Crone
by Alexina Dalgetty
See warp, see weft, see my needle slide in, in, in, see the rent grow, see the once firm linen with lace cloud gilding. I patch, I weave, the threads lined up to occupy blank territories, I struggle to stem the swift advance of space between the cross of warp and weft. Season turns to season turns my fabric to effect. But happenstance intervenes and the snowy grace of coverlet meets fresh disorder. I race to fill the sprawls between the threads to keep the winds and sun and showers at bay, but they are tugged and torn and swept away. I am a glaring overheated pause. My fingers, lined with age beyond the history of this earth beneath my bony feet, push the needle to create the smallest net against disaster. It cannot halt them all. I calm my breath, all is not lost, and then I see another growing yaw burned off by some long distant folly or disaster. I sew, I sew, I pause for sustenance. Cheese and bread, a sandwich lacking spread. No time. No time. I scrabble against the tick tick ticking blast, thread in the needle, blood on my finger, fire in the air. The world is my table, but my cloth no longer protects its fine grains and harvests from the heat of unchecked pots. A rumble and the surface shifts. The cloth catches a corner, larger and larger the gapes. I run in desperation for a thicker silk, a stronger cord, a string, a coarseness rough on my already roughened skin. In out, in out, the needle goes. A patch complete, I cheer and grin a hag’s grimace. All is soft and pillowing yet a screech in my brain whispers another rent, another rent. I am the old, old she, who skipped across the rocks to hammer my hills in place. Tap tap. Desperate to protect their beauty I dressed them plain but fine in simple weaves of white, cloud white tablecloth. Highly unsuspicious. A mean protection but it held its place from year to year to near infinity and now the holes begin. It’s a curious fact that an aging needlewoman with little to her name but silk from fine spiders and an ever-sharp needle gifted from the predawn silver miners, kept sharp with minty grit from herbs unknown, should keep this table covered with thread protection. Day after day, spring summer fall winter, another hole, another. The cheese sits heavy, but I weave. I patch. Another rent, another. The rocky edge of this fine table burps and wretches, a danger to us all.
Alexina Dalgetty lives and writes in Camrose, Alberta. Alexina’s debut novel The Cleaning Woman’s Daughter (2023) is published by Liquorice Fish Books, an imprint of Cinnamon Press.