Through the Partition

by Palmistry, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The partition was a sheet of plywood screwed between two grey filing cabinets, and somebody had cut a hole in it with a jigsaw and not sanded the edges. Over the hole, on Theresa's side, a black cotton sleeve had been stapled in a ring, so that whatever came through would come out of the dark at the wrist and nowhere else. Under it on the desk lay a camping mat folded in four, with a pillowcase over it.

"So you don't see their arm," Kirsty said. "Tattoos, sleeves, a watch. Anything that tells you who it is."

"I can see that," said Theresa.

It was the second Saturday in December, and the room was in the basement of the psychology building, where the heating came on when it liked. Theresa had come in on the train from Gilmour Street and the subway from St Enoch, and her good shoes were wet through. She had been reading hands for thirty-one years, the last nineteen of them in a unit in the arcade off Paisley High Street, between a key-cutter and a woman who did nails, and she had never before been asked to do it to a hole in a wall.

Kirsty Mair was twenty-one and in her final year, and she had written to the arcade in October on paper, which was why Theresa had answered. She had a fringe she kept pushing out of her eyes and a cartridge pen that leaked; she had signed Theresa's consent form and then her receipt for forty pounds and expenses, and the side of her middle finger, where the pen rested, had gone green.

"I'll be honest with you," Kirsty said, "since the form says I have to be. I expect you to fail."

"So do I, maybe," said Theresa. "That's why I came."

The rules were these. Twelve volunteers, all students, had filled in a personality questionnaire the week before. They would come through one at a time on the other side of the plywood, take off their rings, and put the hand they wrote with through the sleeve, then the other one. They would not speak. Theresa could touch, and tap the wrist twice to have the hand turned over. She would speak her reading aloud for the recorder, and Kirsty would have it typed up. In January each volunteer would be given all twelve readings, numbered at random, and asked which one was them.

"One in twelve by chance," Kirsty said. "If you get four or five, I'll have to think about my life."

She put the recorder on the desk between them, a little black thing with a red light, and said, "Participant one," and went to the door at the back, and the hand came through.

---

It was a young hand. They were all going to be young hands; Theresa had known that on the train and had still not been ready for it. A twenty-year-old palm is a page written on only at the top. The three great lines were there, because they are there from before birth, but the fine creases that a life puts between them, the cross-hatching on the mount of Venus, the little ladders up the side of the palm, had hardly started.

She took it by the fingertips and turned it to the lamp. Square palm. Fingers long for it. "Air hand," she said, for the tape. "The books would say a thinker, someone who wants things explained to them, someone who gets restless. The heart line's high and fairly straight. That's somebody steady in their affections, not showy. The head line's long and runs straight across, no slope to it, which the old readers give to a logical mind, someone who likes a plan. Life line well curved and clear." She pressed gently at the base of the thumb, and the flesh came back quickly under her finger. "Good energy. That's all the life line is, energy. I say that for whoever reads this."

She went on to the mounts. Jupiter full under the first finger: ambition. Saturn flat: no great love of rules. She heard herself filling the page and stopped.

That was the trouble, and it showed itself straight away. With a face in front of her she would have had a hundred small corrections by now, every one of them taken without her knowing: a smile when she said steady, a frown when she said plan, and the reading would have bent toward the smile. Here the hand lay on the pillowcase and gave her nothing back. She was a woman talking to a cushion.

"Two taps," she said, and tapped, and the hand turned over, and went away, and the other one came.

Participant two had long fingers and a palm narrower than it was long, a water hand, and wore pink varnish chipped down to half-moons. Participant three was a broad, warm, heavy hand, and when its left came through after it she found that the tips of the first three fingers were hard and shiny, flattened, a little grooved across.

"This one plays something with strings," she said. "Guitar or fiddle. The left-hand fingertips are calloused." Then she sat back. "Kirsty. Put down that I got that from the calluses. It's not in the lines. Anybody could have told you it."

"I'll note it," said Kirsty, and wrote.

"Note every one I do like that."

There were more of them than she would have guessed. Participant four bit its nails and the skin at the side of them, and its hand was cold, and when she touched the mount of Luna it jerked a fraction before it settled. Five had a pen bump like Kirsty's, but clean. Six had a rough patch across the palm under the fingers, the dry shine of a barbell or a rowing oar, and smelled of coconut hand cream laid on thick over it. She read each of them by the lines first, as the books order, the heart, the head, the life; then the mounts; then the shape. And each time, before she had finished with the lines, the hand had already told her something else, something that was not chiromancy and never had been. She said those things aloud and told Kirsty to mark them, and by six the margin of Kirsty's sheet had a column of small ticks down it.

She had come in on the train thinking that with the face taken away she would find out at last what the hand alone was worth. By six she had stopped expecting to. Whoever was on the far side of the wood came through the sleeve with the hand, all the way to the wrist.

---

Seven was a water hand again, long and narrow and cool, and slightly damp in the palm. It lay where it was put and did not move. The heart line curved up between the first and second fingers, which is a warm line, a line for someone who gives a great deal. The head line sloped down toward the mount of the Moon: imagination, the books say, a mind that goes into pictures. She said both for the tape.

The life line came out from between thumb and first finger, curved, and then, a little under halfway down, it thinned, and feathered into four or five fine hairlines, and was gone. Below it, nearer the wrist, the skin was smooth.

"The life line's short," Theresa said, in her tape voice, "and it—"

The hand closed.

It did not snatch back through the sleeve. It shut, where it lay, into a fist, so quickly and so tightly that the knuckles went white, and stayed there on the pillowcase, and Theresa understood that whoever was on the other side of the wood had heard what everybody hears about that line, from a cousin, from a magazine, from a girl at a sleepover with a torch.

Beside her Kirsty sat up and said, "Participants aren't—"

Theresa put two fingers on the inside of the wrist, where the sleeve ended, the way you lay a hand on a horse.

"Listen to me," she said, not to the recorder but to the wood. "That line is not how long you'll live. It has never been that. It's energy: how yours runs, where it's strong, where it changes. Plenty of people have a short one and they're ninety and still going to the bingo. I've never seen a death in a hand in thirty-one years, and I'm not seeing one now. And here's something else. They change. The lines. I've watched them change on people who've come to me for twenty years. This one's barely started."

Under her fingers the pulse was going hard. She did not count it. It was not hers to count, and she would not have known what to do with the number if she had. She only kept her fingers where they were and waited, and after a while she felt the hand loosen, a knuckle at a time, until it lay open again in the lamplight, the short line and the smooth skin under it, and the palm shining a little where it had been clenched.

She read the mounts then, all of them, slowly, and put a great deal of warmth into the mount of Venus, which deserved it. She said nothing more about the life line. Then she tapped twice.

When the hand had gone Kirsty wrote for some time. "I'll have to log that," she said. "Protocol deviation. Reader addressed participant directly."

"Log it," said Theresa. "I'd do it again."

"I know you would." Kirsty did not look up. "I'd have stopped you if I'd thought you'd say anything else."

---

Eight and nine and ten came and went. Eleven had a plaster on its thumb and a scar across the mount of Mars, an old white line where something had once gone badly with a kitchen knife, and Theresa read the scar as a scar and told Kirsty so.

Then nothing came. Kirsty looked at her phone, and at the clock above the door, and at her phone again.

"Twelve's late," she said. "Give me a minute."

She went out by the door at the back. Theresa heard her on the other side of the partition, the scrape of the chair, a sigh, then a long pause; and then the black sleeve moved, and a right hand came out of it and lay on the pillowcase, palm up, as the others had been told to lie.

It was a hand of middling size, the palm a little longer than wide, fingers long. On the side of the middle finger, at the top joint, the skin had a faint green stain worked into it.

Theresa looked at the stain for a long moment. Then she took the hand by the fingertips, as she had taken eleven others, and turned it to the lamp, and began with the heart line, because the heart line is where she begins.

It ran from the edge of the palm under the fingers and curved up gently, and ended between the first and second fingers. "Warm, but careful with it," she said. "Somebody who'll love well once she's checked her figures." She did not know whether she said checked her figures because of the line or because of the girl who had put twelve participants in a spreadsheet and expected her to fail, and she said it anyway, because it was what she would have said, and she noted that she did not know.

The head line was long and almost straight, and right at its end, under the ring finger, it divided into a little fork, the two tines no longer than an eyelash. "The writer's fork," Theresa said. "The old readers give that to people who can see both sides of an argument, and can't leave either one alone." The life line was full and clear and ran down to the wrist. The fate line was faint. "Not settled yet," she said. "That's not a fault at this age. It would be odd if it were."

Then the mount of the Moon, at the outer edge of the palm above the wrist. She put her thumb to it, and the flesh there was fuller than she would have guessed from the rest of the hand, a soft deep pad that came back slowly.

"More imagination here than the rest of the hand lets on," she said. "A good deal more. Somebody who keeps it in a drawer." She heard, on the far side of the plywood, a very small sound that might have been the chair.

She tapped twice. The hand turned over. The back of it, too, had green ink on the knuckle. She tapped twice again, and the other one came, the left, and that was clean.

---

Kirsty walked her up to the subway. It was dark by half past four and raining the way it rains on Byres Road in December, a wet that hangs at head height and waits for you to walk into it. Kirsty had her hood up and her hands deep in her pockets.

"Twelve was me," she said at the top of the steps. "Eilidh didn't come. I panicked. I wanted twelve." She took a breath. "I'll have to take it out. It's contaminated. I knew what you'd be looking at, I've read the same books. It's no use."

"I know it was you," said Theresa. "You've got ink on you."

Kirsty took one hand out of her pocket and looked at it under the light of the station sign, the green on the finger.

"So none of that counts," she said.

"Not that one."

"Did you know any of the others?"

"I knew one played the fiddle. I told you so."

They stood in the mouth of the station with people pushing past them, wet anoraks, a man with a bag of messages from the Co-op.

"The Moon thing," Kirsty said. "Was that the hand? Or was it me?"

Theresa thought about it honestly, because the girl had been honest with her all afternoon and she owed her the same. She thought about the soft pad under her thumb, and the stain, and the leaky pen, and the letter on paper in October, and a girl who wanted twelve so badly she had put her own hand through a hole in a wall.

"I don't know," she said. "Put that in your write-up as well."

---

The email came at the end of February, when the arcade's front doors were propped open for the first mild afternoon of the year and the woman who did nails had put a chair outside. Theresa read it on her phone, and then went next door to the key-cutter, who had a printer, and paid him twenty pence for it.

Dear Mrs Gilfillan, it said. I said I'd tell you the results. With participant 12 excluded (for the reason you know) there were 11 valid participants. Each was shown all the readings in random order and asked to pick their own. One of the eleven picked correctly. That is what chance predicts. There was no effect. I'm sorry, if that's the word, but you said you wanted to know.

The one who picked correctly was participant 7. I have had to flag it in the discussion, because of the protocol deviation: the participant heard you speak to her directly, and would have recognised her reading from that rather than from its content. So strictly speaking it isn't clean either. My supervisor says this is the most interesting part of the dissertation and also the part most likely to lose me marks.

She wrote on her form that she had been frightened of her life line since she was eleven. She asked me to thank you.

Kirsty

P.S. I'm thinking of going on to do a master's. The Moon thing.

Theresa read it twice. Then she took the drawing pin out of the top corner of the old Cheiro chart on her wall, the big hand in brown ink with the mounts named for the planets and the lines labelled in copperplate, and pinned the printout up beside it, where anyone who sat down at her table would have it at the level of their eyes.

She was straightening it when the first customer of the afternoon came in out of the High Street, a heavy man in a hi-vis jacket with his rings already off, and sat down, and put both his hands on the table.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Chīromantīā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Palmistry, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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