Adrianne needed to feel her body.

She used scissors this time, a half pair, separated at its pivot point and missing its twin. Adrianne thought the remaining half looked like the head of a heron with no lower beak, the ring topped with a finger tang like a blue crown of feathers. The edge felt dull on her fingertip as she stroked the silver length of the blade, dulled by repeated use and misuse over the years. Her mother, Tanya, said these were strictly fabric shears when they were once whole and new. Over time, though, Tanya could not be bothered to seek out the utility shears from the kitchen, and so these had been used to clip stems of misshapen floral arrangements, trim unruly bangs, even cut forbidden paper.

“Paper will dull the shears,” Tanya had said. “It deadens the edge quicker than cutting through regret.”

Adrianne wondered about Rochambeau, how scissors beat paper—not the other way around—how only rock threatened scissors with any true mettle. Not so in her mother’s world. In Tanya’s world, perfect things had value, places of esteem. “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work,” she’d quip, though Adrianne could hear the menace in “pleasure,” the demand in “work.”

To push the sound of her mother’s voice from her mind, Adrianne cut a shallow line across her forearm.

The pain that came was different than her mental anguish. Instead of the flashing storm of voices through her thoughts, she felt the blade cut her skin. Instead of the thundering insanity that insisted she was dumb, stupid, and flawed, she felt the heat of the incision. She pressed harder with the scissors as she dragged them against her arm. There. It was just there, beyond the clumsy mistake she’d made when she emptied the rolled oats into the wheat flour container. The sliver of a wound seeped into her consciousness and brought the distraction she sought. Adrianne breathed out a careful exhale as the sensation deepened.

A trickle of blood beaded along the line she carved. Not a long cut—nor could it be more threatening than her own mind’s cacophony of voices and fear—yet the cut had enough sensation to pull her into her body and away from the clatter of her thoughts. She had control over what came next, and so she cut again.

Adrianne thought again of the heron, though not an actual heron. Instead, as she cut, her mind animated the bird upon silk, the way a bamboo brush might ink its sinewy legs and rounded breast. She saw the curve of its neck, the delicate flip of its crown, the focus of its eye as it patiently surveyed the pond for prey—

“Adrianne!” her mother hollered from the next room.

The heron fluttered to dust.

Adrianne stood, wiped the blood from her arm, and yanked down her dark sleeve. Her pulse quickened with the thought of her mother in the living room, smoking and sewing—lately, her only activities.

“Adrianne, I need my thimble. Can you fetch it, child?”

The word “child” drummed in Adrianne’s mind. The tempo matched her stomps amplifying her angst as she walked the length of the hall to the guestroom. She was nearly sixteen, after all, a child who could almost drive. Not that she’d get the chance. The Monte Carlo was off limits even for her driver’s test. She’d known this for years, so her disappointment had long since twisted into resentment. An image of the car flashed in her mind with its black-on-black interior and black-on-chrome exterior. The front grille glared through low-set headlights, an apparent sneer where its bumper jutted out. Her father had purchased the car in 1987, to her mother’s chagrin. Adrianne knew the date well. Not long after the purchase, her father’s fatal heart attack took him; it took him but left the car. The life insurance money had paid off the house, the debts, even the Monte Carlo, but her mother never forgave him that extravagant purchase. Since his death, Tanya seemed to take her own resentment out on Adrianne by not allowing her to sit in the front seat—no exceptions. Certainly, Adrianne had asked about the front seat, a wide bench with black ribbing and black cord trim. Tanya’s answer always came with a smile: “I don’t think so, child.”

And the drumming would start again. Child. Child. Child.

Adrianne found the thimble atop the sewing table and stuck it on her index finger. She turned the object, pointing it at herself. The dimples along its silver cap reminded Adrianne of the moon. She wished she could be on the moon. As she stared into the pitted surface of the tiny thimble, her mind transported her. She walked among strange lunar formations, beheld towering rock outcrops, saw fissures that plummeted to endless depths, and she breathed an atmosphere that her father once called impossible because solar winds had stripped it away.

“Goddamnit!” Tanya cried out like a crashing comet. “Goddamnit! I’ve pricked my finger!”

Adrianne acted before she thought. The feat was enough to squelch her simmering fear before it ignited. She swallowed a second time. The deed was done in an instant, easy. She cleared her throat and called out, “I can’t find it,” though the effort to speak took some doing.

“The hell you can’t,” said her mother. “Get your ass out here, you little brat.”

As Adrianne hurried into the living room she found Tanya sitting in the chair—the place where she always sat—a dark blue La-Z-Boy recliner with cup holders recessed into the extensions on both armrests. In one cup holder she kept her sewing notions: thread wax, pin cushion, seam ripper, and a patchwork of fabrics she’d cobbled together to make a quilt block from scraps she’d cut into three-by-three-inch squares. On the other side of the recliner she kept the TV remote control, her package of Marlboro 100s, and a pair of ten-inch Sheffield Kevlar shears. Adrianne knew those shears, coveted their precise edge.

“Where is it?” her mother asked, a cigarette hanging from her lower lip. The cigarette bounced as Tanya pursed her lips. Its smoke curled into a halo above her head which matched the gray of her hair, a dull and lifeless mass of ashen curls.

“I don’t know,” Adrianne lied, her eyes glancing off the Sheffields in the cup holder. She tugged her sleeves over her wrist bones. Her hands folded together, one atop the other. She fingered the delicate carpal bones under the skin of her wrist, packed in tight with muscle and blood.

“Did you check the sewing table?”

“Yes.” She swallowed again.

“The nightstand?”

“I did.”

“Did you look under the bed?”

“Well, no,” Adrianne paused and tilted her head at her mother. “I didn’t have much time.” She felt the odd lump in her throat.

“Go look.” Tanya took a long drag from her cigarette and then blew a cloud of smoke. “It might have rolled under there or something. I don’t know.”

Adrianne hesitated.

“Well?” Tanya said, giving Adrianne a piercing look.

Adrianne hurried out of the room, patting her sternum as she went. She knew why her mother was mad at her. Adrianne could still see the oats in the flour, the grain scattered atop the bin of dusty wheat. She pinched her arm as she remembered how Tanya had glared, had stayed quiet, had shook her head at witnessing the stupidity of her daughter’s blunder. As Adrianne entered the guest room, she pounded her chest once and swallowed as hard as she could. By now she doubted she would ever be able to produce the thimble and so she sat on the floor next to the bed and pulled up her left sleeve.

She examined the newest cut before studying the scars along her arm, their scattered lattice a history of control. She knew each line intimately, where they’d come from and under which circumstances they’d arrived. Like visitors that traveled from distant places promising stopovers but then staying on, the scars lingered, offering a view of the diverging worlds she knew: one where she was spinning and blundering, endlessly out of control; another where she held the wheel, a modest scar the price for steerage. Her fingernail found an older mark and she dragged the line until it reddened again. As her mind separated the oats one by one from the interminable flour, the memory faded to nothing but the cut.

Did it hurt? Not so much. Instead, there was the welcome presence of her body around her, fixed to the earth. The planet held her. She thought of that, of what it was like to be held to a massive body, a huge and round spinning thing that buoyed her with its gravity. Her father said that gravity remained a mystery, an unsolvable kind. Physicists could describe its properties and yet they could not define it. What had they speculated? A force of attraction from enormous bodies? A property only applicable to large-scale mass? A concave fabric stretching across the universe? In another sense, gravity meant something significant, like when everything important seemed to fit within a small moment, the hope of a birthday wish, or even the decision to purchase an extravagant vehicle.

But the type of gravity Adrianne thought of was the mysterious force that held her to the planet.

She felt her bottom and the upper portions of her thighs against the floor, the carpet pressing into her skin. Where her ankles and feet settled atop the carpet, she felt drawn down, imagined invisible tethers holding her in place. She felt tension in her own weight as it pulled toward the center of the earth, somewhere far below her. She thought again of the moon, only she wasn’t on the moon, but rather looking at herself from that lunar landscape. She saw herself through a magic telescope from the moon, saw how tiny she might look from far away.

And the world rolled from her gaze, away from the moon.

As the earth turned, she saw herself dangling upside down, hanging like a ripe fruit from a big blue marble floating in space. She became so convinced of her upside-down-ness that she wondered why her hair wasn’t standing on end. Of course, by then there was no pain. There was no cut into which her fingernail dug. There was no flour mixed with oats; it had almost never happened. She simply moved across the solar system, suspended from the giant spinning body that held her, all the while maintaining control over the one thing she could always control: her body.

Then she lost control.

The newest secret she’d hidden from her mother gave a sudden and uncomfortable lurch near her esophagus. Maybe the vivid way she’d imagined her upside-down-ness had undone the trick. After all, things don’t fall up. Gravity held her down, and down was toward to the center of the earth, and down was where the thimble was intended to go; instead, it came loose then and began working its way back up her gullet. Afraid the thimble would become lodged in her throat and cause her to choke, she panicked.

She stood in a rush and hurried to the bathroom. There, she ran the faucet and scooped cold water into her cupped hands. She gulped and gulped not thinking she should push up her sleeves. The water pooled into her cuffs and stung the newer cuts. She looked at herself in the mirror, a grave figure afraid to be discovered in a plot to trick a master villain. But for now, the sensation had subsided. She no longer felt the rising thimble in her esophagus, but she did feel her own humiliation, the rise of her own deprecation. How stupid of her! She deserved to die with the thimble lodged in her throat.

Then she heard a sweeter voice, a kinder voice, one that she longed to hear, but also one she fought to silence. Her father. He said, in his calm tone, he deserved the Monte Carlo. It wasn’t a snide remark; he’d stated it in plain terms and exactly that way, too. “I deserve that Monte Carlo, Tanya.” A flatness came from his delivery then, and yet, when Adrianne played the moment back, she heard a choir of angels take up the cause. “He deserves that Monte Carlo!” they’d heralded as Tanya stood, mouth agape, cigarette fallen to the floor. Good gracious, yes, he deserved it. Such a slight and tender man who never wanted much, or probably anything, if Adrianne had it right. Richard Anthony Lane of 22 Forest Acre Place, who paid his taxes and went to work when he had a cold and mowed the lawn on Sundays, deserved a 1987 black-on-black Monte Carlo SS, with a wraparound red pinstripe to seal the deal. After all, it was his birthday and Adrianne did not recall a single gift Tanya had ever given the man with the down-turned mustache and a love of pastries. But what a gift it had been for Adrianne when he drove up and got out and stated his fact: he deserved that car. Adrianne relished the memory of Tanya’s mouth hanging open, how as she replayed the thought the chorus of the angels amplified. But, really, there had been no singing. And now he wasn’t there at all.

She shut the water off and looked around the bathroom. Her eye caught a silver glint and she took up the nail clippers and nipped a divot into the back of her hand. Dark red beads formed. Across the wetness of her skin, the blood spiderwebbed outward, finding each tiny line of her epidermis, miniature valleys along the surface of her. She swallowed hard but could not deny the lump in her throat where the thimble hung. She looked at the cut, a place she could not hide beneath her sleeve, conspicuous on the back of her hand. She’d use one of the dozens of excuses she’d already invented: a cat she’d met on her way home from school, the sharp edge of the locker door, the swinging arm of a fellow student wearing too many rings and passing her in the hall with a closeness that could be real if she allowed herself to get close.

Adrianne turned the water on again and ran her hand beneath the cool flow. The red valleys along her skin disappeared. She eyed the nail clippers with fascination, admired their design, and considered the attention that went into the lever, which could turn and flip into a closed position, rendering the tool useless. And what was it to be without a use? Like her half pair of scissors, until she reclaimed them and gave them a new purpose. Or like the therapy dog they’d brought to the hospital room after her father died. The volunteer—a woman named Merle—explained that the dog had once been abandoned. “Useless old mutt,” Merle called him. He had wandered the streets looking for scraps and sleeping in alleys. His name was Rusty for his russet colored fur, which was wiry and not at all soft. He was a Chihuahua mix, bigger than his parent breed, but also calm, as if he embodied peace. Adrianne loved him for the way he looked at her with such hope and joy in his eyes, the way his tail wagged at her even though she was immeasurably sad. But she also hated that dog for the reason they brought him to her. They wanted to rush her through her process, placating her needs with the clumsy, silly animal. Rusty did not want her to cry; he wanted her to laugh and cuddle and play. Adrianne might have wanted to cry then, but she knew that if she did, she’d never stop. She imagined Rusty’s tongue licking her right on the very spot where the water now washed away the blood. Merle was wrong; that dog had always been useful.

“Rusty,” Adrianne said out loud.

“What the hell are you carrying on about?” Tanya appeared in the hallway, a new cigarette wagging in her hand. “I suppose you never looked for my thimble, eh?” Her house coat hung open, its large cabbage roses making her appear comically small in the old gown.

Startled, Adrianne jumped. This action displaced the thimble, causing it to rise once again in her throat. Only now, the thimble was very near her larynx and pressing against her wind pipe. She thought if she were to respond, even with the slightest murmur, the lodged object would fight against gravity and either expose the trick she’d played on Tanya or render her unable to breathe—or both. Then she would perish in a long and anguishing moment like her father had four years earlier, clutching her chest and staring at Tanya with contempt. Instead of responding, she opened her eyes as wide as she could at Tanya. And then, not knowing she could be so brave, Adrianne slammed the bathroom door shut, leaving the old woman in the hallway. She clicked the lock to confirm her bravado.

“You open this door right now, young lady!” her mother yelled. Tanya jostled the handle and pounded on the door. “Open it now.”

All the while, Adrianne stood very still, regulating her breathing so that the thimble would remain suspended in her esophagus while affording her a few moments for a clear thought. She looked around the bathroom, taking in the mishmash of items atop the counter. She might try to drink the ipecac syrup to induce vomiting, but how would she swallow with the thimble in the way? She could gag herself with the toothbrush. She thought of thrusting her abdomen against the countertop’s edge to prompt the Heimlich maneuver, but she feared she would break a rib before producing enough thrust. Finally, she found a lipstick, a terrible shade of pink that looked more Naugahyde than flesh. She wrote in large letters on the bathroom mirror these words:

CHOKING – CALL 911

Tanya continued to pound on the door and yell about Adrianne’s defiance, her rebellious nature, how insensitive she’d been, when Adrianne flung the door open, consequences be damned.

“What the hell is wrong with you? I mean, you can’t just—”

Adrianne clapped frantically and pointed at the mirror. She waited for her mother to read the lipstick message and take in its meaning.

Tanya’s angry eyes flitted from the mirror to Adrianne, back to the mirror, and then back to Adrianne again, but now with a look of panic.

“If you’re lying to me, child, I will beat you senseless.”

Adrianne could not even shake her head. She only stared at her mother with desperation, tears spilling down her cheeks. She took steady breaths through her nose, and tried to stay calm. She thought about her scissors, the new cut from the fingernail clippers, her need to escape the situation. But she was rooted to the spot, desperately needing her mother to believe her and to help her.

Tanya looked at Adrianne as if she were sizing her up, trying to guess if this was a trick. “Holy hell! This is just too much. You hear me? Too much. Turn around, child.”

The drumming that Adrianne had heard earlier turned into a raucous pounding. Child. Child. Child. As she turned around, she imagined an impending spanking. She hadn’t had a spanking in ten years, maybe longer. But when she turned her back Tanya hit her in between her shoulder blades. Hard.

Adrianne erupted in a shriek that came both from the blow and the pain that flooded her throat and neck and back. With that swift motion, the scream dislodged the thimble, projecting it out of Adrianne’s mouth, and pinging it off of the mirror. It left a splat of saliva where it smacked. With the residual pain, fear, the surprise whack on her back, Adrianne began to cry.

The thimble lay on the counter and Tanya picked it up and looked at it. Then she looked at Adrianne and said, “Now, there’s a girl,” She put an arm around her daughter and then another and pulled her close. “Come now,” she continued as Adrianne cried, “it isn’t as bad as all that. It’s just a dumb old thimble anyhow.”

Through tear-sodden eyes, Adrianne saw her mother holding her in the reflection of the mirror.

 

---

 

Tanya also looked at their reflections joined, saw the shape of their bodies together, hers old and beginning to fail, Adrianne’s so young and vulnerable. She smoothed her daughter’s hair and waited for her own heartbeat to slow. A sense of gratitude washed over her, a feeling she hadn’t felt in a long time. She also felt relief that her daughter was okay. The afternoon could have ended differently, worse. Tanya thought of Richard and the ambulance. Even though Adrianne’s head was tucked beneath Tanya’s chin, she noticed how much taller her daughter had grown in the last few years, took in the fact that they were nearly the same height, relished the color of Adrianne’s auburn hair. And then, she noticed something else. Tanya saw a thin red scab, almost a perfect line, peeking out from the cuff of Adrianne’s sleeve. She saw another wound, fresh and red, on her hand. Her heart thudded at the recognition of the self-inflicted injury.

She waited until Adrianne’s crying ebbed. “What’s here?” Tanya asked, pulling at the sleeve.

Adrianne pushed with a grunt, but Tanya held her close, clamped her arm around her daughter, and drew the sleeve up to reveal a network of scratches, cuts, scars.

“Oh, Adie.”

“Mom, don’t,” Adrianne said. She pried herself free of Tanya’s hold and yanked the sleeve back down.

“Why on earth—”

“Don’t!” Adrianne yelled. She put her hands over her ears and pushed past Tanya, fleeing down the hall.

Tanya stood in the cool room for a long moment. The image of the red on the back of Adrianne’s hand flashed in her mind. She could not anchor onto any clear thought. She remembered her unlit cigarette still in her hand, the thimble in the other. She set the thimble on the countertop where it had landed earlier. She remembered she had wanted it, had asked Adrianne to fetch the thimble. Her eyes moved between the cigarette and the thimble. She noticed the small pool of saliva on the counter, wondered at its presence. She couldn’t imagine how the thimble had lodged in her daughter’s throat in the first place. Tanya marveled at where it had landed; it could have ended up anywhere—fallen unseen behind the wastebasket—but the world pulled it down right there waiting for her to see it, to grasp it. She reached out and picked it up again. Taking in the thimble’s simplicity, she thought about the purpose of such a tool.

She thought about the oats, how Adrianne had been so hard on herself about the mishap. But really, wasn’t it Tanya who had been hard? She’d imagined the oats falling, cascading like rain and landing in a vast desert of flour stretching out before her in all directions, tiny puffs of white kicking up where each individual oat had landed. After the last few minutes, she saw it plain, saw all the broken things: the way the pieces of her life had shattered when Richard died, how those cracks extended into her daughter’s world shattering the girl’s fragile hopes, and the chasm that had grown between her and Adrianne. Regaining herself, Tanya shook away the many different outcomes that had been possible that day.

In that fleeting moment, Tanya recognized how much work there was to be done—for Adrianne and for her. Work. She considered the word. “Work” repeated in her thoughts. “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work,” her own mother had told her time and time again.

She imagined her own mother’s hand plunging a needle in quick succession along the fabric—a thimble ever-present, protecting her from the thrusting needle. Her mother sewed perfect lines. Tanya remembered watching those fingers fly, the precision of the needle tip moving in and out of the quilt top, as many as nine or ten stiches per pull. She thumbed the thimble as she remembered her mother’s eyes concentrating on the task, straight pins held in her pursed lips unpinning as she sewed, not even a pause to reach for a pincushion. Tanya’s mother made clothes for all of her dolls, intricate outfits with tiny buttons and cross-stitched details. But she would not stop working to play with Tanya. She would never join the tea parties or make-believe nursery school. The woman could not be pulled from her quilting. How great must the compulsion have been for her, ensnared in the repetition of the stitching? She made lovely quilts, grand Dresden plates and star-centered log cabins different from the rudimentary patchwork quilts of Tanya’s own hand. But Tanya had never learned to quilt from her mother. Everything she knew about the craft came from observation alone.

“Would you show me how?” She remembered her own small and frail voice in a rare moment of courage.

“Child,” her mother said without looking up from her work. “You lack the drive for precision.” She continued to stich, seated at her enormous quilting frame. “This craft requires a certain love for hard work. Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

But Tanya thought she could love that work; she could learn to love it. She had seen such determination in her mother’s face as she set the needle, waggled her own hand across the surface of the fabric—lifting and sinking, dipping and rising—in such quick bastes. Tanya wondered what it was like to find such pleasure in the work, as her mother seemed to find. She’d find it, too, that pleasure. She had to.

She took the lighter from the pocket of her house coat, lit her cigarette, and blew the smoke at her own reflection. She rinsed the saliva from the thimble, then patted it dry on a towel before slipping the thimble into her pocket. She heard it collide into the lighter with a small clink. Tanya rehung the towel and left the bathroom with another thought of Richard, his blue eyes and quiet voice.

As she made her way back to the living room, she took another long drag off of her cigarette, enjoying its thick flavor before returning to work. There was a quilt top to finish assembling. After that, the binding and basting would need extra care. As she entered the living room, she noticed right away that her Westcott titanium bonded scissors were missing from their usual spot on the armrest. She paused then went to the kitchen and grabbed the utility shears. They were best used for cutting butcher paper and tenderloin string, but they would do with fabric and thread as well. On her return, she passed by the front window where she could see the hood and windshield of the Monte Carlo glaring at her—such a gross indulgence. She considered trading in the car for something more practical.

Just then, the car moved backward in the driveway. Before Tanya could pull the cigarette from her gaping mouth, the glare shifted and she glimpsed Adrianne at the wheel. Then the car turned and drove off.

Rhonda Zimlich teaches writing at American University in Washington, DC. She writes about intergenerational trauma and the unbreakable spirit of youth. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Past-Ten, Dogwood Journal, and others. She holds an MFA from VCFA. Twitter: @rhondazimlich