The fortune-teller said in a past life I was a saloon dancer, a boa-clad high-stepper. She predicted I would travel by water taxi. That I’d love a man with hands hard-hewn. My mother said beware false prophets, shimmering idols, alabaster statues. I flocked to your arms of sinew and muscle, callous palms, sawdust and grit. A carpenter? mother said. Like Jesus, I told her. Like your father, she said, turning a paycheck into 80-proof fast as the Son of God turned water to wine.
The angular cut of your bone, carved to fit the chink in my baby’s breath armor. Mother said marry first for love, then money. We raced dusty highways, sticky grape Fanta bottles rolling at our feet. The sign said five miles to Vegas—there by dawn. Elvis said till death do you part, and we dodged rice rain, chased the sun.
The Lord says goodness and mercy will follow us all of our days, but at night, now, I follow you to the dingy after-hours bar on Howard Street, where I am not a dancer. I travel not by water taxi, but by rusty Ford Taurus, exhaust sputtering in my wake. I wait in the dank alley for you to emerge, for proof. I want to lie down in green pastures. But I force my eyes wide, open the window. Offer a limp dollar bill to a woman pushing a shopping cart nearby. “Bless you,” she says.
I stroke the chained cross that loops my neck. Even before I spot you, I see the future. I start the engine, drive fast, drive east, the pink scrim of sunrise glinting off the water tower next town over, beckoning like a crystal ball.
Lisa Ferranti's fiction has been a Top 25 finalist in a Glimmer Train contest, nominated for The Best American Short Stories 2023 Anthology, twice on the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and has three times been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Her work has appeared in RUBY Literary, Gordon Square Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Literary Mama, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio with her family.
'Foretold' was originally published in Reflex Fiction on June 9, 2018.
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