Her Mother's Sewing Box

These are the moments in between, the ones yet to be. She had an overbite that cut into the crop of her jaw, a sinewy colossus that made her appear sideways and off-centre. The harridan wore frocks stitched from burlap sacs she’d found in the dustbin behind the haberdasher’s. She hemmed and cross-stitched odd strips of broadcloth with the bone needle she’d stolen from her mother’s sewing box, the same one she kept a hatcheck stub and a quail’s foot in. A taffeta dress; a broach with a cameo-face and a swath of pale blue linen, these are the things, cross-stitched and hemmed in between.