Little Repairs

Got a little bad news the other day. My body doesn’t want to do what it should… again. So, while musing about my broken bits and how nice it would be to simply remove what I don’t like and repair myself, I wrote a little something.

Some events and people in this story exist(ed) for me. I did, in fact, receive a glittery pink poison pen letter, once upon a time, back when kids passed notes not texts (sorry for aging myself). I have monsters who occasionally come to mind whose faces I’ve forgotten, but whose words I can’t lose to the void no matter how hard I try.

My grandfather died broken, abandoned, and alone, which was better than he deserved. My father has never tasted alcohol and thankfully is doing well after a kidney transplant earlier this year. I hope he’s around for a very long time. I unartfully cobble stories from experience, memory, dreams, and nightmares. I probably write through too much of my pain.

The harder I push, the deeper the pain that appears in my words. Some hurts run so deep, that you don’t want to uncover them, others you would prefer to excise and forget. I keep pushing to find my limit, and I haven’t found it yet. I know could’ve used a seamstress to put me back together occasionally. My needlework has always been truly awful.

I certainly hope I’m better at telling a story.

“A little repair for a little tear,” Artie hummed tunelessly as she took out her sewing kit.  She sorted her threads by hue and type, searching for the perfect match. Not quite red, not quite pink, a steady shade of visceral off-white to match the canvas before her. She perched her glasses on her nose and licked the blunt end of the thread before passing it through the eye of her needle. Such repairs had once been simple, the needle finer, the seams less conspicuous against the whole. But age had taken more from her than just a steady hand. Artie pushed her lenses up and peered down at her tear.

This would be a small patch; much less invasive than others she had endured. But there was so little left of the original to sew back together, that the prognosis was grim.

So much damage over the years.

It hadn’t seemed so dire when the darning was superficial, a little tear on the surface here and there. Here and there, little tears, the song her mother once sang. A skinned knee, a scraped elbow, but there was always more under the surface. Her mother had repaired the first deep tears, bullies, and lost pets, mending her from the first friend to betray her with a letter of venomous words written in pink glitter pen. But as she grew, the damage was often too deep and too shameful, and she had learned to stitch herself whole again in secret. Her first deep repair was scarred into ugliness forever when her mentor forced himself into her in return for a ride home one late Saturday night.

Time made her a skilled seamstress. Even the magnifying glass hardly revealed the last time the husband they chose for her came home drunk and in need of a punching bag. His untimely death was still blamed on the alcohol, by eyes too accustomed to such mundane things as an addict’s death to notice the tidy line of viscera pink French knots that sewed his heart shut.

She shook her head to stop it from wandering, the product, no doubt, of one too many slipped stitches over the years. Bits of memory excised and sewn up, others shored up and securely held in place for safekeeping. Her mind was a quilt of choices, just as the heart lying in front of her was a patchwork of mending the damage those choices had done to her.

With the needle held between her lined lips, she tied the crimson thread into a knot at one end. This was the last little repair she would be able to manage with her own hands. Arthritis had rendered her all but useless. These stitches would not be neat and tidy. No matter. Pretty repairs were no longer needed. Artie was utterly alone in the world. Safe in her room at the hospital, where no one would bother to come in until the smell of her demise wafted into the hallway.

And that will be soon enough, but not today.

There was one last job the seamstress needed to do. The angel of death had stalked the wing long enough. Old Mrs. Murphy had been about to finally see her estranged daughter again. It had taken so many long nights of mending to excise the fear and hate out of the old bigot, to enable her to call her daughter and apologize for the years of trying to “change her”, then more of disgusted negligence.

Nurse Aimee had no right to snuff out the light she’d worked so hard to reignite.

Artie’s heart was all but done, that pesky little clog working its way through her body even as she cut and sewed her arteries back together to extend her time. One last darn in the tapestry of her life. She tied off the thread and clipped it, slipping the scissors into the pocket of her hospital-issued robe.

She would not need thread or needles for this last fix. Just a razor-sharp cut to the side of Nurse Aimee’s neck as she slouched napping at her station. Artie’s feet slowed and her thoughts began to scramble and glitch like the old television she’d refused to give up long after the neighbors all went to flat screens and streaming. Barclay deserved what was coming to him. His fists were not a fair price for saying “I do.”

No, not Barclay. Not her grandfather, not her debate coach, not her friend Carla’s new husband… They had all deserved their patches, but this was not about them. This was about night nurse Aimee, who had been killing her friends on the ward. As though geriatric meant disposable.

Maybe it does, to some.

A seamstress was a builder, a creator, repairing and making stronger that which was threadbare and weak. Sometimes, that required picking out a bad seam or pulling a loose thread.

Nurse Aimee was just where she’d been left after drinking her morphine-laced froufrou mochaccino whatever. So much sugar in that thing that she would hardly notice the bitterness of the drug. Artie had already lost movement in her left arm. It was all right. She only needed one hand. This job called for a simple cut. She opened her scissors flat and took a breath.

“Who’s the angel of death now, you cranky bitch?” she hissed in the comatose woman’s ear, sliding the sharp metal across her slowly pulsing carotid.

Too tired to make the trek back down the hall to her room, she closed the scissors and dropped them in her lap. It was a shame that the others would decide the story based on the last sentence of it. But when the ladies on the ward stopped dropping like flies, and some of them even got to heal, the inaccuracy of the story wouldn’t really matter.

She felt a stitch pop, then another. That last repair wasn’t holding at all. But as her mother had said that night, suitcases packed by the door as she worked on Father’s liver while he lay in another rotgut-induced stupor-- Some repairs just have to be good enough to last the night.

Sometimes, you just needed a stitch to hold long enough to leave the scene of the crime before it was discovered, and sometimes, leaving wasn’t the point.

End