501 AV, Season of Spring, Day 40
A young Kit sat cross-legged on a wooden floor, staring intently at something clutched between her fingers. Her teeth dug sharply into her bottom lip, and her toes were curled up in reservation. Her eyes darted across her aunt and uncle's house, looking for some means of escape. There was a window in the cramped room upstairs they had converted into her living space, but it was a tight squeeze and she was like to break it in the attempt. The door was the easiest exit, or would be the easiest, if not for the obstacle that stood between her and it.
Auntie Summer loomed over Kit, making her cringe as she looked up and saw a face full of silent, grown-up disappointment. She was a thin, reedy woman, short by the measure of those wholly grown but still immense by Kit's. Her hair flowed back over her shoulders, and her skin still had youth's shadow behind it. But a flicker of something deeper in her eyes betrayed age or experience or both. "I am tired of mending your clothes for you." She sighed. "You need to learn for yourself."
Kit bit down on her lip and stared at the trousers laid across her legs. With her free hand she traced the shape of it, found a rip across its back, that'd left too much exposed for decency when it had caught on something while she was running in the street last evening. She had already felt it a dozen, half-a-hundred times before. She delayed, delayed and delayed . . .
"If you can't mend that," Auntie Summer said, the shadow of antagonism creeping into her voice. "I'm sending you into the streets tomorrow in your skivvies."
Kit looked up at the woman, tried to measure the sincerity of her threat from the set of her jaw and the look of her eyes. She could not see through them, and swallowed, hard.
In her other hand, Kit held a little, wooden needle. She pointed it at the rip like a knight making a challenge, and let it waver there. And then left it there.
"Push it through the cloth," her aunt sighed again. Swallowing hard, Kit did so. "Not [i]there! Near where the tear starts, so you can start to close it." Kit pulled the needle out from where she left it and pushed it through the other. It was sometimes easy to mistake a pair of trousers or shirt for one solid piece; it wasn't, of course. It was threads, woven together just so. The point of the needle was just thin enough that it found its way through the warp and weft of Kit's trousers and out the other end. "Now, close the rip as best you can. Push it through the other side, so that it comes closed when you tighten it." Kit did so. The cloth pulled closer together, the rip suddenly just that much smaller.
"Your mother should be the one doing this," Auntie Summer said, and when Kit looked up and saw her aunt running a hand over her face. Did she mean teaching about sewing? Yes. Did she mean everything else, too? Yes, Kit thought, her shoulders shrinking inward, trying to make herself smaller—
Kit spasmed and hissed as inattentive fingers drove the needle up through the cloth and into her thumb. She stuck it into her moth and let it stay there for a moment, nursing the stabbing pain for a moment in her saliva.
"That's what you get for not paying attention," her aunt said, and Kit shot a hurt look up at the older woman. All the same, Kit found no sympathy there.
"I don't wanna stay here," Kit said. "I wanna go outside."
"Then you can go naked." Aunt Summer said firmly, reaching down, grabbing hold of Kit's shirt and making an attempt at pulling it off the girl. "I won't be the one to fix every time you destroy your clothes."
Kit tried to wriggle away, and failed. "'Alright! 'Alright!" She said, and only then did Auntie Summer let her go. She sulked where she sat, grabbed hold of the string that tied trouser to needle and pulled. It came right off the floor, no need to find it. Again, Kit pushed it through the gaps in tthe cloth, rewove it on the other side and pulled the string taut. Again, and again, and again.
"You put it through the same hole that time."
"You pushed it through too far away, it will rip too easily."
"Too close! You're weakening the fabric."
She always had some critique for Kit; this is what you did wrong, this is how you correct it. But never once did she actually bend down to help Kit with her sewing. Kit had seen the way she taught her own daughters, intimately, gently with her hand laid over theirs and a smile on her face. The only thing Kit could hear in her voice now was exasperation.
Kit wondered what her mother was doing right now, at that very instant, and again the needle slipped and dug into Kit's thumb. She winced, chewed on her lower lip, breathed through her teeth and pulled the needle calmly out, drove it back in. It was nearly closed, now. Nearly closed, nearly done . . . "Look! Look!" Kit held up the trousers with a big grin on her face, looking to where Auntie Summer stood.
But she sighed, held a hand to her head, disappointment radiating from her like light from the sun. Kit hunched her shoulders and turned the needle back on her trousers and pricked her finger again.
I want her life to have been easier. She seems so vulnerable it hurts.
