i have pieced many quilts in my fifteen years, my fingers calloused and red from the work, my eyes used to tracing careful stitches between separate cuts, used to spreading the fabrics around the livingroom floor and my bedroom floor and the kitchen floor and the back porch deck, because Grandma liked the way it made our floor look like joseph’s colored coat or noah’s thriving ark, but i’ve never pieced a quilt down here, in the dark, in Grandma’s cellar, my work weaving beneath the watchful eyes of all her carefully placed preserves, jellies and jams and pickles and olives, pears and peaches and onions and beans, their reds and yellows and greens and blacks mirrored in the reds and yellows and greens and blacks of the calico fabrics I snip and place, and it’s here that i piece them, place them, cut them, fold them, because down here there’s no uncle james to move my cutting board from the table while he talks about choosing foster care, down here there’s no aunt marjean to unplug my iron while she tells him they’ll lose the money from the will if they do give me up, down here there’s no little cousins running through my scrap pile yelling “you can buy a nicer quilt for cheaper at the store, half-brain!”, down here there’s no older cousins, their paws reaching for the handles of my scissors and the round edge of my rotary blade, holding them to my hair, threatening to cut off my braids if i don’t give them the fabric money Grandma pressed into my palm last week, down here is where i do it because before, each time when i handed a finished
quilt to Grandma, her eyes lit up, and she pulled it in for a heavy deep breath, and she told me she could smell my pricked fingers and careful placing and midnight sweat, and it smelled like love, she said, and it smelled like me, she said, her golden girl, and she hasn’t breathed like that since she fell and broke her spine, and she hasn’t smelled like that since her body seized up and died, but maybe, just maybe, since this quilt will wrap her up while she’s settled in the grave til kingdom come, maybe this’ll be the first thing she breathes in when jesus reaches for her hand, and maybe it’ll make her think of me, and maybe she’ll ask jesus to reach for me, too, wretched child that i am, because no one’s ever wanted me but her, not even mom, and maybe he will take convincing, too.
Mikayla Johnson works as editor in chief at Inscape journal. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Evermore Review, AWE (A Woman's Experience), and Dialogue.
Art by M. Alice Abrams
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