Sage Whitney

Latency

Sage Whitney

The joints in her arthritic hands creak like a rusty gate, longing for oil with every memory that she stitches away. Her trembling fingertips struggle to grip the needle whose reflective surface shows her wrinkled skin.

Her left foot rests, bare, in a pile of shards of broken clay and her husband’s ashes. Like a nervous tick she digs her toenails into the floorboards and rubs hubby further into the carpet.

She’d been working needle point, a counted cross stitch, another one of her “craft store trophies”. The box art depicts Humpty-Dumpty, sitting high and mighty on top of his castle wall, grinning, staring into colorful landscape of lush trees and cartoony foliage.

The colors make the old soul smile, her lips cracking into dust, exposing her swollen gums (her false teeth are the wrong size or maybe she forgot to apply the ointment).

Ever so slowly, the landscape on her canvas draws nearer as the needle tugs at her scalp. The woman’s long gray hair forms the brick of the castle wall, securing it so that even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t knock the egg off.

46 s

Hana Kruse

s

A Cycle

Mell Finefrock

There’s a clock on the wall that is counting backwards.

The room is plain. Nothing but a twin sized mattress on the floor with a flimsy pillow and blankets haphazardly strewn about, and the clock smack dab in the center of the adjacent wall.

She sat nude in the center of her bed in silence. The clock ticked on and she picked at her fingernails, blood caked around the cuticles.

The clocks hands continued to tick backwards until they all reached twelve. Twelve hours. Sixty minutes. Sixty seconds.

She stood from the mattress and paced the room, the clock started forwards, counting normally as she got herself ready for the day.

Everything must be in order: pull on underwear, bra, pants, shirt, watch, socks, shoes, and lace them up, then she can start to clean herself, wash the blood from her nails, wash the stains on her cheeks, soothe the puffiness in her eyes, and brush her teeth of filth.

The cycle sometimes goes well, sometimes it would stop short.

48 s