By the fire, she knits one, purls two, the soft click of needles a steady metronome. She plucks a strand of her silver hair and braids it into the next row.
Shaping: the frequency of decreasing and/or increasing stitches to shape a garment. A sweater. A scarf. Ten tiny toes.
She casts off and makes a slip knot. She weaves in a pine needle for adventurousness, an eagle’s feather for foresight, and crescent fingernail clippings saved from her own dear ones for love. The sky darkens, and still her arthritic hands work like the counting of a rosary, lacing a dragonfly’s wing, a fox’s whisker, a hollow porcupine quill, into each measured row. The knitwork presses on her lap, the moon through the window a silver-scaled bowl. The room wafts bergamot, burnt switchgrass, and the bitter coffee she’s drank throughout the night.
Bobble: a decorative technique created by weaving through the same stitch multiple times. A star. A tulip ear. A rosebud mouth.
She shuts her eyes, the knitted yarn a solid weight on her hollow belly. She strokes the soft lamb’s wool hand dyed with bloodroot, walnut hulls, and pokeweed berries, and whispers a lullaby. Husha husha. At dawn, she’ll bury her finished creation, limp and heavy as a sleeping child, in the far end of the garden, opposite the six crosses that bear the names of her own sweet babes who never got to run or play or stomp, barefooted, through rainy-day puddles. Later, when the sun disappears and the man-in-the-moon watches, she’ll make a fire beside the hollow where the knitted form lies underground. She’ll stretch her body like a spider’s web across the tamped down soil and wait for the rain to anoint them; her lungs will fill with petrichor; and soon, small buds will sprout beneath her: an elbow, a finger, a button nose.
Backstitch: a method of stitching that doubles back on itself to strengthen the seams. Make the seams tighter. Stronger. Unbreakable.
Maybe her husband will come back then. He’ll stride past the grey crosses, the cedar wood pitted and mottled no matter how many times she paints them white or retraces the etched angels with a blade. He’ll open the door, filling the cabin with the metallic scents of cold and city-life. She’ll be there by the stoked fire with a button-nosed child, barefooted and mud-streaked, his apple-smooth cheeks glowing as if a light burns deep within his tiny, knitted heart.
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Dawn Miller’s writing appears or is forthcoming in The Forge, The Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brink, Room, and Fractured Lit, among others. Her work was shortlisted for the 2023 Bath Flash Fiction Award. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect on Twitter @DawnFMiller1 and Instagram @dawnmillerwriter.