Cassie sat by her mother’s bedside waiting for her to die, a nervous excitement fizzing in her stomach. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother. She did. At any rate, she didn’t want her to die. However, the pallor of Maggie’s skin and the rasping of her breath suggested death was imminent and Cassie couldn’t help the fact that the thought of the inheritance coming her way filled her with excitement. She had spent so many years dreaming about it and soon it would be hers. Unless something miraculous happened and Maggie pulled through.
Cassie’s sister, Annabel, had gone into town to buy food for dinner and Cassie was relieved to be away from her judgmental gaze. A judgmental gaze with the green tinge of envy. Cassie might not be able to see everything yet, but she could see that Annabel was jealous. Her sister was annoyed that the gift was passing to Cassie and not her, but that really couldn’t be helped. It always passed to the oldest daughter upon the mother’s death (and the Anderson women always had daughters), so it was destined to pass from Maggie to Cassie, just as it had passed from Grandma Elspeth to Maggie before, and Great-Grandmother Sarah to Elspeth before that – all the way back to a darker time of forests and spirits, when gifts such as these had first been bestowed.
It was unfortunate for Annabel that she was the youngest. Cassie could understand her sister’s frustration. It was probably even more infuriating that she was only the youngest by about eight minutes. They had always been identical in every way, even Maggie had struggled to tell them apart. Soon, however, there would be one striking difference in their abilities. Still, at least Annabel would inherit all of their mother’s worldly possessions – her jewellery, the house they were sat in now with its surrounding woodland, and a not insignificant sum of money – enough that she would never have to work again at any rate. Cassie on the other hand would inherit the other-worldly gifts. And they both knew which was more valuable.

The sisters had long known that Maggie possessed the gift of second sight. When Grandma Elspeth had been alive, they had thought it was a joke. A silly story to both amuse the grandchildren and deter them from being bad.
‘I will see you,’ she would say. ‘I know what you’re going to do even before you do. There’s no hiding from Granny Elspeth.’
The girls would laugh, but also feel scared, and made sure that they always behaved themselves when they were in her house. However, there was always an element of doubt as to whether her stories were true. She was a crazy old woman who was always getting their names mixed up, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
When Elspeth died, not long after the girls’ ninth birthday, the gift passed to Maggie. Her grey eyes, which her daughters shared, turned darker and her carefree nature became more cautious. She would stare off in a trance as the visions came to her and the girls would gaze at her, mesmerised by the notes and drawings she would make of events yet to come. Then, one day, Maggie told Cassie and Annabel they were no longer allowed to go on the school trip to the zoo. They had both been looking forward to it for a month, so Cassie had cried and stamped her feet all day, while Annabel had accepted the decision and sat quietly in the corner reading. Annabel never wanted to unsettle their mother further. Later in the evening, Maggie had huddled the girls in her arms, tears soaking their nighties over the loss of school friends who had died in a bus crash on the motorway.
‘I’m so sorry my darlings,’ Maggie said as she held the twins tightly to her. ‘I saw the crash in a vision, and I knew. I knew straight away what it meant. Those poor, poor children. I’m just so glad you’re safe.’
So, it continued throughout their childhood. Trips were cancelled. Friends were banned from visiting the house, due to some perceived future slight. The sea could never be swum in as Maggie had once had a vision of some unidentified person drowning in the deep blue waters. Cassie and Annabel came of age with lives half-lived.

For a long time now, Cassie had realised that the problem with Maggie was that she didn’t view the visions as a gift at all. She only saw the downsides and the darkness. It was ironic really that someone with second sight could be so myopic towards its potential. Cassie had tried to speak to her mother, to make her understand what she was missing out on. Oh, when she had the gift, it would be her ticket to fame and fortune! In recent months they had seemed to drift further and further apart, Maggie growing increasingly annoyed with Cassie throughout her illness, to the point that she no longer wanted to be on her own with her. When Annabel had left to go shopping, Maggie had looked fearfully at her eldest daughter. She had not been able to speak for several days now, but the look in her fading grey eyes left Cassie with that all too familiar feeling that she had never been good enough.
Maggie was sleeping now, and Cassie wandered over to the window, her hands trailing along the books on the bookcase, the journal of meditations, the moon calendar. Her fingers rested on the worn green velvet of the armchair in the corner, also a hand-me-down from Granny Elspeth. It had a dint in the cushion that occasionally seemed to sigh as if it was being sat upon, although nobody was there. And though he had been put down five years ago, a few ginger hairs from their old cat Biscuit remained embedded in the velvet.
As she looked out the window at the autumn leaves, Cassie thought about her childhood and a lifetime of missed opportunities and unlived dreams. She thought about her future with the gift of knowledge and visions and no mother to hold her back. She was barely aware that she picked up the cushion, and had no plan as she walked back over to the bedside. As she held the cushion over her mother’s face, she finally realised why Maggie had started to distrust her.
Cassie sat down in the armchair that would now belong to Annabel and waited for the visions to start.
Across town at the supermarket fish counter, Annabel’s eyes turned a darker shade of grey and her shopping basket fell to the floor. Her senses were heightened as the world seemed to spin around her, a thundering train of visions streaming in front of her eyes – Cassie sat holding a cushion, an argument, broken plates, two sisters stood separated from each other at a funeral.
Annabel thought of Granny Elspeth always calling her Cassie, and she wondered when the mix-up had been made.