Loose Ends by Thea Liu
By the time dusk drapes over the banyan boughs, she can see her own heart.
It peers from between the fabric of her chest that has unraveled over the day, a scarlet blossom caught behind criss-crossed threads, and flutters against the thrice re-embroidered fingers she presses against it. Though she has lost the flesh and blood of her first body, the rhythm of her heart remains unchanged.
Once she pushes her heart back into the embrace of her lungs, she tugs the bars of her ribs closed. Clutching their white ropes with one hand, she uses the other to retrieve a needle from her dress — like her, it is made of threads; unlike her, this makes sense — and begins to sew.
It will take her all night; she comes apart so much faster now. There is her chest, a leering smile cut down its center. There is her neck, scarlet muscle and blue veins laid bare. And there is her flank, kidney trailing out in wine-red strands.
In the mornings she is a delightful oddity. In the afternoons she is a gruesome monster.
No wonder the last woman she asked for directions had screamed. The rest of the little town had followed and shut their doors, even those who had only hours ago touched the fraying threads at her neck curiously while saying I remember a girl, but that was years ago — passing by — she didn’t stay — town over the ridge — why are you looking for her — what are you —
Layer by layer, she heals the damage of the day: ribs then muscle then fat.
As she weaves together the hazel strands of her skin, she is glad to have known the craft of the thread in life. She remembers shaping fabric into dresses, drawing ruffled sleeves over small arms. She remembers touching her fingertips to the silk cotton blossom she’d embroidered over her daughter’s heart, then pressing a kiss to those fingertips.
Even now, the muscle memory remains.
She taps the new seam running down her chest, then her lips, before beginning to sew up her ruptured kidney.
The first knife had slid in there. That pain still echoes clearly. The individual violences leading up to that cut — rough hands, strange men, the lurching of salty waves — and following it had melded into one terrible bloodstain. After it was all over, shimmering darkness had cloaked her so snugly it was as if her corpse had been tucked into a black pearl instead of abandoned in a muddied alley a sea away from home.
A voice had spoken from the darkness, and she had bargained with it.
There is yet a beyond, it had urged, exasperated. Staying will consume your essence until nothing remains to cross over. It is a terrible deal.
Then offer me a better one.
It is all I am capable of. Do you accept?
The sun returns just after she closes up her neck, and she gathers up the body she traded her soul for to take the next day’s journey. Beyond the banyan grove lies a mountain, and beyond that rests the town she seeks. It is a long walk, especially for feet made of thread, but she has grown used to long walks during her decade of death. She has limped over unfamiliar lands and bartered her way across unfamiliar oceans, unraveling and then healing herself hundreds of times over until she found her way home. The people who once called her neighbor called her demon and tried to burn her, but they weren’t who she sought anyway. She has been venturing the unknown since — though perhaps her wandering is nearing its end.
Her path marks itself upon her body. The steep incline peels open her clavicle. The cedar forest punctures gaps over her abdomen. The steel bridge cuts long strips to expose her bones. The serpentine road carves tear tracks down to her chin. Yet the people of the town answer her questions, follow her as she approaches a house so shrouded by ivy its windows are sightless.
The town’s resilience is explained when a young woman opens the door. Though one is flesh and the other fabric, one alive and one dead, the two are nearly mirrors in appearance, in posture, in their inhalations of shock.
The woman composed of thread cups her daughter’s face with a ragged hand and senses the flinch. Many have shivered at seeing her embroidery organs, but this flinch is different: it is the recoil of sorrow festered into resentment. She always knew her disappearance would be taken as abandonment.
“I didn’t want to leave.”
There is so much more she could say, yet that is all she truly yearned to say, all she needed her posthumous odyssey to culminate in. When her daughter’s cheek leans into her palm instead of twitching away — she unravels.
From skin and sinew to woven doll to, now, a mound of hazel and saffron and maroon string. Only her heart remains, shaped like the blossom of a silk cotton tree.
The voice returns, unchanged after a decade.
You could have had an afterlife. Do you regret this?
As her daughter cradles the fire-orange flower, she replies,
No.
