The Queue
The camp had no clocks, so the men told time by the palm reader's queue.
It started before the light did. Six men by the wire, eight by the first bell, and by the second bell the line ran past the latrine and bent back on itself. A man could read the hour off the heads in front of him. Half past, roughly. Getting on for noon.
The reader had no cards and no coin to turn. He had a splinter of charcoal saved from the stove and a square of cigarette paper traded for half a ration. He laid a man's hand on his knee like something breakable, and drew the lines the way he remembered them from better rooms. Life. Heart. The long one that forks early.
He never said what the lines meant. That was the courtesy. He described the hand and let the man build the rest himself.
Some stood in that line three hours for two minutes of it.
He had no future of his own. They all knew it. Still they queued, because a man with nothing left will spend a morning on a promise he does not quite believe, if the telling is gentle enough.
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