Etta
A car door scraped outside. Etta pressed her nectarine against the tray on her lap. She leaned in close to see how the juice broke inside the skin, leaving the hairy pores sagging. Her lap and chair were musty. The nectarine had hurt to chew. That was unusual. So she was bruising it, rolling it slowly under her palm.
It looked something like that sideways face she’d just stitched on her tapestry, stuck and darkening. She was stitching her little warrior in his latest battle, pressing his enemy’s head to the ground. Both tears and blood were on the bruised face, the mouth agape, the eyes strained. It had been difficult to make.
She wondered if the head had felt like this nectarine, a bit fuzzy on the outside, but bone-hard beneath, needing to be tenderised. Yes. Her little boy had made that scrunched face tender, kneading out the sweetness.
The tapestry was under her lap tray, just waiting for her to fill in her little warrior’s face. For now, his head was still that blue baseball bedsheet beneath, an abyss of bats.
She held the nectarine up close to check it. With it and its sunset colours, she caught her face in the television screen.
The gate squealed outside, gasped, then squealed back into place.
Her little warrior was coming home to visit today. This was good. She struggled to do faces without their references.
She cut into the fruit’s sagging skin, and the loosed, sweet juice ran down the tray’s wood grain onto the tapestry, seeping through. She tutted and put the tray aside. And all this after she’d chided her little warrior for driving off while she was still so messy the last time, too.
Etta looked down at her boy’s stitch-drowned bedsheet as she bit into her nectarine slice. She touched the place for the unfinished face. She sniffed it. This, at least, still smelled of him. She smiled and heard the crack of the ball, the drumming of his running so long ago. It smelled of cupboards. So, her boy must have smelled of cupboards, too, then. That was new.
Her little warrior trod on the loose step outside the door.
He would be so proud of what she had made. But the juice. It slipped from one fibrous stitch of her little warrior’s strong finger to the next, until it came to the purple cheek beneath it, where it slipped through the threaded x’s as a vein. It trickled into the crying mouth’s crooked teeth.
Etta felt the bruised nectarine slices in her fingers. They made them smell rotten. They made her tongue sticky. She scraped her teeth with her tongue while she was still staring at the tapestry’s juice. She kept feeling, back and forth across them, vision narrowing to the jots of white rimming the stitched mouth’s abyss.
She gasped, and her cheeks ached. Why should they ache?
A key stabbed the front door’s lock. Her little warrior was home.