The Seamstresses
Written by Marie Davis-Williams
Photographed by Christabel
Model: Sarah Eve
The surgeon of hand bones said
a constellation of time, pressure and genetics
caused the osteoarthritic pain
at the base of my thumbs.
He turned my palms skyward to trace
the path his incision would take.
In that darkened room, the x-ray illuminator
was the only light he navigated by.
I began to tell him about the women of my clan,
seamstresses, miner’s wives, all.
Who, after losing the power to force the orbit
of small planets, jar lids and doorknobs,
met on bright nights in their backyard gardens
and with sharpened kitchen knives,
cut deep into each other’s basal joints
revealing the source of their pain;
the allotropes that grew there.
With skin folded back and secured by dress pins,
they’d turn their hands to the moon
letting the celestial light glint and glisten off their cache.
If held in this position long enough,
glossolalia of the bones would begin.
The doctor was not put off.
The efficient nod of his head indicated that
he had both heard similar stories before
and needed to move on to his next patient.
“Surgery will alleviate your discomfort.
But your thumbs, it’s hard to predict
how they will articulate. Go home.
Think about it. How intolerable is the pain?”
Without waiting for my answer he exited the room.
The film of my wry joints remained illuminated there
along with the lunar phases of a phosphorescent moon
painted on a calendar that swung side to side
from a nail on the back of the exam room door
as it was shut.
Before dawn, under the light of the Ipomoea Alba
that climbed their trellises, the women who could still
manage a pincer grasp on a needle,
sutured each other’s wounds shut.
Using silk floss, they embroidered stars and flowers
in the colors and patterns of the dresses they wore.
In this way the lacerations were made mostly invisible
and the gems were left to gestate in their hands
for as long as they could bear it.
Back home they went, each of them
to set bowls in front of their bone-weary men and to
watch them tipple whiskey medicinally from teacups.
The men, forever telling the tale of the hidden seam
miles below them that they would find and plunder.
And finally, after too many teacups,
the banging of fists on the table and a final declaration
that one day it would be diamonds falling from their
hair to their soup instead of coal dust!
But the seamstresses knew otherwise
and marked their days by the stitches
that appeared in the firmament above them
and waited for the next moon-engorged evening to gather again.
With seam rippers, they reopened the old incisions
becoming spellbound once more at what shone there
and at the bone on bone conductivity,
that gave speech to the ancestral osseous matter
telling them the constellation of time, pressure and genetics
was theirs alone to tend to and to measure.
