by Amanda Ashworth
In fifth grade, I got in trouble for reading palms at school.
I read about it in a book my mom brought home from Goodwill, The Mysteries of the Universe. It was a big hardback book, the cover flecked with stars. Inside: pyramids, ley lines, haunted castles, the meanings of dreams, and—most magical of all to me—palmistry. I don’t think my mother bought it for the content. I think she just liked the look of it. But she brought it into our house, and that was enough.
The hand diagrams became my favorite. How the heart line curved like a river, how the life line looped around the base of the thumb like a moat. I liked the idea that we were born with stories etched into our skin. That maybe the body wasn’t just a body, but a book.
At recess, kids lined up for me to trace their palms with a pencil eraser. I told them they’d travel far, fall in love, dodge disaster, maybe get famous. I didn’t really know what I was doing when I was reading my classmates’ palms. It was mostly play, gentle guesses, and playground prophecy. Some of them said I had a gift. Others ran off pretending to be cursed. One told her mother, and her mother called the school.
Her mother told the school I was “dabbling.” That word felt delicious and dangerous. Like I’d stepped too close to something adults couldn’t quite name.
My teacher, Ms. Brewer, wore floor-length skirts and bracelets that jingled when she moved. Every day, no matter the weather, she took us outside for a walk. We’d walk the carpool path, which was long and lined with trees. I’m sure it ate into instruction time, but she never missed a day. I wonder now if it was for us, or for her.
We shared a birthday, Ms. Brewer and I. When she told me, I was stunned, like we were twins in some secret way. I had never met anyone with my birthday before.
She’d let me read her palm once, in the hush of free reading time. She didn’t say if she believed me. But she let me look.
When the complaints started, she called me up to her desk. “You’ll have to stop,” she said softly. “People are upset.”
I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong. To me, it was like reading a story written on someone’s hand. The idea that truth might live in our skin, that mystery might be part of us, felt beautiful, not dangerous.
That classroom lives inside me, a room where mystery was both scolded and softly permitted. A room with paper stars taped to the ceiling, and a teacher who walked us under the trees, every day, like she was teaching us something—just not the kind of thing that could be tested.
Amanda Ashworth is an English teacher and writer raised in rural Tennessee. She keeps one foot in the classroom and the other in the creek. Rooted in Appalachian tradition and storytelling, her work explores memory, lineage, and Southern womanhood.
January House Literary Journal 
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