Curled inside the drum, there is just enough room for me, an echo, and the blanket you knitted. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to wash it. You did something complicated after it was done — pinned it out damp on the rug, like a wet cat. Blocking, you said. Like actors hitting tape-marks. Remember to project all the way up to the gods.
Every turn tangles me deeper. Red yarn like a nosebleed. Like a fire curtain. Like a lolling tongue. A carpet for a grand entrance. Standing ovation — exeunt stage left. You never fussed over pulled threads, even though I’d watched it emerge from your fingers, from nothing; marvelled at all the things it could be. A cat burrito. A picnic blanket. A sick bed. We tumble together in the delicate spin and it cushions me against perforated metal. It shrinks. I shrink. The world has shrunk since you are gone.
I peg myself out on the line. Spring is still a faraway promise and the sunlight is too cold to feel, but the wind works just as well. Only the blanket has hard edges now, knots merging into one another, and I can no longer put my fingers through it. It has felted, stiffened, like a cartoon. A ruined red rectangle, casting shadows against the fence like bladed lines of a zoetrope, its dark angles shifting against the light. Only the illusion of movement, of life passing by, paused in motion.
I hang by the loose skin of my underarms and let the wind slice through me, make holes where there once were stitches, shredding me down to nothing but loops of yarn and sinew; unravelled fingertip threads, trailing across frozen grass.
Jo Gatford is a short writer who writes short things. Her work has most
recently been published by Had, Flash Frog, The Oxford Prize and
Stanchion. Some of it even wins prizes, sometimes. She is also a
novelist, poet and scriptwriter, and edits other people's words for her
supper. More at www.jogatford.com and various socials @jmgatford
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