Stitched Together
I am knitting my little brother a sweater, although it was difficult at first, trying to pick a color that would match his newly translucent skin tone. Butter yellow would wash him out. Pine green seemed too stuffy. Eventually, I settled on fairy tale purple, my favorite color, reminding me of the splotchy stains on his baby cheeks when I fed him blackberries as a toddler. The skein of yarn slips through my fingers as I make loops and tighten stitches, my joints aching with repetition. He’s shivering in the corner of my living room, though, so I don’t dare stop. I promised to take care of him, no matter how much he protested. Since his body has grown gaunt after his death, it doesn’t take long to finish the garment. I drape it over his skeletal frame like he’s a doll and stand back to admire my work. He looks down, flushes paprika red. I hate purple, he spits out between rotted teeth and decaying lips. Even after nineteen years, you never knew me at all, did you? Only saw what you wanted to see. But now the colors are clashing and the whole thing is ruined, so I frog back the stitches, unraveling the wool as a stranger emerges from the pool of kinked yarn, and I begin to purl it into the shape I’ve always known.
Unseen Music
My mother stole my fingers, right from the keyboard they were dancing on. She snipped them from my hands, one by one, dropping them into her oversized yellow purse as red fireworked against black and white. The tarantella kept playing as she rattled my fingers against pennies and coupons. I didn’t see them again until her funeral. She clutched the fleshy bouquet in her fists, and I swore I saw them twitch as she entered the ground.
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Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She’s on twitter @ezhang77.