Winter of Needle and Thread

By Caroline Bock

Dedicated to Grace Cavalieri

Nana makes you learn needle and thread and you stick your fingers—and blood—“Don’t bleed on the cloth,” she says. In your hands is a scrap, an addition to the family’s patchwork quilt. “Stitch. Even stitches,” she insists. A bulb of red appears as you pull the needle through your skin, and more blood, and she hits you with her boot on the side of your head, and you bend and stitch. Blood drips on the ice-hard ground, and you stitch. The sliver of a needle slides in and out, next to your bone, and you flinch. She hits you with her boot, and you stitch. Lift the thread through the heterodox cloth. Thread it through your skin and bone. Stitch the batting and backing; sew, swiftly. The needle pricks the cloth as if connected to a machine, not your throbbing fingers. “Faster, snow is in the forecast,“ she says. She has plied this trade since coming to this country from Sicily. She survived because of the needle and thread, a seamstress since age thirteen. We sit outside on wrought-iron garden chairs because the razor-thin air is good for our lungs, hers being very old and yours being only ten years old. You have no able mother, and your Pop has given you to Nana’s care. Her breath is smoked with black licorice cough drops. Her teeth are false, ruined over the years (“Use a scissors, not your teeth, or you’ll find yourself as toothless as me, a strega too, a witch.”). Her hair, once the same chestnut as yours, now frizzes coarsely metallic. “Come, closer to me,” she says, picking at the cloth, “let me see.” The seams are straight and neat enough, though she gives a bitter smile of superiority; her stitches would be straighter and neater. She is making you learn because you insisted you would never learn. You will have no soup, no warmth, until you finish. Some people, you will discover, will think they know what it is you need to know. They will know nothing about you—only that they see themselves in you. “You were born to needle and thread like me,” she says, distracted by the crows cutting across the twilight, and you stitch. And stitch. Stitch. You sew her into the quilt, and then, to her outrage, snip yourself free of the thread with your pair of scissors. You skip over the fence and, transformed, you fly off into the wintery candor of moon and crows. The promised snow falls, frozen spikes, erratic needlework, and you look back: the ice sews a final lattice around her. The other crows pluck out her eyes. And after all, the story should be that you take up the needle and thread, but you never do. You never bend your head over handiwork again. You have left buttons dangling and hems too long. Birthrights are often forsaken, and the needle and thread is yours. No one knows you as well as you know yourself. She might have shouted at you to return, to rip out seams, to incant forgiveness, but you are long gone, soaring on the snow-crisp winds toward southern skies.

Caroline Bock’s debut short story collection, Carry Her Home, is the winner of the 2018 Fiction Award from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Bock is also the author of the young adult novels Lie and Before My Eyes, from St. Martin’s Press. In 2018, the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County awarded her an Artists & Scholars grant for her novel-in-progress. She is a lecturer at Marymount University and leads creative writing workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. Learn more about Caroline at www.carolinebockauthor.com and follow her on Twitter @cabockwrites, Facebook @CarolineBockAuthor, and Instagram @CarolineBockAuthor.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash.