What the Palm Lines Hide

The old woman traced the lines on my palm with a fingernail stained yellow from cigarettes. "You're still waiting," she said, her voice like gravel rattling in a tin can. "The line that should have forked didn't. It just stopped."

I pulled my hand away, embarrassed by the truth in her grease-stained fingers. Five months after Mara's funeral, I was still measuring time in the empty half of our bed, the silence that filled the kitchen when no one was making coffee, the goldfish bowl gathering dust on the windowsill. The last fish had died three weeks ago, and I hadn't had the heart to replace them. Or flush them.

"She was like a sphinx," I found myself saying. The old woman raised an eyebrow, waited. "Always asking questions she already knew the answers to. Testing me." The night she told me about the other man, she'd posed it like a riddle: "If love is zero-sum, what happens when you've given everything?"

I'd struck out swinging. Married eight years, and I never learned to read her signals.

The catwalk above the factory floor where I worked had a clear view of the abandoned baseball field across the street. Sometimes during breaks, I'd watch teenagers play pickup games, their shouts drifting over the chain-link fence. Baseball was a cruel sport—most failures were invisible, statistically insignificant. But in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs, the whole season could hinge on one swing. Mara had been my bottom of the ninth. I'd taken my eye off the ball, convinced the game wasn't on the line.

"Forget the past," the palm reader said, closing my fingers around a fortune. "The future's just a pattern you haven't recognized yet."

Outside, the rain had started. I thought about the goldfish, how they'd spent their whole lives in circles, mistaking the bowl's curve for the world's edge. Maybe that was me—swimming the same routes, thinking I was moving forward. But as I walked toward the subway, my palm still tingling where she'd touched it, I decided to buy new fish tomorrow. Something bright and orange. Something that reminded me life could be visible, even in shallow water.