HEIRLOOM FROM RIVER ROUGE, MICHIGAN — BROOKE RANDEL
/A bell dings. A woman hands over her husband’s shirt, torn at the shoulder, and another woman, a woman with the same first name as my middle name, takes it and says come back Thursday. She smooths the shirt, aligning its seam under the eye of her Singer sewing machine, model 31-15. Her grandson sleeps on a wooden table in the back. She watches the Singer’s needle bob up and down as it does its steady, invisible work. No one will know what happened to the shirt, what traumas it’s seen. She doesn’t pick up her head, doesn’t slow down, doesn’t wonder why her grandson isn’t in school. She sews a straight line, closes the wound. Decades later, when the auto plants close down and the town empties out, her body will too and her grandson, grown and graduated, on his own since sixteen, will move across the country, setting the sewing machine in a corner of his house where it will go untouched for years, a dusty memory, a different time, until, at age five, I try to sew my finger and scream.
Brooke Randel is a writer and copywriter in Chicago. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Gigantic Sequins, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a memoir about her grandma, literacy and the legacy of the Holocaust. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.
