Nona’s magic was woven between needles. Plop her in a desert and she’d find twined twigs and before she’d broken a sweat, from the very air fabric would begin to appear. Drop her on a glacier miles from the nearest Yarn Barn and before you’d heavy-hiked a stitch into your sweaty side, some slack fabric frippery would be forming a snow sail or some such well-intended but mostly useless thing.
Momma always said those needles were receptors for any word said within the house or porch, antennae tuned to whatever frequency emitted from her booming beacon of illicit teenage angst or could even sense a snuck cookie’s telling tink when the lid touches the earthenware jar. I never got the wooden spoon from Momma’s tales, but that absence doesn’t make me doubt the existence of the bruises when I see her flinch so frequently when in that woman’s house.
Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Rattle, Meridian, North American Review, New York Quarterly, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journal Coastal Shelf.
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