How To Cut And Sew Love Quotes

The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child’s dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.   The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star.

Her gaze returned to my wings, and then her brow pursed. “You’re bleeding,” she said on a gulp and pointed over my left shoulder. When I looked, I could just see a trickle of blue from the cut the guard’s sword had made. Rising, I went to my satchel again and removed a vial of antiseptic that our healers in Gadlizel made. I poured some on a clean cloth and stretched out my left wing. I could barely reach the cut, but I could see that the guard’s blade hadn’t gone to the bone. Still, it was wide enough to cause infection. “Damn,” I muttered, reaching back to try and wipe the blue blood still streaming lightly from the wound. “Let me.” I actually startled, finding Murgha standing right next to me. Without a word, I handed her the cloth. “You’ll need to sit down. I can’t reach.” She was quite small, even for a light fae. I sat on the pallet and spread my wing. She stood eye level with the top of my wing. Then she dabbed at the cut, the sting of the medicine sharp, but I didn’t move a muscle. “This needs to be stitched,” she said softly. I looked up at her. “I don’t suppose you know how to stitch wounds.” She swallowed nervously. “I do, actually. I sew all my own clothes, and Papa has needed cuts treated in the past. My sister was always too squeamish to do it.

Although Arin was eager to see Kestrel, he would have to wait. He caught threads of music from far away. As he came across the grass, the piano’s melody strengthened. It opened within him a happiness that gathered and gleamed…glossy, but the way water is, with weight. A lovely fatigue claimed him. He lay down on the grass and listened. He thought about how Kestrel had slept on the palace lawn and dreamed of him. When she had told him this, he’d wished that it had been real. He tried to imagine the dream, then found himself dreaming. Everything made sense in his dream yet he felt the tenuousness of this perfect reason. The arch of Kestrel’s bare foot. An old tale about the god of death and the seamstress. Arin would lose, upon waking, his understanding of why touching Kestrel would arouse the memory of a story he’d not thought about in a long time. He dreamed: one stocking balled in his fist, and the stray question of how it had been made, who had sewn this? He saw his hands--though they did not look like his hands--measuring and cutting fabric, sewing invisible stitches. A dark-haired boy tumbled from a room, a god-mark upon his brow. When a guest entered and said, Weave me the cloth of yourself, Arin thought that he was the forbidding guest and the child and the sewing girl all at once. She said, I’m going to miss you when I wake up. Don’t wake up, he answered. But he did. Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said, “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to.” It took him a velvety moment to understand that this was real. The air was quiet. An insect beat its clear wings. She brushed hair from his brow. Now he was very awake. “You were sleeping so sweetly,” she said. “Dreaming.” He touched her tender mouth. “About what?” “Come closer, and I’ll tell you.” But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way. She curled her fingers into the green earth.

I’m at the airport. I’m waiting for the plane to take me home to my sister and my mother. I bought cream at Lush to rub onto Elf’s body. She has a surprisingly beautiful body for a woman in her late forties. Her legs are slim and firm. She has muscular thighs. Her smile is an event. She laughs so hard. She makes me laugh so hard. She gets surprised. Her eyes open wide, comically, she can’t believe it. Her skin is pristine, smooth and pale. Her hair is so black and her eyes so green like they’re saying go, go, go! She doesn’t have horrible freckles and moles and facial hair like me and big bones poking out like twisted rebar at the dump. She’s petite and feminine. She’s glamorous and dark and jazzy like a French movie star. She loves me. She mocks sentimentality. She helps me stay calm. Her hands aren’t ravaged by time and her breasts don’t sag. They’re small, pert, like a girl’s. Her eyes are wet emeralds. Her eyelashes are too long. The snow weighs them down in the winter and she makes me cut them shorter with our mother’s sewing scissors so they don’t obscure her vision. I knocked over a tray of bath bombs the size of tennis balls, bright yellow, onto the floor and I couldn’t figure out how to pick them up. The woman said it was okay. I can’t remember now if I paid for the cream. I’m going home. NINE When Elf went away to Europe my mother decided to emancipate herself as well and enrolled in university classes in the city to become a social worker and then a therapist.