Fingers Crossed

by Marie Anderson

I was looking through Mom’s binoculars at the cute neighbor boy mowing his lawn wearing only shorts when something in my own yard caught my eye. Near Mom’s rose bushes, a red tail hawk was feasting on a dead raccoon, pulling out and devouring red strands of guts. The raccoon’s sweet face was facing me, and then its eyes blinked.

What the? How could it be alive?

And then my bedroom door crashed open, and Ursula (aka The Evil Stepmother) burst in.

“Nora!” she screeched. “I thought I’d find you here, ogling the boy next door. You’re gonna wind up in prison if you don’t stop this Peeping Tom path you’re on.”

I suspect she knew it had been me peeping at her going at it in a parked car at our neighborhood park. I’d been walking the dog under a bright full moon close to midnight, and the curly-haired man all over her wasn’t my dad. That was three days ago. Dad was out of town on business, not due back until next week, and I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him. I knew he was still lusting for her and might not believe me. After all, he’d dismissed my suspicions that Ursula, Mom’s visiting nurse at the time, was overdosing Mom on pain meds, hastening her passing.

Now I faced The Evil Stepmother and muttered 66613, my zip code for Hell which is where all Evil Ones belong.

“I wasn’t looking at the neighbor, Urs, I was looking at that hawk eating a raccoon by Mom’s rose bushes.”

Ursula marched to the window, looked out. “What hawk? What raccoon?”

“You blind?” I looked back out the window and saw . . .nothing. No hawk. No raccoon.

What the?

The next morning, I glanced out my bedroom window and saw a red tail hawk attacking a raccoon by Mom’s rose bushes. The raccoon was nearly a goner. Only its eyes had life, blinking once, twice, then closing for good. Ursula suddenly appeared on the scene, shooing the hawk away. “Stupid,” I muttered. “Can’t condemn a bird for eating.” I grabbed the binoculars and looked through the lenses. But what I saw was no longer Ursula in the yard, but Ursula engulfed by flames strapped in a car next to a man not Dad.

The car was a silver Cadillac.

What the?

My mind spun with theories. Were Mom’s binoculars a portal to the future? Was her spirit from beyond behind this second sight?

Later that day, I was watching the latest season of The Crown when Ursula grabbed the remote and shut the TV off. “Nora. Pay attention please. I’m Ubering out right now for a spa weekend in Lake Geneva. Don’t forget to walk the damn dog, Nora!” And away she went, rolling her suitcase over the beige carpet that now covered the oak floors Mom had loved.

I hurried to the window and watched a curly-haired man place Ursula’s suitcase into the back seat and then open the front passenger side door. Ursula slid into the front seat. The man hurried around to the driver’s side, got behind the wheel, and the car purred off.

The car was a silver Cadillac.

I smiled. “Fingers crossed,” I whispered, and ambled back to resume watching The Crown.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Marie Anderson is a Chicago area married mother of three millennials. Her stories have appeared in dozens of publications, most recently (2025) in The Meadow, Raven's Muse, Bloomin' Onion, Kismet Magazine, and Fiction on the Web. Since 2009 she has led and learned from a writing critique group who meets at a local public library.