I
wrote “The Old Quilt” for one of Lascaux’s flash fiction contests and, to my
surprise, I was one of seven finalists out of more than 240 entries. The story
was based on a visual prompt—a color collage that looked a lot like a stained-glass
window.
Originally published on LascauxFlash.com, Sept. 2012.
The Old Quilt
By Lee
Wright
The quilt was made by my great-grandmother. She turned ninety-nine the week before I was
born and didn’t live to see my fifth birthday.
To me, she will always be a short, stooped, wisp of a woman with thin,
silver hair, a hard jaw, and cloudy blue eyes.
Dressed always in a simple, gray housedress, she was a quiet,
near-ghost, still and introverted, somewhat frightening to us children. I never knew her as the woman who lost three
sons to war, two to the mines, one to drink, and one in youth to God only knows
what. I have only vague, sometimes
contradictory, three-generation-old stories of her time at the front tending
the wounded. I’m told that, somewhere,
in a trunk at my aunt’s house, there is a yellowed letter from a President now
decades dead thanking my illiterate great-grandmother for her service.
Remembering bulbous purple knuckles, barely capable of
pinching a cheek, it’s hard for me to imagine her sitting, night-after-night, in
a hand-hewn rocker, working by candlelight to assemble this quilt from the scraps
of the hand-me-down and homemade clothes her ill-fated children had worn until
they could be worn no more. But, nearly a
century later, the stitches are tight, the edges only lightly frayed, the
colors muted but warm.
My child, born to a child, will know even less of me, but I take
comfort in the fact that, before saying goodbye, I swaddled her in the colors
of a hundred autumns.
© 2012 Lee
Wright
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