What the Palm Reveals

The palm reader's shack smelled of incense and desperation. Elena sat across from the woman, her own palms sweating against the cheap vinyl tablecloth. Outside, the waves kept **running** up the shore, relentless as the deadline she'd abandoned three days ago.

"You're tired," the woman said, tracing the lines on Elena's hand. "But not the kind that sleep fixes."

Elena thought of her team back at the office, how she'd left them **bear** the weight of the client's impossible demands while she fled to this coastal town. She'd become a **zombie** somewhere around year seven—showing up, nodding in meetings, delivering results, but feeling nothing. The promotion last month should have meant something. It didn't.

"You're running from something," the woman continued, her thumb pressing into Elena's lifeline. "Or maybe toward something. The lines are blurry."

Elena's phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't check it. Marcus, probably. The man she'd been **running** toward for six months, whose emails made her pulse quicken even as she deleted them unread. He'd asked her to leave David. She'd said she needed time. What she'd needed was courage.

"Your heart line is fragmented," the palm reader said. "You think you can compartmentalize, but emotions bleed through. You can't **bear** it much longer."

Elena pulled her hand away. The truth was, she'd been **running** from herself for years. The affair wasn't about Marcus. It was about feeling something, anything, beyond the numb routine of her marriage and the corporate ladder she'd stopped wanting to climb somewhere around the first miscarriage.

She stood up and dropped two crumpled bills on the table. The **palm** trees outside swayed in the breeze, indifferent. Somewhere, a zombie movie played on a television—people running from monsters that looked like them, sounded like them.

"Your future's not written here," the woman called after her. "But you already knew that."

Elena walked to the water's edge. The waves kept **running** toward her, then pulling back, like breath, like possibility. She dialed Marcus. Then David. Then her boss.

She couldn't **bear** being dead inside anymore. Even if it burned everything down.