It’s ten minutes past close when I blink and find that I’m still lost in my own palm. My left hand lays motionless before me, a corpse at a viewing. The singular spotlight that normally shines over the circular table in the middle of the room is off, and all that remains to illuminate my reading is the pulsating hum of green neon from the sign in the window. The words flash one at a time, all together, and then disappear. “Palm Readings… Mystic Dabrowski.” The words surround an out turned hand. I take my mother’s reading needle, and trace it over the mounts and lines. “Divination is half reading, half guiding the seeker, but all pageantry” my mother used to say. The needle hisses as it scrapes across the soft flesh of my hand. Health, Love, Heart, Head. All lines interweave like the threads of a dreamcatcher. And here, in the gloom, I can’t interpret any of it.
The last woman to come in was too young to be as dead as she was. Upon her face was the same desperate mask they all wear when walking through my door: the anxious, wide-eyed gaze of the onlookers of Christ’s Crucifixion. I knew her before she even reached the chair adjacent to mine. Sluggish gait. Hollow eyes. Trembling hand. Skin thin and brittle. Mummified. The dead and I are well acquainted… here in a room between worlds.
“Tell me my future,” she wheezed, collapsing into the chair, laying her hand across the red velvet cloth between us. I didn’t tell her that it’s not the purpose of palmists to determine any sort of future. My clients are always the souls in Limbo: the drifting ones, the desperate ones. I wrapped her hand in mine. The flesh was cold and clammy. The joints of her fingers were knobby like willow branches. I exhaled and traced her palm. And began the part I’d grown to hate.
The half-lie.
“Your Life line is deep” I told her, “you have strength within you.” I ignored the additional fact that the line was short and straight. Her eyes shimmered in the gloom. I looked down so I didn’t have to meet them. As my mother’s needle crossed the center of her palm, she grimaced. I found her Heart line, which was long and swooping. “Your love is true.” I continued, and her body hitched. The line faded at the end below her index finger. I felt like throwing up. Proceeding with the reading, I told her what she wanted to hear, but not what she needed. I drew musty air from the dried up well and told her it would quench her thirst. Five minutes later, her time was up. She thanked me. And when she left, a part of me departed with her and died.
Then I blink, and find myself staring at my own hand.
The scent of musty cigarettes and incense permeates the room, the ghost of my mother lingering ever present. Sometimes when I’m reading someone’s palm, I can still hear her syrupy voice, can still feel the weight of her nicotine stained finger as she traces it across the valleys of my palm, tapping the mounts.
“Take the needle in your hand, feel the way it runs across the skin without cutting it. Press the flat of it here, the Mount of Luna. Yes! See how it is raised higher than the others on your hand? The blood beneath here flows strong. This is your connection to the beyond, your ability to divine. You will be a great reader, moj drogi. It is written upon your hand.”
It is spoken in a tone that knows as much as it suggests. A tone that tells women whose husbands have been unfaithful that Karma is a spiteful snake, waiting in the deep grass to strike. A tone that takes a young boy by the hand and guides him, through the haze of tobacco smoke, towards a table that can imbue him with the same thrum of power he feels when gazing at his mother.
But when I stare at my own palm, I don’t see the raised mount, even though I know where it lies. My skin is parchment white and blank, thin and windblown. It has always been this way.
The ivory light of the moon spills through the bars in front of the neon sign.
Lost in memory, I press too hard, the needle punctures the skin, and a single bead of ink rises from my flesh. It blooms and breaks, cutting across my palm, trickling up to my middle finger.
The Fate line.
I draw her reading needle through the blood and study it.
As a boy, the Fate line seemed most important, the grand finale of every reading. Watching my mother perform, it was apparent that even when seekers came to learn of their fortune or health, what they longed for was the truth within that line. She would always pause before that reading, the tip of her cigarette illuminating her eyes while all else was shrouded in smoke.
“This is where I deliver the truth,” she would tell me later, “the one we all want to hear. Our Destiny.”
It was bullshit, a reading based mostly on the look on their face, the condition of their hands, and the questions they asked. It was the lie that was the worst… the one that I gave a piece of myself to every client for as a penance. Your line is deep and true? You will find success with your career and desires throughout life. Your line is deep but fades? You must concentrate on your success while you’re young, for your luck will soon run out. Your line is thin and shallow? You will not achieve your goals. Put your energy elsewhere.
Or… you are not bound to your current destiny.
There is another pinch, and a second tear rolls across my palm, cutting from between my index and middle finger to the outer digit of my left hand. The Heart line. Before I can stop myself, the needle pierces the Venus Mount, the fleshy mound beneath my thumb that my mother taught me to use when testing steak tenderness when the palm wasn’t being used for divine purpose. Point after point the needle penetrates flesh, harvesting blood and carving lines that sweep across the pale canvas of my hand.
And I can see it, but I cannot read it.
The moon draws me from the table, and I stumble out into her light. It is cool and soothes the stinging in my left hand. I thrust my hand out in front of me and open my palm. My mother’s needle rolls from my fingers, spinning in the air like a broken compass before shattering on the ground among the half smoked cigarette butts of the strip mall parking lot. Blood webs across my hand in sticky red threads, dripping from the sides of my palm. The Head bleeds into the Heart. Fate into Health. I trace my lines with my finger and read them for the first time. I read my destiny. And although I am terrified by my reading it, like the moon above, the act fills me with something I haven’t felt since my mother proclaimed me to be the last great palmist.
Head. Heart. Health.
Fate.
I see it all and read it.
I read it, and see the full truth.
Genre: Open
Event: Burned-Out
Character: Palmist
The Word and The Song 