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I Am Standing, He is Sitting
by Glen Wilson I know the rat a tat tat of the singer now and I am comfortable with its regular song. My hands have leaned and learned how threads can lace up the seams of any dress, how garments measured right can fit bespoke limbs through narrow gaps, how quiet fabric can rest on skin. Sunlight flicks the haberdashery walls, coaxing out the colour of the plastic shrouded apparel. They queue up with their wounds, content to wait with their missing buttons, frayed ends spilling out, weeping for they knew I would heal them soon, for I am the needle armed tailor of Lourdes. An old man shuffles unto a bench across the street, I recognise him, even after all these years. His wide nose now red and bulbous, the sharp mouth barbed up to one side possibly by a stroke. I see myself in the clothes I arrived in back then, they were all I wore or didn’t, we moved on the grey shopfloor, the exits with iron bunting, machines lined up with only serial numbers to tell them apart. He patrolled that patch of our world, beady eyes on the apparatus, checking the harmony of the stitching and us. I fold up the piece I am altering and set it on the table, traffic held back at a red light, I walk across the road. ‘Do you remember me’, he smiled then memory reeled, all the raised hands of the past fall in different weight, He slouches down further, fumbling for his cane his left hand a tremor, my right hand so still. |
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