Johnson’s mother left behind a sewing machine when they took her away shrieking. Grown mad over the loss of a young daughter to an outbreak of influenza, the woman spent the remainder of her short life in the company of the kind but helpless doctors at the State Hospital. They were unable to ease her rattled mind.

The machine was the only useful item, to Johnson’s mind, that the woman owned. Gifted to her by an old dying rich matron, for whom Johnson’s mother had provided maid service and sometime companionship, the item had become a source of entertainment for the boy, his mother, and his itinerant father, Josiah. When it became obvious that the baby girl was coming, Johnson’s mother began to make clothes with the machine while the boy sat beside her. It was how he learned to sew, and what he knew of his mother, and of himself, he learned while seated beside the machine. Still, it was a short period of learning, one followed by longer periods of solitude. It was a pattern struck and repeated, like a sewing exercise, whereby Johnson would stitch together the rest of his life. A brief epiphany, maybe begetting a short respite of commonweal, followed by isolation’s return. After his mother’s illness took her away, his father left on horseback, and to Johnson’s knowledge, never returned to the small farm on which they had lived.

-Danny Grosso

Excerpt from the short story.