She births me every Día de Muertos, stuffs me with hope,
stitches me up with deeds.
“Hope isn’t hard to find,” she says. “The thing grows wild
out of the eyeballs of children and in the far stare of any well-lived adult,
who understands that ends are just new kinds of beginnings. Good deeds, well…
those take work and pain and blood.”
“It does hurt,” I say, clenching the painted cloth of my
teeth against the jabbing pain, rubbing the crimsoned stitches she is using to
secure the hope of young and old inside my chest.
“I know. I know it hurts,” she says, cutting the spare
thread with her teeth, and kissing the top of my head, before taking a step
back to smile at the newly born me. Her lips are bloodied. Red has trickled all
the way down to her chest.
“You got dirty,” I say, pointing at the cloth that covers
her heart.
She unbuttons the top of her dress, revealing fresh ragged
stitches that mirror my own, and says, “Dirty? No, just marked by the price of
hope, scarred by life.”
“I’m sorry,” I say with a smirk, knowing the crooked lines
of my mouth morph the gesture into a creepy thing.
“Don’t be sorry, my Puppet,” she tells me, “just live for me.”
Her smile is a red kick in the face of impossible, it feeds me, frees me.
“I’m ready,” I say, and she touches my cheek with the back
of her fingers before setting me on the floor. I take a step and then another. On
the third step, my first stitch comes gently undone. I smile at my maker,
feeling the next stitch give way, letting my lifeforce—her hopes—spill and
spread into the world.
She births me every Día de Muertos, stuffs me with hope,
stitches me up with deeds… I share.
“Puppet”, by Shelle Kennedy
- this wee tale, which I wrote four
years ago, was originally titled “On el Día de Muertos, the Puppet Feels”. I
made some small changes: trimmed a bit here, stitched a bit there…
- for Poets and Storytellers United (Writers’ Pantry #44: Of Death and Ghosts in Books).
