Apex Magazine: Issue 113, October 2018 by Cassandra Khaw & Hassan Abdulrazzak & Kristi DeMeester & Chesya Burke & Tim Waggoner

Author:Cassandra Khaw & Hassan Abdulrazzak & Kristi DeMeester & Chesya Burke & Tim Waggoner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Apex Publications

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With Lips Sewn Shut by Kristi DeMeester

4,200 words

My brothers imagined themselves the first to speak without mouths—their fingers blood-pricked from learning how to pass a needle through lace—but it was only my mother and I who could understand the heaviness of the things we could not say. Only my mother and I who had learned how to speak with small sounds that were not words at all.

“How much longer?” they asked with the harsh grunts they taught themselves. Listening to them was like hearing one voice but also like a roaring. Like the sound of the river in the dark. “Our fingers ache,” they said, and I kept my eyes cast down because they did not know how they left their stain all over everything. It was not beautiful to leave parts of yourself behind.

But there were only the two of us to do the sewing, and it needed done more quickly, so my mother gathered my brothers to her skirts and fed them tinctured milk from the tiny spoon she carried around her neck until their eyes fluttered shut and then stitched their mouths closed. This was the way it had always been done. Girls’ mouths sewn closed and born without names so that we might focus on our work. If a mother gave her girl child a name, there was violence at the end of it and so I was Sister to my brothers and nothing more. My brothers had names, but I never learned to speak them properly.

When my brothers woke, my mother traced her fingers over the tears pearled on their cheeks and pricked each of their fingers until their hands were painted in scarlet and vermillion and crimson. How they wept! Their shoulders shaking in silence as they caught at my mother’s arms, her hair, her breasts, and behind my own sealed mouth, I bared my teeth.

My mother and I were meant for our work, meant to bend to it, but my brothers did not know anything other than the freedom of the river; the warm, iron scent of earth slick against their skin as they lifted their voices into the sky. They did not understand how the silence was a necessary part of sewing lace.

Over and over, my mother taught them how to thread a needle, how to coax lace—thin and airy as a spider’s web—from the movements of their hands. Here, her hands said. Like this. Forget your voice. Forget there was once anything other than this movement. It won’t be for long. I promise.

Under her touch, they jumped and fidgeted and stared out the window at the pear tree they could no longer climb. They coaxed the lace from their needles, but it was not quite as fine as it should be, so it did not fetch a high price when my mother ventured into the city to sell it.

My brothers’ fingers did not grow calloused, as ours were. Back and forth, they grunted

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