Short-Short Story Contest Finalist

A Selvage Edge

By Mary MacAskill

Before the nurse peels away the tape and gauze, the doctor lays a hand on the girl’s arm. “It looks different,” he says, “but soon you’ll be good as new.” Yesterday, the doctor stripped her down and slit her open; his hands were wrist-deep in her abdomen. The incision is raw-edged and angry, a great puckered mouth, pinned in place with silver staples. The girl nods and blinks at the ceiling; she waits for the doctor to leave. He shifts his clipboard, inspects his handiwork.

            She is thirteen, flat-chested and bony-hipped, vain enough to be concerned with what survival looks like.

            At home, her family is soft-voiced, gentle. Even her big-boned grandmother whose tender edges have been snipped away long ago. She teaches the girl to sew. “Something,” she tells the girl’s mother, “to keep her hands busy.”

            On a winter afternoon, the girl chooses a sundress pattern and fabric with little yellow sunflowers. Her grandmother clips the tissuey pattern with heavy, black-handled scissors. She looks at the girl over her bifocals and says, “Measure twice, cut once.”

            Alone in her room, the girl measures the scar with her father’s retractable tape measure. Thinks: Cut once, measure again and again and again.

            Her grandmother smoothes the fabric, tells a story around a mouthful of pins. Her stories are bare-boned, straightforward as she is, and they all start the same way: “I’ll always remember….”

            She shows the girl her hand, the skin between thumb and forefinger perforated with a line of hard white knots. She points to the last one, larger than the rest, and says, “That’s where the needle broke off.” Her hands are big, the knuckles swollen. It’s hard to imagine those hands ever belonging to a young girl. Especially one careless enough to machine stitch through her skin.

            “What did you do?” asks the girl.

            “What I had to do.” Her grandmother seems amused. “I pulled it out. With a pair of pliers.” The girl thinks of the needlenose pliers the doctor used to remove her staples. That night, she had lain awake, flat on her back, afraid to move. When she finally slept, she dreamed the incision’s edges would separate and she would unravel, her intestines spooling out like a roll of thread.

            When the dress is finished, the stitches are tight and even, the hem straight, but it is too small: the buttons down the front snag on her scar, and she cannot breath. The girl wears the dress once, then hides it at the back of her closet. Tries to forget it.

            That spring, the girl goes back to school. Her parents stop asking how she’s feeling, and she stops making up different ways to say fine.

            Her grandmother does not believe the word fine, and she has not forgotten the dress. When she asks, the girl shrugs, looks away, feigns indifference. But her grandmother knows. She clutches the girl’s hands, squeezes, and the girl practices another way she has learned to hold things together.