The Situation At Hand

My right hand opens like a rose, blood everywhere. For a moment, I lie there: nervy, open-eyed, gashed.

On the way to urgent care I look inside myself, poke the exposed splays of beige fatty cells. I wear a mask in the waiting room until a nurse calls my name. 

Eleven stitches later, there’s a new pathway scarred below the middle finger.

I need a good palm reader. 

*** 

It's an intuitive schematic. Like an astrological chart, the hands contain roadmaps of our past lives and practical concentrations.

The contours on our palms are both a fossilized record of early development and a hint at future well-being. Veins of the hands and arms lead to the most noble parts of the body, particularly the heart.

Look at your own hands (right now, for just a moment, please). Imagine your clutched fists in utero, causing creases while your body formed inside your mother’s. These are the moments we set our first intentions. 

Still, fate is fluid, and palm topography mutates over time. Physical lines etch subconscious detours. In this way, our wounds are oracles. 

*** 

As soon as the last sutures fall out, I email Mark Seltman to schedule a virtual consultation. I attach some high-res photos of my hands at varying angles. He responds almost immediately, correctly assumes that I’m right-hand dominant, and tells me: “Your scar is there to remind you of things you must do and not do.” 

During our Saturday morning session, Mark mentions that my left and right hands are quite different from each other, implying certain contradictions and dualities—I’m a communicator but also shy; I’m practical but don’t really care about money. The head line shows a tendency to rationalize feelings instead of verbalize them. 

Okay, but what does the scar mean?

He asks me how I got it. I slipped on the ice when I stepped out to smoke a cigarette a few weeks ago, I explain, fell hard and grasped something sharp on the way down. He tells me I need to quit smoking. I roll my eyes. 

The scar is a continuation of my fate line, which starts at the bottom of the palm near the wrist and runs up through the center, toward the middle finger. (Not everyone has one.)

In traditional palmistry, Saturn rules “the finger” and the pads of flesh beneath. 

Saturn is all about discipline, structure, and focus. More than once, Mark uses the phrase “it’s time to take the trash out.”

*** 

Most people experience their first Saturn return between the ages of 27 and 30. My Saturn returned last summer but didn’t fulfill something, and that’s why I have this scar. According to Mark.

Saturn return can also be a time for coming to grips with your father’s failings—both the parental figure and the patriarchal authority. My own father, also named Mark, was sharp and cynical. But he had a sense of humor. Loved the “pull my finger” joke, for instance. 

Around this time, I fixate on the daughters of Saturn: Vesta, Ceres, and Juno, goddesses of hearth, grain and marriage, respectively.  

Daddy Saturn is the Lord of the Rings, the Dweller at the Threshold, the Keeper of the Keys of the Gate. The ruler of Capricorn is associated with goats and goat-like creatures, Baphomet and other devils. 

Saturn is Satan in the way that he is also Santa. He brings gifts, but only if you earn them. He believes in the educational value of pain. 

There’s heat, if not light, on this malefic planet.  

*** 

It’s still winter. Saturn works hand-in-glove with Uranus, and I’m surrounded by more ice. I want to be somewhere warmer. Everything is hard. This feeling has its astrological merits, but it really is not a good feeling. 

I take the trash out. It’s a short walk to the dumpster and it begins to rain, slight and warm. I stroll back empty-handed, looking for something else to throw away. 

My desire-path leads me to a strip club that evening, where a topless woman purrs in my ear and I give her a fistful of cash. She says her name is Goddess, and I ask if I can read her palms. 

I regurgitate my own horoscope from earlier in the day—you’re a “real thinker,” family is important to you, etc. She eats it up. Putty in my hands. I clench my jaw tighter than any fist. 

With some hand-wringing, I make several choices, virtually none of which follow CDC-recommended guidelines. 

I wish I could show you, but I just want to hold your hand. 

The house lights come on and I squint in the smoky fluorescence. 

*** 

The skin around my scar is still red, a bad omen. I have no reason to believe Daddy Saturn has any sympathy for me. 

Mark (my palm reader, not my father) told me that you can’t escape it when you have a strong Saturn. The same way nobody can escape hard realities or inevitable consequences. 

In fact, the more you try, the more you pay the price. According to Saint-Germain’s Practical Palmistry, a person like me could be at higher risk of stroke and a heartless disposition. 

*** 

Ten weeks later, in an abortion clinic, I think about Goya’s Saturn.

In the myth, Saturn swallows his children. Goya’s version shows a frantic titan, wild-eyed and gape-mouthed, consuming his bloodline with ferocity. Is there guilt in his eyes? Or just the gilt of manic avoidance, that sinking-in feeling just before it all goes down the drain.

Saturn eventually barfs all the kids up from his belly. Vesta, the oldest child, was first to be swallowed and last to be regurgitated, the loneliest captive in her father’s stomach pit and the only one to be kept in total solitude. 

After much blood and thunder, Jupiter becomes god-king to the Romans. 

There are no happy families in classical mythology. It’s all too uroboric. 

***

I begin to wear a cheap ring on my middle finger, hoping it will remind me to please Daddy Saturn. The skin around it turns green by June. I take it off and put it in a jar of teeth. 

My TMJ starts acting up. It hurts enough that I go to a doctor, who has an eye-catching diamond ring on her middle finger.

She tells me to quit smoking. I ask her for a prescription for Chantix and she gives it to me. I haven’t filled it yet, but I might. Quitting isn’t the same as stopping. Just ask anyone over the hill. 

I ask experts, I read books, and all of it points to the same thing. Doctors and astrologists advise me to fix my bad habits. 

This is the situation at hand: Saturn is a slow-moving planet. If I live long enough, he’ll come back around to Capricorn, in my second house, when I’m 59. Very few get a third chance. 

Kathryn Parkman is an Aries (Scorpio rising, Leo moon). She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a boy and a cat. Her work has previously appeared in This Land Press, The Tulsa Voice, Apple in the Dark, and other publications.