Suture by Nic Brewer

Author:Nic Brewer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2021-09-02T19:17:08+00:00

Eva lay in bed with her eyes closed while Dev moved around the room getting ready. She opened the closet and surveyed her options, closed the door without choosing anything, her bare feet quiet on the wood floors, until she stepped on that spot, and she drew in a short, sharp breath, probably looking over at Eva in their bed to see if she’d been disturbed. Eva didn’t move. Dev stood still a little longer, maybe drawing her eyes over the garment rack, maybe looking at Eva lie too still in the bed, clearly awake and pretending not to be. After a moment, Dev returned to the closet and pulled out three hangers, moving them to a hook near their bedroom door. She pulled out a pair of shoes and set them underneath the clothes, then crossed to the bed. Her lips brushed softy against Eva’s forehead.

“I set out an outfit for you like you asked, my love,” she whispered. “It’s those high-waisted, blue-and-green tartan pants you love, with a navy turtleneck and your dark-grey blazer. Your black suede ankle boots are there too.” Eva didn’t open her eyes yet, didn’t respond, but pushed her head against Dev’s face slightly. Dev stayed, brought her hand to Eva’s jawline, stroked her cheek softly with her thumb. You’ve got this, she didn’t say, because Eva was not a pep talk kind of woman. “I love you,” she said instead, lingering until she felt the muscles of Eva’s jaw relax, felt the weight of her wife’s head rest back fully into the pillow. As she passed through the doorway, Eva whispered thank you behind her. Dev paused. “Call me if you need anything at all,” she said, and heard Eva’s head brushing against the pillow in a nod.

From the bed, Eva listened to Dev put on her coat and shoes, leave their house, lock the door behind her. At last she opened her eyes, the dark static under her eyelids replaced by the cloudy, shapeless dark of her bedroom. The March sun had not yet risen, and Dev had made sure to turn all the lights off before she left. When it was dark, Eva had told her, the blindness didn’t feel so much like blindness; in the light, the foggy shadowscapes still felt like they were teasing her, a deceptive dynamicity that felt like taking an extra step at the bottom of a flight of stairs, turning her head toward a light but seeing nothing different, foot thudding into unexpected ground.

Once the details had started to leave her, they disappeared quickly: she’d had less than a year left with her sight, filming every moment of it, watching and rewatching the footage in the camera, memorizing every shadow, every shade of grey, every sound and its matching movement until she could just listen, until listening was watching, until it played on the insides of her eyelids on loop. And it had been a year since she’d stopped, a year of learning her house anew, a year of putting off acceptance in favour of an agreed-upon wallow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.