What the Palm Forgets

The air conditioning in the Cairo hotel bar had died an hour ago, and Elena's hand stuck to the marble counter where she'd rested it for twenty minutes. She was thirty-seven and drunk on gin she couldn't afford, waiting for a man who wasn't going to show.

"You have a long life line," someone said beside her.

Elena turned to face an older woman with skin the color of strong tea and eyes that had seen everything twice. "I'm sorry?"

"Your palm." The woman nodded at Elena's hand, still pressed to the sweating condensation on her glass. "You grip the glass like you're drowning. Like it's water you can't reach."

Elena laughed, and it sounded broken. "I had a dream once. I was floating in dark water, and something kept pulling me down. Every time I tried to scream, my mouth filled with salt."

"The sphinx in the desert outside this city," the woman said, not really asking, "has sat for four thousand years watching people search for answers they already have. Your lover—the one who won't come tonight—you've been asking him the wrong question."

Elena pulled her hand away. "Who are you?"

"Someone who learned that the hardest riddle isn't what walks on four legs in the morning." The woman's gaze dropped to Elena's empty ring finger. "It's why we choose the questions that will hurt us most when answered."

Elena's phone buzzed—David, finally. She stared at his name glowing in the dark bar, remembering the night he'd traced her palm with his thumb and promised everything means nothing eventually.

She slid the phone across the counter toward the stranger. "Keep it."

"And the water?" the woman asked. "The drowning?"

Elena stood up. "Some dreams you wake up from. Others, you learn to breathe underwater." She walked out into the Cairo heat, leaving behind the sphinx's riddle, the palm reading she'd never asked for, and the phone that buzzed like a dying thing on the marble where she'd pressed her hand against the condensation, leaving nothing behind but a ghost of sweat and salt.