The Winding Quilt

Didn't bother with childish tears.

No more crying for Lindy. Not since the funeral home—she goosed up the waterworks for that, of course. They needed a show.

Mother asked to be buried with the quilt, but in the end, she wasn't buried at all. Casket, flowers, cemetery plot, guestbook, embalming, refreshments—Lindy ran those numbers. Fat, rich numbers.

Cremation and a cardboard box for Mother.

Lindy didn't see the crematorium—didn't watch Mother slide into the giant oven—but she imagines flames licking up those gnarled, veiny legs, heat liquefying that mottled skin, the soft tsh-tsh of sizzling fat when it hits hot metal. She opened the box of ash and bone earlier today, dipped her finger inside, marveled at how dry it felt. Like a sack of wheat flour.

Lindy told the funeral director she had her own urn—a cookie jar, actually. A green ceramic frog with big painted-on eyelashes and a goofy grin. Sentimental container. Mother belongs on the kitchen shelf, Lindy wailed, inside the cookie jar she loved so much. The funeral director nodded and patted her shoulder, kindly—couldn't possibly know that cookie jar shattered years ago—thrown by Mother, at Lindy. She still has a cluster of scars behind her left ear.

The patch beside her old baby blanket sports more green frogs, to match the ruined cookie jar. It started life as Lindy’s first potholder. Bought from the drugstore with her own babysitting money. She didn't fuss as Mother hacked up that potholder, but she did mourn later. In private.

Mother's burnt scraps can live in their cardboard home until trash pickup on Thursday.

There's still a smudge of Mother left on Lindy's thumb. She rubs it across the jumble of fabrics—silky prom dress, lacy Christening bonnet, fuzzy teddy bear pelt—leaving behind a thin, pale line of ash. Mother knew exactly what she was doing, asking for the quilt to join her in the coffin. And she knew exactly what she was doing each time she pulled out her trusty shears—each time she stood over Lindy and berated her loose patchwork and jagged lines. Mother's seams were always surgeon-tight.

Lindy presses her face into the quilt and laughs. Mother's room is so quiet now. Her ventilator kept Lindy awake these past three years, its single-minded whoosh-whoosh punctuating the nighttime silence, each blast of oxygen another blow to their bank account, until she unplugged the damn thing herself. One sharp tug—no more problems. Mother turned purple as an eggplant and drowned in the stale bedroom air. The ambulance carted her away an hour later. Easier than a rocking stitch.

Lindy buries her nose deeper into the quilt and inhales. No trace of baked cookies on the potholder, cheap perfume on the prom dress, spat-up formula on the baby blanket. The fabric smells musty.

Sweetly rotten.

Dead.

Whoosh-whoosh

Lindy jumps. A cool gust swipes the back of her neck.

She turns toward Mother’s ventilator—its bellows are moving. She squints at the cord. Still unplugged, of course—just as she left it.

But its bellows are moving.

Whoosh-whoosh

The quilt shifts in her lap. Shifts—and slithers. She feels the slick scrap of prom dress wriggle across her bare knee and wants to stand up, needs to stand up, to scream, to fling the whole patchy mess back into the cedar chest and set the room on fire—but instead, she freezes. Breathless.

Whoosh-whoosh

The quilt is around her—all around her—by the time she tries to move. Fabric whips over her hands and under her feet—winding, winding, winding.

Whoosh-whoosh

She scrabbles helplessly as the quilt worms upward, into her mouth. Cotton pinwheels swaddle her arms, torso, legs—the harder Lindy flails, the tighter it squeezes, popping threads and snapping bones.

The tighter it squeezes—and the deeper it travels.

Past her tongue and tonsils, wriggling down into her esophagus, Christening lace and baby blanket fleece heaving against wet, tender muscle. Lindy tastes every flavor of the past forty years, the buffet of a miserable, wasted life—smoke and salt, blood and decay—would vomit it back up, if she could.

But the quilt won’t stop winding.

It swallows her final scream.

Whoosh-whoosh

One last hug from Mother.