Four lines on a palm. One wrapping serpentine around the base of the thumb. Two adeptly evading each other, feathered old stitches on a baseball. Last one bisecting all three, spanning ring finger to wrist. Life, head, heart, fate. Myriad different variations, each containing a separate truth, a parcel of a life. Does the life line, that inescapable viper, carve a wide canal, deep like a scar? You're resilient to disease and well adapted to physical labor, the palmist tells me, as I reach into my pocket for another tissue to plug my ever-running nose. Is it a perforated line, circling the thumb like a moat? You were born in poor health and, with this, I agree. Does it split itself in two halfway? Either a difficult decision awaits you, or you will grow lonely in old age, depending on where the line splits and how long the branch is. She leaves it at this, I notice, and examines instead the next line.

The head line--the tell-tale indicator of personality. She checks the weathered line for trajectory, flattening out my palm in the faded candlelight, finally deeming the line to be curved, a few degrees shy of "sharply downward." A curved head line is good, she says, I'll find success in financial matters with my pragmatic, steady nature. But your line is chained and heavily branched--you're disorganized, disordered of thought, tend to be unreliable. I find myself nodding despite myself, as she hasn't told me anything new, anything that my seventeen years of life haven't already revealed. Perhaps there is some truth to the mystic, though my rational mind battles me. I listen more intently as she starts on line three.

The heart line, the hand's vital canal, etched deep like memory. This is what, on crisp summer nights like this when breezes gently stir the flaps of carnival tents and month old fliers flutter by in the street, they all really come for. Teenage girls awaiting validation that their crushes will become something more, couples seeking to know if marraige lies in the cards, even the cynics searching for some sign of the love they scorn, as if a line that stretches a lifetime can predict a minute's folly. As for my line, she simply says it's normal. A short line would indicate callousness; a long line, stubborness; a broken one, marital strife ahead; a chained one, past trauma. You'll have a good love life, an average one, she says and I nod again.

I then ready myself to leave; after all, I didn't expect to hear anything remarkably profound. I'd come there on a whim, the product of friends extolling the woman's psychic powers, and I'd paid for a reading simply out of curiosity and a skeptic's desire to know. But she stops me, pulls me back to the table, you still have to get your fate line read, the most important one. Alright, I say, and she takes my hand, stretches it flat under the candlelight once more. And searches until her eyes hurt. A thousand other lines traverse my palm like old leather, a battered map, pre-worn from a life of impending journey, but fate is shockingly absent. She tells me come back tomorrow, next week, next year. Always keep searching. This has never happened, not once that she's seen.

Under the fluorescent lights of the school cafeteria, I examine my own hand, seeking the line that last night the woman at the carnival had been so unable to find. It hasn't materialized, not that I believed it would. Four lines on my palm. One wrapping serpentine around the base of my thumb. Two adeptly evading each other, feathered old stitches on a baseball. One invisible.

If my rational nature left me, if my head line had veered those few degrees to "sharply downward," I would cross into the domain of the highly creative. And I would sit for hours and invent the mythologies of my hand, remedy the uncertainty that fatelessness has imparted. It's what the Greeks did, after all--the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians and every other  ancient society that ever pointed to a storm and said, this is why it is. Out of uncertainty, stories are born. The dark is just the absence of light, Apollo and Ra taking well deserved breaks from dragging the sun across the sky. My invisible fate line is just that: the absence of fate. I am aimless and unbound. I am uncharted territory, the first human being to gaze up at a glittering night sky and see specks of light that no one yet named.

Out of the abyss, I create the mythology of my spirit.