The Seamstress

Kristine gave us a really interesting prompt last year at the writing retreat. She brought a big stack of photos she had taken and handed one to each of us. We were to write something inspired by the photo. Here is the one I got:

I can’t rightly remember what the photo was. I think I posted it upside down, because after Kristine told me what it was (and I’m pissed I forget), I can now see a face in the top and it’s supposed to be a hat or headdress.

Anyway, I wrote the following short thing about a piece of embroidery, because that’s what it looked like to me!

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He caressed the fabric, sensitive hands marking each texture, each line, each ridge.  The softness of the thread, the slight catch of a small nick in his skin snagging on the base fabric.  He thought it might be wool.  It had a slight bumpy and scratchy texture on the back that reminded him of his grandfather’s jacket, an old and worn piece of cloth buried with the old man.  

The embroiderer  (embroider?  Embroideress?  He had no idea what it was called….) was skilled.  Each leaf and feather and shell perfect.  The work, care, and skill that went into this forgotten piece of artistry was next level – a masterpiece of perfection, beauty, and something that made his heart ache.  

He closed his eyes and let his imagination steal into his thoughts, picturing wrinkled and gnarled hands patiently working a needle through the fabric, pulling thread juuuuuuuuuust tight enough, adding a bead here, a bead there, tying tiny knots of floss.  Smoothing out the precious work in much the same way he was running his hands over it now.

He wondered if the artist, for that’s what this was, a work of art, had been to the beach.  The colors and images imprinted in the fabric suggested heat and water.  He pictured somewhere in the Caribbean?  Some tropical place with bleached white shells and feathered birds who flaunted colorful plumage in mating dances among the waves.

He pictured a young woman dancing among those birds, those shells, those waves, her hair flying about her, the wind teasing her dark strands into knotted cords like the threaded knots on the fabric.  There was music, of course, played by faceless musicians back among the swaying palms, tapping a staccato rhythm that made the blood burn and sweat pool at the small of the back.  This seductive bird danced at sunset, when the sky shifted from blue to orange and red – from calm to fire – a fire that inspired her own mating dance to entice a lover.

Did the artist, embroiderer, needlepoint lady remember this night?  Was this a night from her past?  A night of dance, of music, of passion?  Did she recall it one lonely day as she pawed through her craft supplies?  Did she put aside thoughts of retirement, absent children and grandchildren to remember a lost night and translate it onto an old piece of fabric with Caribbean threads?

He’d never know.  It came in a box labeled “Bea’s Things”, taken from her estate sale.  He was an appraiser and his job was to sort the things of dead people.  He saw so many of these boxes, labeled “So-and-so’s Things”, all with stories to tell and no one to tell them.  Most of these things made his heart ache.  He wondered at his choice of career.  He was too soft for this.  This hand-embroidered piece of fabric had something to say and he wished, as he always wished, that he had the time to say it for Bea.