Sewn

By the time Flora arrived in New Mexico for the all-women’s artist retreat, she was hallucinating fairies, the same size and demeanor of Tinker Bell, sprawled on her dashboard in various lewd positions. She had driven twenty-seven nonstop hours from just west of Brunswick, Georgia to just north of Elephant Butte, and en route had consumed little more than two key lime yogurts and one forty-ounce Olde English 800. Thankfully, the check-in process involved nothing face to face. Courtesy of a retreat map Flora had received in the mail upon acceptance, she was independently able to locate her tiny adobe, which was the color of a baked potato and no bigger than a camper van. She punched in her assigned PIN code—6-9-6-9—and ducked inside. Within was a cot, one table and one chair, and a kitchenette housed inside an antique hutch. In the center of the little room, on the wood floor, sat a bleached cow skull outlined in pink chalk. Next to the skull, also in chalk, was a speech bubble announcing, apparently on behalf of the dead cow: I GAVE OF ALL OF MY MILK. Flora stood considering the installation, feeling initially stupid then ultimately superior, before going to look for the toilet. After some effort, she found it and a showerhead outside, at the rear of the adobe, enclosed by vinyl lattice braided with Tibetan prayer flags.

As Flora pissed, a sound rose up like water on a hot skillet. She could not say if the toilet on which she sat was attached to any pipes. Perhaps her hot piss was going straight out the bottom of the toilet and into the earth. Flora liked this idea, so much so that she continued sitting on the toilet even when she was finished, just to ponder her urine going down into the core of the earth, not in a territorial way, but as an offering. From her perch, all Flora could see though the lattice was sand and tan. The retreat was aptly named Sandland. It was the only artist retreat Flora had applied to. She had no desire to complete any art while there or meet any artists. She was only there to walk around in the sand for two weeks on the retreat’s dime. For a year, she’d been having dreams she was in New Mexico, walking in the desert for days on end, looking for a fountain. And now, she was finally where she was supposed to be and ready to do what she had come to do.

Since graduating college twelve years prior, Flora’s family and friends had tirelessly interrogated her about the future. Was Flora going to get married? Was she going to have children? Was she going to freeze her eggs? Was she going to take up sewing again? She was a very good needleworker, and this was a dying art. Did she understand that this was a useful skill? She could be a seamstress, make clothes and/or alter them. Did she know she didn’t have to use her talents in an artistic way as she had in college? She did not have to return to textiles or fiber. Did she know these things? Or was she going to work forever as a bank teller at that hideous concrete bank branch by the mall, putting lollipops and dog biscuits and envelopes of cash into plastic cylinders? Had she thought about learning how to upholster furniture? She could probably even find work with someone who restored vintage cars. The baseball stitching? Somebody did that. Why couldn’t it be her? Because it was only a matter of time before she was a victim of a bank robbery, before she was held at gunpoint, before she was possibly blasted through her temple and skull for a thousand dollars in ones. Didn’t she think she was made for bigger things? For twelve years, Flora had never answered these questions. If she had been a crier, she would have been brought to tears a hundred times over by the cross-examinations, but a weeper she was not, even as her destiny remained unknown.

But then the New Mexico dreams began, and Flora knew, unequivocally, what it was she was made for. She knew she was meant to go to New Mexico and walk around in the sand. In the dreams, Flora was always wandering, looking for that fountain. What kind of a fountain? people in the dream would ask. A manmade fountain, like the kind in a town square? A water fountain? A natural spring? A hot spring? A waterfall? Even in her dreams, Flora was asked questions again and again by people who didn’t even care about her. They were just people desperate for answers.

Flora rose from the toilet and walked around to the front of the house where she could see the other artists’ tiny adobes in the distance, potatoes strewn in a field. She wondered what wonders the artists were working on. She wondered if they would leave her alone. Flora had checked the small box on the application form next to the words: OTHER THAN A BREAKFAST BASKET LEFT EACH MORNING ON MY STOOP, I PREFER TO BE LEFT ALONE. Still, the box had been very small, and her pen had been very low on ink, and Flora began to fear she might have given the false impression that she was friendly. She feared she might be visited by artists, knock-knocking on her potato under the guise of camaraderie but with the true intention of competition. What was Flora producing? Was Flora someone who valued productivity as much as creativity? Could she show proof of her produce like the goddess Pomona atop the Pulitzer Fountain? Just out of curiosity, where were the fruits of Flora’s labor?

Flora began unpacking her car. There was her suitcase, her small cooler of now-warm yogurt and beer, as well as all the supplies she had brought but would not be using: the sewing machine, the small loom, the spectrum of threads and fabrics, and, of course, wrapped in tissue paper and packed inside a large garment box meant for a wedding dress: the tapestry. Flora carried the sturdy white box into the adobe and placed it on the table. She supposed if someone unexpected came by and wanted to see what she was “working on,” she could show them a corner of the tapestry. That always shut people up.

The tapestry had been her senior project in college and was the only artistic thing she’d ever made. She had woven it on a loom and then embroidered it, painstakingly, with seed beads and baubles to portray eleven constellations of goddesses. The whole premise of the piece had been a secret, really. It had not been about astronomy or beauty or feminism per se, but about what women gave of themselves. Not sexually or spiritually, not intellectually or emotionally, but physiologically. Flora’s tapestry had been an ode to biological offerings. Sweat, saliva, breast milk, amniotic fluid, blood (both venous and menstrual), urine.

For Flora, the unspoken goal of the tapestry had been both vile and voyeuristic. She’d wanted to watch admirers admiring her art, knowing the vast majority would be unaware that the rainbow of fire opals erupting from Virgo’s lips was not a comet but vomit, the virgin’s justified and eternal disgust at the state of humankind. Flora wanted to watch her watchers fail at interpretation. And, in the rare instance that someone, peering closely at the tapestry, went from smiling to frowning, Flora delighted in a nearly erotic way. Watching the fall from innocence to corruption was an indescribable thrill.

The tapestry had taken 1,432 hours to complete and was twenty-four feet long. The only other thing with which Flora had put in a similar amount of time was men, also in college. When she had not been weaving, she’d been seducing. During that period of Flora’s life, the overachieving in art and sex had been pathological. Sewing and fucking, fucking and sewing. What had she been trying to get at? Most psychologists would have insisted it was praise or love or validation. But Flora knew it was something darker, deeper. Something closer to merging. Amalgamation. Of all the ways fabric could be manipulated, felting had been her specialty. The use of heat and water and agitation to make something impermeable, impregnable was nothing short of alchemical. A death for a birth.

Now, Flora was at a stage in her life where she had no desire to psychologically evaluate her past. Despite her parents’ relentless questioning about her future and fate, Flora was not close to either her mother or father. She was certain these strained relationships were connected to both her previous addictions and her current burnout, but, at this point, she was uninterested in cause and effect. Simply put: once she had been an artist; once she had been a whore. Now, she was in New Mexico with fourteen days to walk around in the sand looking for a fountain she would recognize upon first sight. Not everyone could say as much.

Flora slept well on the sagging cot. It was as if she were cradled in a sling and hung in a tree like a netted sack of oranges, and that is what she dreamed of: being swaddled and looped over the branch of a thirsty cottonwood, both safe and imprisoned, with no choice but resignation for eight sublime hours. In the morning, she went out and sat on the cold toilet, once again releasing her hot piss into the earth, taking note of the sand and tan as she did so. The sound of her urine, again, suggested a pipeless system, even though the toilet would allow itself to be flushed in an anemic way. When she was finished, Flora stood up and looked behind the toilet and saw there was indeed a pipe working earthward, but it seemed something of a facade, like a stage prop. She pushed a curious hip against the toilet tank and saw the base of the toilet lift up slightly from the earth. A visible crescent of black suggested a hole, a deep and gaping one, and rushing toward Flora came the pungent scent of urine and clay, as well as a sharp, cold draft like a woman’s hiss.

“Hello?” A voice called from inside the adobe. “Special delivery.”

Of all the abominable things Flora could imagine, company at dawn took the cake. She cracked the adobe’s rear door and poked her aggrieved head inside. Standing square in the center of the cow’s speech bubble was a handsome man with a bursting, fairytale picnic basket.

“You can put it on the table.” Flora’s tone was clipped. She gestured with one hand and clutched her robe with the other.

“But there’s…” the man pointed at the large garment box. It was printed with block letters incorrectly declaring: BRIDAL GOWN. “I know better than to put hot muffins on that.”

Flora surrendered the impulse to make herself presentable and marched into the house, barefoot, robe tied off-center, hair a mess, and without underwear underneath it all, to move the box from the table to the cot. She let herself appear exasperated, so she didn’t feel exposed.

“Bridal gown,” the man mused. “When’s the wedding?”

Flora snorted to show the man he was ridiculous. “Never,” she said. “That’s a tapestry. Not a dress.” She went to the table where the man had placed the basket. She pulled back its checkered tea towel to discover four blueberry muffins and two bright yellow pears. There was also a small crock of white butter, a napkin printed with stars, tea bags.

“A tapestry?” The man began to smile then thought better of it. “You sew?”

Flora turned and let herself look the man straight in the eyes. At the bank, she didn’t even look customers in the eye. Most of her days were spent in an intentional, empowering disengagement, but this man had the unmitigated gall to not only bring her, uninvited, muffins at sunrise, but to also strike up a conversation. He had the nerve to ask her about art while looking like art himself. Here he was, with his full head of hair and his mustache reminiscent of a giant algebraic parenthesis and his T-shirt stretched taut over a chest that was nearly the breadth of the adobe’s front door. On the T-shirt was a silk-screened UFO sucking up a cow. The cow was upside down and heading into the UFO’s beam of light, udder first. There were no words on the shirt, just the picture.

“I did sew,” Flora said. “I used to do a lot of things I no longer do.”

“Same,” the man said. “I used to drink, for example, and now I don’t.” The man went to the basket and produced the star-spangled napkin. He spread it on the table and brought out the four muffins and the two pears and made something of a still life. Flora could tell this was not part of his job description but rather a nervous response to his drinking admission.

“Do you find you’re still thirsty?” Flora asked. The man stopped arranging the foods and looked at Flora as if he might burst into something: tears, laughter, flames. “I mean, fair question,” she said, defending herself. Flora went over to the still life and put the items back in the basket and covered them up. She did not like cold muffins. “I don’t like cold muffins,” she said. “They become clammy.”

The man stared at Flora, and Flora stared back, her days of sewing and fucking and fucking and sewing returning in a cold, earthy burst, as though—against her better judgment—she had pushed her hip up against her past life and revealed a beckoning void.

“Well now,” the man said. “We don’t want that.”

There was a long pause, a pregnant one, a standoff that was ultimately broken by two simultaneous sighs of moral concession. It was hard to say who was the UFO and who was the cow, but one was drawn into the other with no apparent recourse or resistance. Flora lifted her robe and the man lifted Flora and there was, after an impassioned kiss, a moment taken to consider the cot, which held the box, or the table, which held the basket. The table won out for their brief but blistering tryst, during which Flora reimagined herself in the cottonwood, in a sling, a dozen oranges hung and wrung.

Afterward, Flora was energized by not just the act but the acquisition. She felt certain, right then and there, that she could sit down at her sewing machine, despite the long absence, and pick up right where her prowess had left off. She turned to face the man, whose mustache now seemed askew. Flora licked her thumb and pressed on one end of the parenthesis.

“Would you like to see what I’ve sewn?” she asked, retying her robe.

The man held his hand up to the side of his face, touching where Flora had touched. Flora went to the cot and brought the box to the table. The man, wordless, took the basket back in his possession and stood as he had stood in the very beginning, only this time with his pants around his ankles, holding Flora’s breakfast in the center of the cow’s speech bubble. The bubble was now notably wet, as if it had burst, with a good portion of the chalk rendered illegible. The only letters that remained read: ALL OF MY  ILK.

“Is this”—the man gestured at the floor—“normal?”

“Normal? Yes.” Flora turned back to the table and lifted the top of the garment box. “Common? No.” She pulled back the tissue paper and marveled, for the second time that morning, at her own work. The tapestry sparkled like a desert’s night sky. It was a luscious indigo black, studded with thousands of iridescent glass stars in various jewel tones. She brought the entire thing out in her arms, fold after fold, and spread it on a dry stretch of the adobe’s wood floor, between door and table, for the man to admire. He set the basket back on one end of the table, attended to his pants, and then stepped forward, cautious.

“You made this?” he said. “It’s… astonishing. It’s… almost three-dimensional. As if the Milky Way were right here, at my feet.”

“That’s Capricorn,” Flora pointed. “She’s half goat, half fish. She’s both an achiever and a believer.”

The man squinted. “The beads on her body,” he said. “They represent?”

“Sweat,” Flora said. “She’s never not industrious.”

“And this one?” He pointed. “With the…” The man held both hands to his chest and pantomimed breasts.

“Cancer,” Flora said. “The cosmic wet nurse, if you will.” She gestured to the tiny freshwater pearls, three thousand at least, sewn in spirals, out from the goddess’s breasts and up into a crown. “Everyone’s mother, Cancer.”

The man gestured to two faces gazing at another other. One woman cried crystalline tears into the mouth of the other. “Gemini?” the man asked.

“You know your astrology.”

“Not really.” The man laughed. “I just recognize myself.” He stood for a moment in quiet contemplation, twirling the end of his mustache that Flora had tried to tame. “Eleven,” he counted. “Like I said, no professional, but shouldn’t there be twelve?” He motioned to an empty space in the tapestry, then placed his offending hand in his pocket, as if he’d pointed out not just work undone but a lapse in character.

Flora didn’t answer at first. She went to one end of the tapestry and began folding it back into a careful bundle. “Yes,” she admitted. “There should be.”

The man pressed no further with his questions. He lifted the lid of the box and waited for Flora to put the tapestry away, to tuck it back into bed under tissue paper sheets, before he replaced the lid and patted it gently. It was a tender gesture that acknowledged both her art and theirs, what had been finished and what was unfinished.

“I’m afraid your breakfast is probably cold,” the man said.

Flora considered the basket and shrugged. “In the scheme of things,” she said, “it’s inconsequential. Now, I must get on with what it is I came all the way to New Mexico to do, which has nothing to do with anything in this room.”

The man’s face fell imperceptibly. “I understand,” he said. “I hope your day is as lovely as your art. As you.” He gave a small, solemn nod and headed out the adobe’s front door. As he retreated, Flora saw that his shirt did have words on it. They were silkscreened across the back and announced: TIME TO SUCK IT UP.

Flora went to the basket and retrieved the starry napkin. She placed the dry square on the damp circle on the floor and marched on top of it to undo what she had done. Then she dressed herself in a sundress and sandals and filled her canteen, little by little, at the outdoor showerhead with water that, when sniffed, smelled more metallic than blood.

Flora’s desert walk, though shorter in duration, was nearly identical, mentally, to her drive from Georgia to New Mexico. It instantly became monotonous. Within an hour of wandering the sand in search of a fountain she’d yet to see even in her dreams, Flora struggled to concentrate on what it was she had set out to do. She was exhausted, dehydrated, and ravenously hungry. She shuffled in a daze, unable to think of little more than the man’s black arc of a mustache, the way he’d let Flora take the lead until it was clear he could take it himself. That cow, udder-first. The two pears, yellow as ducklings in the man’s tan hands. These were the things that ran through Flora’s mind like hot piss through a dummy toilet. That and the question “…but shouldn’t there be twelve?”

Flora was haunted very little by the things she had and had not done in life. She did not regret the numerous men she’d ensnared. When she thought of them all, she thought of a dog show: the breeds, the coats, the dispositions. She saw wire-haired and brindle, a toy, a shepherd, something steel blue and twice her size that could have killed her but instead could not find the exit to her apartment without assistance. She did not regret that, because of the tapestry and the tedious work it had entailed, she now wore spectacles as thick as aquarium glass to correctly decipher routing numbers. She did not regret that her hands were prematurely arthritic, that to peel a banana required wincing. She did not regret that not once, since the age of eight, when her parents had insisted that she “stop that this instant!” had she shed a single tear. It had been twenty-six years since Flora had cried. It was an act that was so far removed from her arid universe that she no longer understood its origins or purpose. But the missing constellation? The Water Bearer? Which she herself was? Flora lamented that. She had saved it for last, then saved it for later, and later had come and gone.

After two hours in the sand, delirium took over. In the sky, Flora saw the man’s mustache, multiplied—a flock of black parentheses circling overhead. Flora squinted across the sand, the tan. She could see a smattering of baked potatoes several hundred yards away and no longer knew which one was hers. She drank flimsily from the canteen. The water tasted like a warm, fresh cut. “If I began Aquarius today,” Flora said aloud, “could I be done by tomorrow, then done with it forever?”

Flora stumbled in the midday heat toward the closest adobe. As she neared it, she saw, with great relief, that its lattice was braided with Tibetan prayer flags and that out front, a blue hybrid hatchback with Georgia plates was parked. The first house was her house. Flora punched in her PIN code—6-9-6-9—and entered the adobe. There was her archival box marked with BRIDAL GOWN. There, on the table, was the basket. Starving, she went for the pears, only to find that inside the basket were no pears, no food, just a single white handkerchief. Flora frowned and got her bearings. On the floor, the white cow skull was still outlined in chalk, but there was no napkin over the speech bubble, and the speech bubble’s words had yet to be washed away. They still declared their original message: I GAVE OF ALL OF MY MILK.

Flora went out the front of the adobe with her hot canteen and shuffled, unsettled, to the next nearest adobe, which also had a lattice woven with Tibetan prayer flags and a blue hybrid hatchback. Inside, Flora found a scenario identical to the first house: a garment box on the table. A basket holding a single white handkerchief. A speech bubble in pristine condition. Flora tottered out the back door of the second adobe. There was the showerhead and toilet. She went to the toilet and inspected its pipe, and with her hip pressed against its tank, the toilet lifted up to show a black crescent from which the scent of urine and clay emanated, along with, not just a ghostly draft, but words. Flora leaned and listened.

“She’s getting somewhere,” a woman’s voice said.

“Good,” a second woman responded.

Flora recoiled from the raised toilet. It thumped to the earth, and she took off in a panicked stagger. The third adobe was a carbon copy of the first two. At the fourth, the same. At the fifth, Flora bypassed the adobe’s interior and went straight to the toilet, again raising it with her hip. She was now unnerved to the point of, what was it, tears?

“So?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Sewn,” said another.

Flora trembled with terror, weakened by thirst and hunger, fatigue and heat, and by the sensation of moisture in her eyes. Each step felt as if she walked not on sand but on water, and as she reached the fifth adobe, Flora could see, near the horizon, a final sixth lump of tan. Above her, a thousand black mustaches circled. Flora picked her way forward, the last adobe sometimes vanishing, then reappearing like a mirage. Her mouth hung open—a dark, hissing hole.

Flora crawled the last quarter mile, a thin thread pulled forward by some invisible hand. At the house, she willed herself to stand with the help of the blue car’s bumper. Once steadied, she pitched forward to the front door by holding the vision of the two yellow pears. They would be her reward. She punched in the PIN code a final time. Within the adobe, there it all was: the tapestry box, the table, the chair, the cot, the hutch, the skull, the chalk. This time, the speech bubble was as she’d left it: damaged. This time, there was a napkin on the ground. This time, on the table sat a basket of four stale blueberry muffins, a pair of pears, and a crock of melted butter. Tea bags. Flora went and collapsed on the cot. Over and over, she had a fitful dream. A gun was held to her temple while she counted out a thousand dollars in ones. On the money, instead of IN GOD WE TRUST were the words STOP THAT THIS INSTANT.

Later, when the man let himself in and came and knelt at her bedside, Flora could not say if she had been there for minutes or days. The man lifted her head and brought an earthen jug to her lips. At first, Flora could not respond. She had no strength to swallow but to only let the water lap against her chapped mouth. “One taste,” the man urged, “and then you’re on your way.”

Flora took the tiniest of sips, followed by a larger one, then two, then three. The water was as hot as the canteen’s, but it was not metallic; if anything, it tasted like the sea. Flora’s sips turned into swallows, and her swallows turned into gulps, and the water went down into her belly then up and out of her eyes. Into her mouth, cup after cup, out of her eyes, cup after cup. She drank until she thought the jug must be empty, but the water appeared endless. Flora drank until her crying flooded the floor of the adobe, first erasing the chalk, then pushing the cow skull out the back door, followed by the chair and the table and the hutch, then, at last, Flora and the man themselves floated out into the desert on a hot river of tears.

They went on like that until the sky grew dark and the stars grew bright and Flora stopped her drinking and crying. Above her, she could see one blank spot in the sky—an indigo square, void of light. Flora took both of her hands and brought the man’s face to her own, guiding his lips so close to hers that, from the side, they appeared as one person. The garment box floated alongside them like a loyal little rowboat. At some point, they would all go under—Flora, the man, the tapestry—and the only thing to surface would be a bird, a black one, soaring skyward, water beading off its wings, tears seeding the heavens.