against Meredith's fever-damp skin.

"You're a zombie, child."

The word hung in the incense-heavy air, small and terrible.

"Not the stories. But you've been moving through your days without being in them." The woman traced a line across Meredith's palm with a fingernail, her touch feather-light. "How long has it been since you felt something real?"

Meredith's throat tightened. Since the promotion that should have felt like triumph but instead felt like stepping onto another treadmill? Since the divorce papers arrived, unsigned but final anyway? Since—

Outside, thunder shook the building's foundation. The old woman's finger pressed harder against Meredith's lifeline, which ran shallow and fading.

"This line grows faint here." She looked up, her gaze pinning Meredith to the chair. "You're not dying. But you're not quite living either. You exist between."

Meredith pulled her hand back, the truth of it settling in her chest like cold water in her lungs. She'd been going through the motions. Wake at 5:30, train ride reading emails she didn't care about, meetings where she spoke words she didn't believe, dinners alone with Netflix as her only companion. A senior title, a corner office, and an emptiness so vast she'd stopped noticing it was there.

"Can you fix it?" Meredith asked, and hated how small her voice sounded.

"I don't fix anything." The old woman smiled, revealing teeth too white, too perfect for her face. "But knowing is the first step toward waking up."

Meredith stood as another flash of lightning illuminated the room, throwing the woman's face into shadow and light. For the first time in two years, three months, and seventeen days, she felt something stir beneath her ribs. Not hope exactly. She was too tired for hope. But possibility. A small, sharp thing that might grow into something else.

She stepped back into the rain, no longer running, and walked home with the storm at her back and the palm reader's words still echoing in her ears: You exist between.

Tonight, she would call her sister. Tonight, she would make a real dinner. Tomorrow, she would ask about that transfer to the Chicago office—the one she'd been avoiding because it meant change, and change meant feeling things again.

The zombie was waking up.