Stitches
by Rick White
It took me a good twenty or so years to realise that it was a feather duster, the strange alien life-form which lived in my grandmother’s airing cupboard. As a young boy, whenever I walked down the hallway to the bedroom where my grandmother lay, I’d pass the airing cupboard and I always had to stop and look inside. The feather duster I remember was red, or some sort of vivd pink and it moved and pulsated like a weird plant. Its soft, feathery tendrils moved in the convection of the warm air and seemed almost to beckon me in.
And although I was always a bit frightened to look inside that cupboard, I still had to do it every time I walked past. I only thought of it today, decades later, because a huge spider has made it’s home in the compost bin in my garden. Now every time I walk past the bin I have to open the lid and look inside at the miniature forest world, draped and festooned with fine cotton sheets of web. The spider always retreats slowly from my view and I close the lid and walk away.
There are tiny parts of this world which do not belong to us. Miniature worlds within worlds just like my grandmother’s airing cupboard which have been annexed by something other, and in to which we can never truly hope to look. Part of the fabric of our Universe, yet quite entirely apart from it in every way, hidden behind the finest of shrouds. And it freaks me out.
My grandmother was dying, although I didn’t realise it at the time because I didn’t know what dying was. She lay in her pink sheets and blankets in her bed by the window. Her small frame and short curly hair just as light as the feathers on the duster or the spider’s web. She was waiting there to float up from the mattress one day and out of the open window.
“Give me a hug to last until I next see you.” was what she’d always say at the end of my visits. And I would squeeze her tightly, just not so tight that she’d break, and I really believed that the hug would last. Of course she knew that each time might be the last time we’d see each other, but that was not something she wanted me to have to know.
She was my paternal grandmother, my dad’s mum. My father and I have never really spoken about her except for when he told me she was a spiritualist. She believed there was a connection between the realms of the living and the dead, and she believed that this connection could be used to heal.
My dad told me about a dog that wouldn’t stop snapping at its own ear, and my grandmother asking its owner if she knew anyone who had passed over who walked with a cane and smoked a pipe.
“That’s Uncle John.”
“Uncle John – I’m sure you’re very welcome to come and visit any time you like but can you not bring your dog as it’s scaring this one.”
That story gave me chills when I heard it, especially because it was so incongruous with dad’s most pragmatic nature. It seemed so unlike anything he would ever subscribe to that it must be true. I since heard somewhere or other that the whole “don’t bring your dog” trick is bread and butter to anyone wanting to pass themselves off as a Medium. It’s like telling someone in a cold reading that they’ve always wanted to write a novel.
Dad really seemed to believe it though, or maybe he believed it because his mother believed it. Maybe he found it easier to believe that story, than to admit how much he loved and missed his mother. Maybe he clung to it, maybe he needed it.
Not so many years after I heard that story, my younger brother injured himself quite badly while riding a motorbike on holiday with me and my dad. He bit through his lower lip and had to have the wound stitched without any anaesthetic, in case he swallowed his tongue.
Dad sat by my brother’s bed and held his hand while the stitches were being sown and he said that he could feel every last ounce of my brother’s pain. Later, Dad asked my brother if his pain had diminished whilst he was holding his hand, and my brother replied that yes, it was the strangest thing, but it actually had hurt less.
I had sat out in the corridor on my own as all this was taking place and heard my brother’s screams echoing through the hallway. I would suggest that sure enough he’d felt every last stab of that needle, every last tug of that thread and could still feel it later when he was being asked to relive it.
I think he wanted to make my dad feel better. So maybe you can take someone’s pain away if you want to, and if they’re willing to let you.
You just have to believe in the same stories.
You just have to give them a hug to last them.
BIO
Rick White is a writer and debut novelist from Manchester, UK. He currently writes for a number of online magazines including Vice and Drunken Werewolf, as well as his own blog www.badtripe.com. Rick’s first short story was published earlier this year by Storgy Magazine, https://storgy.com. Rick hopes you enjoy reading his work.