Something Sacred by Sarah Scott
2021 Flash Fiction Winner
Honourable Mention
The basket contains several balls of yarn, a tattered box of matches, three paper straws but only one set of needles. They’ve been cast on with a vibrant purple, deeply synthetic yarn. The laminated sign explains that you should knit 30 stitch rows. The square is a mess, lumpy and uneven. I can see where the yarn tangled under someone’s hands leaving a hole, someone else added a stitch to each row, accidentally ballooning the square out. One set of hands left perfect symmetrical stitches and another are too tight, narrowing the square. I run my hands over the square and think of all those hands and the anxious hearts behind them.
I think of the familiar and comforting movement of my hands while I knit and not about her, 40 feet away in the operating room.
She says, “they are mutilating me.”
She says, “I should have seen it coming.”
She says, “it’s just a breast.”
Just flesh and fat and muscle—one curve of her shape; the place caressed by lovers; the way she fed her babies; where I rested my head when she read me countless bedtime stories.
The yarn slides through my hands adding my own stitches to the purple mess, and I am struck by how beautiful this is. Every loop made by someone who sat here praying and hoping in whatever way they could. I feel that love like a ball of light in my heart connecting me to the people before me. This purple mess is sacred.
The nurse calls my name and I drop the knitting back into the basket with the paper straws and the misplaced box of matches. There is news of lymph nodes and next steps. These battles all belong to tomorrow. Today’s battle is behind us.
As I leave the operating area I see that someone new is knitting. Her face—tight lipped and tired, is familiar, but she is a stranger. She is waiting anxiously for her own person. Her hands hold the purple mess but it isn’t a mess anymore. She pulled out all the stitches that came before. Now the sacred purple mess is a one-inch scrap of symmetrically even, ordinary synthetic purple. Gone are the too tight stitches and the extra stitches and the tangle that left a hole.
I cry then. I cry for my mother’s breasts and for sacred stitches and a world that takes both from us without any care or warning. I cry because the tight-lipped woman doesn’t see the beauty that she took and that seems like an awfully sad way to live life. I cry and then I close my eyes and I move on, because that’s what we all do. We put each stitch behind us and keep looping life together one tiny, wrapped moment tangled with the next. And it's imperfect. And it’s beautiful. And it’s sacred.
Sarah Scott is an aspiring fiction writer who lives in Hamilton with her husband and two kids. Sarah is a featured curator at HitRECord, an online production company, where she works collaboratively with artists and writers from all around the world. Her work has been published in print and online and you can check out some examples here, www.sarahscottwrites.com. She is currently working on her first novel.