Photograph by Amy Hart
At the bottom of my grandmother’s sewing basket, there is a roll of twill ribbon. On it, inked in red, is the name Peter. As in Pan, the boy cursed with flight instead of old age. The name marches across the cotton in two repetitive beats, like a pulse.
My grandmother dutifully stitched the name into the collars of button downs, the waistbands of corduroy pants, the inside of a denim jacket. But there was no tag to help her retrieve what she most wished to keep.
For, instead of a mitten, or coat, or scarf, she lost the boy.
Now, instead of thread piercing straight lines into cloth, she licks the tip of a pencil and marks off squares on a calendar. Marks the days till the next meeting. The only time she will speak aloud that name inked in red. Speak of the boy who tried to think happy thoughts but instead of flying, crash landed at the bottom of a bottle. The boy preserved at seventeen. The boy who will never have the privilege of lamenting the unflattering fit of a graduation robe or the retreat of a receding hairline.
Somewhere across town, a young mother leans over her infant son. His plump hand reflexively wraps around her finger. He clings to her like a shadow, something outside herself, but so much a piece of her that they could never be severed.
She has yet to learn how the unlatching of nursery windows can have unthinkable consequences. How a mother can tuck her children into bed in the evening yet find them lost to Neverland before the morning. Despite nursery rhymes. Despite nightlights. Despite Nanas.
The mother sets aside her thimble and kisses his soft curls. “I hope you never grow up,” she whispers.
She thinks she means it.
Two locks of hair plaited together. Two shades of brown. One deep like fertile soil. The other the color some call “mousy.” But someone loved it once. Reverently coiled it around a finger, buried their nose in the silky strands, ran a boar bristle brush from roots to ends, one hundred strokes every morning and evening.
Now, that hair is a corpse’s cast off. A fragment of body, displaced from time. Only escaping its fate to rot in the earth by virtue of being held captive behind glass instead.
“Victorian mourning jewelry,” my mother says, distractedly rummaging through her jewelry box, the one she’s owned for the better part of a century, for the pieces she actually wears.
I cradle the plated metal rectangle of the brooch in my palm. Repulsion only overshadowed by aching wonder. So hopeless, this attempt to stanch the flood of grief with nothing more than a patch of woven hair. As if the barb of the pin and one of these trapped strands could suture up a hemorrhaging heart. As if these tresses could be intertwined tightly enough to keep death from its thieving aim.
Two locks plaited together. The two shades of brown now rendered anonymous by years. Some now-forgotten relative’s love story. The nature of it lost by generations of careless inheritors. I nestle the brooch back in my mother’s cracked vinyl-covered jewelry box. I close the lid on this bereft mother and child, or pair of sisters, or lovers. Leave them to cling to each other unseen in the dark.
I am grateful to live in a time when mourning does not involve the making of corporeal trinkets. That my map for navigating grief does not include stops for lopping off pieces of the dead. I would never imprison a deceased loved one’s body parts behind glass from my own comfort.
I kiss my mother’s wrinkled cheek, and we say our goodbyes. The words cast between us with the casual promise that they will be said many times again. But I sit in my car in her driveway, and don’t yet turn the ignition. I reach into my pocket and take out my phone. A rectangle of metal and glass. I listen to the voicemails I have saved there.
“Hi, honey, it’s Mom.”
“Call me later.”
“I love you.”
I play them over and over, let them soothe me from roots to ends, bury themselves somewhere deep and hidden within my chest, and coil bracingly around my heart. My insurance policy against ever losing her completely. Digital pieces of her I pilfered without her knowing. Strings of binary code for a future emergency when I will use them to stitch up my heart to keep from bleeding out. A first-aid kit to pin myself back together on the day her aging body irrevocably unravels. A day we both know is coming.
Alison Luk: My work has been published in literary and special interest magazines, including Highlights High Five and Bellevue Literary Review. My flash fiction has won second place in Exposition Review’s Flash 405 contest and was shortlisted for the Fractured Lit Anthology Flash Fiction Prize. I hold a BA in English Literature from Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. I live in Michigan with my husband and two bookworms masquerading as children. You can find me on Instagram @alisonlukwrites.