Lady Octopus

Octopus sculpture by Charlotte Loring

by Marie Anderson

Lausen stared through the window at the octopus on the wall of Aunt Schik’s Art Gallery. Her octopus! Painted with acrylics in purple, red, and blue, with fierce green marble eyes. Eyes that had seen what had happened to Lausen. The body and eight legs sculpted from newspapers, paper towels, aluminum foil, and, if Lausen’s mom had for once been truthful, something else. Something Lausen could use right now. Lausen’s mom, sister-in-law to Aunt Schik, had created Lady Octopus ten years ago for Lausen’s 16th birthday. How had she ended up in Aunt Schik’s Art Gallery? With a price tag of $1000 dangling from the lower right edge of the frame!

Lausen flung open the door and marched into the gallery. From behind a counter bookended by potted lush green plants with suspicious-looking leaves of three, Aunt Schik scowled.

“Well, well, well. The Prodigal Girl has returned. What have you been doing lo these many months, Dear?”

“Recovering, Aunt Schik. That shouldn’t surprise you.”

“Have you an appointment, Dear?”

“That’s my octopus! What’s she doing here?”

“Your late mother gave it to me, Dear.”

“She’s mine! And you’re lying. You stole her off the wall in my bedroom after Mom died.”

“I wouldn’t dream of stealing, Dear. If you’d wanted it, why did you leave it behind when you moved out? And why didn’t you scurry back and claim it after your poor mother passed? I don’t recall seeing you at her celebration of life.”

“So you did take her! Mom didn’t give her to you! I want her back!”

Lausen strode to the octopus, grabbed the frame, yanked, but it stayed fast to the wall.

“You may certainly purchase it, Dear. I can offer you a ten percent family discount. Though a daughter who can’t bother to show up to help her ailing mother, who can’t bother to deal with all the tasks involved after someone departs these mortal coils, has perhaps lost her right to be considered family.”

Angry tears spilled, blurring Lausen’s eyes. “You of all people know why that happened. And if you’ve conveniently forgotten, ask your husband. My uncle. My mom believed her baby brother over me. Her daughter. I’d always be her baby girl, she’d once told me. Hah.”

“False memories, Dear. Perhaps planted by an incompetent therapist.”

“She’s mine. I want her back.”

“Repeating that won’t make it happen, Dear.”

Lausen clenched her fists. Eyeballed the distance between her fists and Lady Octopus’s head. She turned to face Aunt Schik. “So what will make it happen? Dear.”

“$900. Cash, not check, not credit card, not crypto. Dear.”

Lausen nodded, turned back to her Octopus, and rammed her fist into the beautiful, doomed invertebrate’s head.

Aunt Schik shrieked. “What the hell? I’m calling the cops!”

Lausen pulled green $100-bills from the shattered head. Stuffed them in her pockets and ran out the door. She’d count them later, but no doubt there was plenty to keep her numbed for a while.

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Marie Anderson is a Chicago area married mother of three millennials and a grandmother of Summer Marie. About 120 of her stories have appeared in about 100 publications. She leads and learns from a local public library's writing critique group and is an occasional first reader for the publication, Five Minutes. She also currently volunteers as a reader/evaluator for Flash Fiction Magazine.

Charlotte Loring is a high school senior in the Chicagoland area. She combines mixed media artwork to express emotion, realism, and nature. You can find more of her artwork here.

 

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.