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The Winding Quilt

Rachel Henderson

Issue One: What Scares You (October 2024)
(C/W Parental Death)

Mother asked to be buried with the quilt.


Selfish, Lindy thinks, as she peers into the cedar chest – they'd sewn it together, the two of them, fifty-fifty. And Mother doesn't need it anymore.


Mother doesn't need anything anymore.


Lindy pulls out the quilt and brushes her hand across a patch of pink flannel – her old baby blanket. Nine-year-old Lindy learned how to make a rocking stitch on that patch; its seams are puckered because the needle was large for a child's fingers, and she was sobbing too hard to hold it straight after Mother carved up her beloved blanket.


“Nine years old and already having your period,” Mother told her. “The thought of it.”


Most of the baby blanket went straight into the garbage – ruined, Mother claimed, by the light spray of menstrual blood Lindy tried scrubbing out with dish soap. Mother, who could get any stain out of any fabric, didn't bother with that blanket. 

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.

About

Rachel Henderson

Rachel Henderson lives in Louisiana. When she’s not crunching numbers at her day job, she spends her time writing horror fiction and playing bagpipes. Rachel’s short stories have appeared in Finn McCool's Short Story Anthology and The Writer's Arena. In 2021, she won first place in the NYC Midnight Short Screenplay Competition.


Website: www.rlhendie.com

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