​Summer’s End, by Francesca Teal

​Summer’s End
 
after Lady in Waiting, by Louise Bourgeois (USA, b. France) 2003
​
Summer’s end is my favourite time of year. Still the bliss of light and warm skin, yes, but the infinite drawl to which summer alludes, all the lavishing and pleasuring, diminishes. A world about to turn. For me, it’s not about the celebration of harvest, another year gone where I’ve sown nothing of importance so I reap nothing. No, it’s the embers of leaves. The thick oak pulsates outside my window, its centre green with abundance. However, the edges are scorched to a crisp, a cozy light orange. The reminder is beautiful: this was no usual shedding, come look at this brutality before a natural death. Burnt leaves crackle like tinder, and hiss at me for falling for this phantom autumn. The sun will scorch me in the end. I don’t care when. Not many alive could say they never feared the heat of the sun, but relished it.

My back aches when I don’t sew. The time it takes to consume is not the same time as it takes to produce, of course, but it is nevertheless a belief that has wormed its way into my kidney, and is chewing away. I blame it on the world moving far from the tune of seasons, choosing to spin instead to harvest, harvest, harvest. There is something within me that I would like to harvest, but I can’t before it’s time, which is natural. It’s not a new dress my kidneys are aching to stitch. Some part of myself is evading me. I’m on the precipice of locating this loss, somewhere between adult cynicism and childish innocence, I think, and to figure out what it is I need to fall, cold and hard, either way. 

My mother says I’m becoming part of the furniture. She says this as she sews, smiles before becoming aware that she’s enjoying herself, and draws them into a tight line. She has a fear of things leaving her, even joy. While I do love the certainty of my existence shown by my perpetual perching by the window, my mother is right, I am becoming the furniture in the literal sense because I have embroidered my dress just like the armchair. It’s dark brown cotton with red peacocks and blue apples. It amuses me to hide in plain sight, in such a garish print, copying an object that will outlast me. I stay in this chair and sew, looking out at the oak tree.

In the evenings I sit there, half-splayed and half-hunched, and stare at the thread spools spilling from my guts. It’s something I hide from my mother. There are three that reach right up to the windowsill. Each time they stir, the strained silk jangles like an exposed nerve. I am very sensitive. The threads start to twist after every night with Jonah, we press our bodies together and then I have to run to this chair and sew. Then I get some awful knotting. I think it’s because Jonah thinks he is trying to repair me. I press him to me until I blister and my skin starts to weave new cells together. But there’s nothing really to make anew, or amend, I think. I am simply trying to feel something towards him. Indifference has swallowed me for a while. That, and forgetfulness. I’m not sure if Jonah is nice to me or not; I move through every moment seamlessly. I patch it up like my mother taught me, and sit in my chair. There nothing can touch me. 

Since my mother is a master seamstress I have come to think of her as a spider. One who is spindly and all-seeing like the one in the corner of the ceiling. Nothing is a fuss: repair and self-creation is all there is. She has made me a home from herself, yes from her guts, it’s natural. Her web, silken and strong, protects me from this cell I find myself often inhabiting, one deep in my bones. I think that’s where my memory is located. It’s a hexagonal room, the parameters defined by broken doors of addresses we used to live at. They have been broken by my father. On a rickety, poor chair I hover and my arms reach out for my mother, tucked in the corner of the ceiling. I want her to take me into her web and cocoon me for a while so I don’t have to bear the splinters of broken homes. My mother does not embrace me. Perhaps that is a form of protection, for me and for her.  She is playing the good wife. 

Jonah has come to visit. I don’t trust him because he doesn’t see me as a person. But I am a girl who looks good to his mother as a wife. He knows the imbalance of our bodies, and that it’s not right, my right leg a prosthetic under his fully fleshed two. How much of desire is really mine? I had a flashback of something that never existed; the appearance of union knocks me sick. My threads are threatening to rattle out of my stomach so I run to my chair by the window. These knots ravage me, I try to calm myself with my sewing as they unravel like the early morning hours. 

I’m flustered and forgetful and I’ve stitched myself into the chair. The beautiful threads on the windowsill have always been strands of my dark brown hair. Maybe I am a self-creator, like my mother!  I can repair this, like she always does. Anything is possible with my mother. But I am not a mother, am I. Each harvest yields no fruit for I bear none. Reaching for the scissors, I tip the candle onto my peacock and apple dress. A new colour added, flickering cosy orange. I don’t even scream. I suppose anything before its time, was always in its time. And time comes from nowhere. Like a thought. I have fallen both ways, and have not found it, I think.

Francesca Teal

Francesca Teal is a writer from West Yorkshire, UK. She is a Master's student in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, and finds that her work is concerned with the interplay of time, memory, and reality. She has been published by Oxford Magazine, The Vanity Papers, and Ghost Light Lit. You can see more at francescateal.co.uk.