The Zombie Who Read Palms

Marissa stared at the goldfish circling its bowl in the reception area of Anderson & Sterling. Three years she'd worked here, and she'd never noticed how the fish's orange scales caught the morning light until today—the day she'd decided to quit.

"You look like a zombie," her cube-mate Sylvia had whispered that morning. Marissa had almost laughed. That was exactly it. She'd been sleepwalking through her life since the divorce, since Tom took the cat—Barnaby, her sweet orange tabby who'd slept on her pillow every night for seven years.

She packed her box efficiently: framed photos (she'd leave those), the succulent that was mostly dead, her favorite pen. Her palm brushed against her phone—47 missed calls from her mother since Sunday.

Sunday. When she'd met the palm reader on the beach.

The woman had been elderly, with skin the color of cured tobacco and eyes that saw too much. "You have the long line of someone who waits," she'd said, tracing Marissa's palm with a nail yellowed from age. "But the waiting line is broken. Something is coming to break it."

Marissa had paid her forty dollars and walked away feeling foolish. But now, standing in her office with her half-empty box, she understood. The zombie-like trance of her marriage, the zombie-like trance of this job—it was all waiting. And she was done.

Her phone buzzed. Her mother again.

Marissa answered. "Mom."

"Your father's in the hospital. Heart attack."

The waiting line broke.

She drove to her parents' house first. Barnaby was there—Tom had dropped him off when he moved to Seattle, unable to take the cat to his new apartment with his allergic girlfriend. The cat wove through her legs, purring like a small engine, and Marissa wept into his orange fur.

At the hospital, her father survived. In the waiting room, a woman with eyes like cured tobacco sat beside her. "You have the strong hand of someone who endures," she said, taking Marissa's palm without asking.

Marissa looked at her goldfish-colored wedding ring on her finger, still there after three years. She slipped it off and dropped it in the hospital trash can.

"I'm done enduring," she said. "I'm done waiting."

Outside, the palm trees swayed in the wind, and somewhere, a fish swam in endless circles, and a zombie opened her eyes and finally, finally began to live.