Weird Tales #327 by Tanith Lee & Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Tanith Lee & Darrell Schweitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, horror, weird tales, anthology, magazine
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

THE QUILTER, by Michelle Cacho-Negrete

Surrounded by velvets, silks and cottons, The Quilter dreams. Large spools of thread arranged by color line the walls. Thimbles, like silver wedding bands, nestle in a cracked china bowl. The sewing machine oiled and gleaming, a ­pincushion pricked with needles and pins like tiny metal hairs, scissors, pinking shears, rotary boards and cutters and extra blades, everything patiently waits. Outside, trees are blowing green gauze in the melting rain, and clouds flow the cool gray of a coming storm across the sky.

The dreaming isn’t hers, it’s the family’s whose father left scraps of clothing, neatly folded memories in two brown paper bags. A surprise for his wife, he’d explained, for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. He kept glancing at the bags as he spoke leaning towards her, glowing in an arc of light from the window behind him. The Quilter nodded through a pale mist from their steaming mugs of tea as they lifted their cups to their lips. He offered snapshots conjured from words, a photograph album he’d barely opened when she stopped him.

“The fabric will tell me,” she’d said, smiling. “When do you need it finished?” He’d looked at her curiously, leaning back in his chair again, but he’d seen her quilts and trusted her.

“Five weeks. Is that enough time?”

She nodded and said, “Done.”

Through the open door, she watched his ­cautious steps over the wet stones, shoulders stooped in a tan raincoat, hat tipped forward to shield his eyes, somewhat blurry in the rain falling all around. Turning before he slid into his car, he’d waved and she waved back. Then the car door slammed, the engine coughed wetly, and mud sucked at the wheels along her dirt driveway until he reached the road and gave a quick honk good-by.

She waved again then closed the door and leaned against it listening to the rap of the rain against the windows. Then, eager to get to work, she washed the mugs quickly, settled onto the rug and pulled the family’s past from the bags.

* * * *

This is how it always begins: sorting, cradling a piece in her hands, her fingers trailing along its length, and finally weaving disparate pieces into a fabric memoir. From the vibrant disarray sprawled over the rug, her fingers confidently examine each old scrap like jigsaw puzzle pieces to see what should go where; remnants of a cotton nightgown, of children’s clothing, of shirts, blouses, sheets, satin dress, silk ties, so much! She closes her eyes to blind herself to the temptation of guesses, wanting the cloth to tell the story, and as her hands move, the fabrics become pages of a book written in Braille. Images travel through her fingers to the place that reads cloth; a constant flow into a mind-vase, then a flow back through her fingers into the patterns of the quilt, and the vase is empty again once the quilt is done. Her own memories long ago vanished of their own volition and never intrude on those other lives she takes into herself and flings out in an explosion of beauty.

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