The Honeysuckle Weave

Hazel sits at her loom and weaves. Back and forth, back and forth she passes the shuttle between warp strands threaded smooth as the millpond on a windless day. Back and forth, back and forth the spiders in the corners scuttle, weaving their funnel webs in the cracks between rough hewn logs, sealing over pinpricks of light.

In spring Hazel helps Mama plant the vegetable patch. She hoes and tills and runs off groundhogs and deer with a broom, keeps after Edie and Harlan to mind that they don’t trample the neat new rows of green. In summer they put up food for winter—peas, pickles, peaches from the Gleason’s orchard that they trade for when they have eggs to spare, so many tomatoes her hands stain bright red. When the days grow short she strings beans and shucks corn, their papery husks rattling like the gold and red leaves on the trees when the wind kicks up the ridge.

When her other chores are done, Hazel tromps up the hill from their cabin to the loom house. The squat little barn’s barely big enough for the loom itself, with just enough space for one person to walk all the way around threading the warp and getting everything set for a new weave. Slits in the walls let in the afternoon sun as her feet work the treadles up and down—one and three, two and four, one and three again—the wood beam clacking and clattering along. Shuttle passes from left to right, right to left. Up and down, left to right, breathing in and out and in and out air that smells of old wood and the oil that keeps it smooth, and the faint sheep musk remembered in the woolen thread.

Weaving’s slow going at first, but Hazel knows how to wait. With enough clacking and clunking the pattern emerges, fabric smooth and whole spooling out of the chaos.

***

Hazel sits at her loom and weaves, and so she doesn’t hear his boots creak the porch steps that first cold week of October, though of course the spiders do. She doesn’t hear the wrap of knuckles on the old wood door, or maybe he never knocked at all. Maybe he came upon Daddy and Jeb in the fields as he ambled up the cart path and they had the whole thing settled before she or Mama ever got a say. All she knows is when she walks down the hill still blinking away the loom house dim there he is, sitting on the porch steps pinching a cob pipe between his teeth, bandy legs crossed long out in front of him in the bright gold afternoon.

They never get visitors up here, except inviting the neighbors around for the occasional quilting or singing of hymns. Their land hunches on the back side of the ridge, a full quarter day’s walk past the Hilliard’s farm. Anyone looking for work stops there. Hazel knows because Millie Hilliard is her best friend, and it’s news worth sharing when anyone on this mountain looks up to see a face they don’t already know staring back at them.

He must’ve seen her coming down the hill, head still full of the complicated pattern she’s working up into a new coverlet for her and Edie’s bed. He doesn’t stand, doesn’t doff his worn out felted hat or introduce himself as would be proper. Hazel’s not quite grown, but she’s old enough for a man to tip his hat brim when he comes to call. Instead he watches her in that long, hateful way men watch a big buck that crosses their path on the way to church when they have no rifle on them to shoot it.

He sits without moving his scuffed up pant legs until Mama calls out the window for her to come help get supper on. He takes his time uncrossing his legs, like he’s doing her a favor even though he’d rather not go to the trouble. Hazel itches to smack his hat clean off his head, but of course she never would do it. She’s to turn the other cheek, as it tells in the good book.

***

Hazel sits at her loom and weaves as soon as the breakfast dishes are cleared and cleaned, before Mama can set her to mending Jeb’s spare set of overalls where they tore at the knee. Before anyone but the spiders might notice where she’s gone.

Back and forth, back and forth the shuttle flies, the beam thunk thunk thunking as she tightens each new row.

Daddy invited the man in for dinner last night, as Hazel expected he would. He gave Daddy his name before waving it out of the air like a puff of smoke. Most folks call him Happy, he said, on account of his genial nature.

Through dinner Happy joked with Daddy and Jeb, crowed over Mama’s black eye peas and cornbread. He smiled sweet at Harlan and Edie, so unlike the hungry man who’d looked her up and down like a hunk of salt pork.

After supper she cleared the dishes. Happy went on and on about how he’d hungered for such a well cooked meal until Daddy asked him out to the porch for a smoke. Jeb wandered out after them because he’s seventeen and convinced himself he’s a man now, while Hazel helped Mama fix Happy up a pallet to sleep by the hearth downstairs. Out on the porch Daddy decided Happy would help with the slaughtering in exchange for a place to lay his head and a sack of meal to take on his way. Inside, Mama sent Hazel to fetch one of the quilts off the bed she shares with Edie. No guest of theirs would sleep on sackcloth blankets. When she handed it over Happy’s fingers brushed hers, stopping for a moment too long on the spot where her heart’s blood thrummed in her wrist.

“There’s somethin’ foul in him,” Hazel tells the spiders in the corners as she pulls the beam to her and tightens a new row. The spiders don’t say anything back, but they don’t tell her she needs to stop seeing spooks where there are none, either.

“He seems fine enough,” Jeb had grunted last night as he tugged his nightshirt over his head. Harlan and Edie were already asleep, Harlan’s little snores whistling through the small upstairs room the four Keeler children share. “The slaughterin’ will go faster with another man to help. That’s worth keepin’ him up a few days. Then he’ll be on his way.”

When they were small she and Jeb had run all over the ridge together. They chased chickens that got loose and pretended to be explorers adventuring over sparkling boulders and through endless hells of laurel. Now Jeb runs the plow behind their mule and accompanies Daddy on trips to town while she cleans and cooks and weaves. The farm will be his one day when Daddy gets too old to work it. Hazel will be married off and living someplace else by then. That’s why Jeb went out to the porch while she scrubbed the skillets. If there was business to be attending to with this Happy, he needed to watch how Daddy went about it. She belonged out back, bones plunged in the washtub and aching with cold, clearing up the leavings from keeping them all alive.

***

Hazel sits at her loom and weaves, though the loom isn’t hers anymore than the cracks in the walls belong to the spiders. Granny Keeler brought it over from her home place once her eyesight got so bad she couldn’t pass a straw through the opening of a tin can, let alone thread the warp through all the heddles on a loom.

Most days she works up plain fabric to sew into shirts for the boys and dresses for her and Mama and Edie, but her favorite is making coverlets for the beds. On a piece as large as a bedspread she can weave complicated patterns like the swirling Rose and Vine or the swelling and shrinking circles of the Cup and Saucer. She can’t be thinking of nothing else while working a pattern like that, busy as the spiders stringing their circle webs between oak branches outside. Once she gets going the loom house walls fade away until all that’s left is the shuttle and her hands, the treadles and her feet, the steady clunk and clack of the wood, something beautiful coming together out of loose threads.

For this new coverlet she’s working the Honeysuckle Weave. Half ovals twine in and out of one another, a tangle of vines with little half circles like flowers in between. She picked a deep red thread from when she and Mama showed Edie how to dye with madder roots this past spring. Of all the colors they got Edie liked the darkest, bloodiest red best of all.

***

Hazel sits at her loom and weaves every second she can spare. The spiders watch the sky, sniffing for change on the way. She bundles her shawl and coat tight around her, longing for the fire crackling in the cabin’s hearth. She leaves off weaving during the coldest months, helping Mama with the spinning or knitting by the fireside instead. The honeysuckle coverlet is her last weave of the season, and she’s determined to see it done before winter sinks its teeth into them.

The sun’s dipped so low and pink she can barely see the weave in front of her, so low Mama’ll plant her hands on her hips and purse her lips when Hazel gets down to the house too late to help with supper. The cold air bites at her ears but she prefers it to the glint in Happy’s eyes, a gaze longer than it should be from a man to a girl but not so long that Daddy sees as they all stomp the mud from their boots. She’s caught Jeb eyeing him now and then, mouth turned down and hands fisted at his sides, but whatever he’s thinking he’s kept it to himself.

They’ll have finished the bottom field today, the last of the corn harvested and waiting to be shucked out in the crib. There’s another day yet until the slaughter—one more day to find her out back doing the wash or on the porch shelling peas. One more day to stand too close over her chair, running slithering fingers along the neck of her dress when no one’s there to see.

***

Hazel doesn’t weave on slaughtering day. The spiders listen to the morning mist, wondering where she’s gone.

Every year when the bloodroot pokes its tender white blooms up through the spring-thawed ground the farmers notch their hog’s black velvet ears and send them off into the hills. The hogs spend the summer fattening on wild berries and the chestnuts that fall like stones from the broad tall trees, their numbers offering protection against coyotes and cougars that slink behind them in the shadows. When the leaves crunch and the days shorten, every woman and child not too young or too old to go cavorting up the mountainside sets out to round them up while the men wait at the Hilliard’s farm, sharpening their knives. Once the pork’s butchered and salted it’ll hang in burlap bags above potatoes and bags of meal, the only sure meat they’ll have to last the winter.

“But what kind of a look is it?” Millie asks, stepping around a gnarled root the perfect size to catch a toe. They hug their shawls and coats to them as they trudge through the gold husks left of summer’s ferns.

“I don’t know,” Hazel says again, watching the white clouded sky. It’s early for it, but she swears it looks like snow.

“Is it like the Guthrie boys, the way Bobby was sweet on you at the candy pull?”

Hazel tugs her hat back down over her ears and thinks of spring, of maple sugar boiling in vats outside the Guthrie’s barn, her holding one end of a sticky ribbon of candy while Bobby pulled the other, him blushing and shy from under long dark lashes when it broke and he’d gotten the shorter piece. The boys had wanted something from them then, too, but Hazel doesn’t think they knew yet what that something was.

“It’s like the dogs,” Hazel says. “When Daddy brings them bones from the bottom of the pot, but first he makes them sit and mind. That quiet watchin’ and waitin’ before the snappin’ teeth.”

They pick their way through a tangle of rhododendron toward the sound of snuffling in the brush, Hazel holding back branches to keep them from smacking Millie’s face.

“Even so,” Millie says after a while. “I think it’d be nice to be wanted like that by a man. So bad he can’t stand it.”

Hazel stares, a wriggling doubt twisting inside because she doesn’t know which of them has the wrong of it.

A snuffling snort grunts out from behind the wall of branches just ahead. Hazel curves right while Millie creeps left, and they burst through the gnarl of limbs onto the backs of two squealing shrieking pigs.

The hogs they raise aren’t the huge ones they keep on the farms down the mountain, fleshy pink and damn near big as cows. Their hogs are black and white and about the size of full grown dogs, nimble and sturdy enough to survive this craggy mountainside. She and Millie can each wrangle one once they’ve got ropes looped and tied around their necks. They squeal and shriek and pull like they know what’s waiting down the hill. Hazel’s heart aches for them just the same as last year and the year before, but her family need bacon and salt pork to see them through the dark months when their fields freeze over and the snow falls deep as a grave.

She can see the smoke from the Hilliard’s cabin rising above the scarlet maples when her hog gives a mighty tug, bucking and yanking the rope loose from her grip. She scrambles for it but in a blink it’s gone, squealing its way on back up the hill.

Millie looks at her, eyebrows pinched as she wrestles against her own pig. He’s seen his friend’s daring escape and kicks and shrieks to attempt one of his own.

“Go on ahead,” Hazel says. “I’ll see if I can root it out and meet you at the house.”

Hazel crunches through the brown brambles of a dead blackberry patch, thorns snagging the fabric of her skirt so that she has to stop and untangle herself every few steps. Trees shush in the wind high above her head. Squirrels rustle the carpet of already fallen leaves. Her stomach gnaws for the lunch Granny Hilliard and the other old women put on for everyone down at the farm. She’s about decided to give up on that damned pig when she hears footfalls crunching behind her. She turns, thinking it’s Millie come back up to help her, but her skirts snag on another thorny cane.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she mutters, just knowing there’ll be at least one hole to add to her mending pile.

“You shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain Miss Hazel.”

She stills, hands still clutching the wool of her skirt. Happy’s boots snap the dead brown canes as he troops into the thicket.

“They’re waitin’ for you down at the house.” He’s standing over her now, reaching down to tug her skirt free.

“Isn’t that where you’re supposed to be? Down helpin’ with the hogs?” She hikes up her skirts and stomp her way out of the brambles. His footsteps crack and crunch close behind.

“That friend a’ yours told Jeb you’d gone back up the hill, and I wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen to you out here alone.”

They’re free of the blackberry patch, standing under a roof of orange treetops and blank white sky. The smile in his voice slithers down her back as he steps close again, trailing a knobby knuckle along the edge of her jaw. She swallows. Even if she ran he’d be faster. Hazel lifts her chin, clenching her fists at her sides. The rotten leavings of coffee and tobacco reek on his breath.

A stick snaps behind them, loud as shotgun fire in the hush. Hazel scurries back from his reach as he whirls around.

***

In her dreams Hazel sits at her loom and weaves, the honeysuckle coverlet spread out before her.

Hazel, Hazel the spiders whisper from the corners. She’s not frightened of their clicking voices, not so different from the swish and clack of her loom. She works the treadles one and three, two and four.

Hazel, Hazel the spiders call. Come and see what we have made.

Hazel passes the shuttle right and left, left and right. We have seen the eyes that follow you. We have seen his pincers flash.

The spiders crawl from their crevices, skittering under the crack beneath the door. Hazel sets down her shuttle and watches them go.

We know what to do. Come and see.

A mist heavy and dense as snowfall hangs over the woods, so thick she has to stoop to see the trail of spiders as she follows them up the ridge.

We have known his like before. Come and see what we do.

They stop where stunted trees hunch and twist, deformed by the unyielding push of the wind. There is no wind now, though, no sign of life at all except lichen-covered boulders beaded with dew. Hazel wonders why they’ve brought her to this harsh and empty place, but then she sees the webs, as broad as her chest and bigger, designs intricate as tatted lace strung between gnarled branches. Their brown speckled weavers nestle at each center, arms folded in as if in prayer.

See what our sisters have made.

Voices click all around her. She strains to hear one from another, like trying to pick out one line of a hymn being sung in the round.

We do not hunt or chase, child. We do not run or hide.

Hazel turns to the voice rasping from a dew-heavy web beside her head. A brown and orange speckled spider with a large round body looks back, her many eyes shining in the gray light.

We do not need to fear, only to wait.

At the edge of the web Hazel sees another spider, the same burnt orange-brown but smaller, a meager version of the spider with whom she speaks. She watches the small spider ease its way onto the web, plucking at the gleaming fiber like a banjo string.

See how he comes. See how he wants.

The small spider reaches the larger one at the web’s center. Their legs tangle in a clasping writhing knot, a coupling full of violence and power.

He wants so badly he forgets himself. Forgets what I am. Forgets what I can do.

Their bodies twist and tumble. The larger spider opens her pincers and clamps down. A tiny voice shrieks and clicks but she gnashes harder, again and again until his head is gone, a mashed and oozing stump. The spider sips of the wound, a smile in her voice.

He wants so badly he forgets himself she says again. You do not need to chase or run, only to wait.

Once the spider has eaten her fill she winds the curled body into a small white knot. Waste not, as Mama says. Then the spider picks her way to the edge of her web and jabs the air with a pointed leg, beckoning Hazel closer.

She hesitates only a moment before she extends her hand and lets the spider climb onto her fingers. Her legs leave only the faintest tickle as she skitters down Hazel’s palm.

He will come to you she says, stopping at the soft skin of Hazel’s wrist. Her pincers flare. Before she can even think to swat the spider away she feels the sharp sting of the bite where blood pulses to the rhythm of her heart.

Lie in wait. Let him come.

***

Hazel sits by the fire and longs for her weaving. The spiders huddle in their holes against the cold.

She knew it’d snowed before she’d even fully roused the morning after slaughtering day, Edie’s small body curled to hers against the chill. No scuttle of foxes or squirrels in the leaves. No wind shushing through the trees. Hazel had tucked their one quilt and tatty old coverlet snug around them both, breathing in the sweet child musk of her sister’s hair as she closed her eyes to bright, flat white that shone around the edges of the closed shutters. If she could only finish that new coverlet, then maybe they’d be warm.

For two days Hazel watched white flakes mound on the porch steps, the wood pile, the upturned washtub, so that now the world looks smoothed at the edges, rounded and soft. She knows better than to ask to go out to the loom house. Mama’ll say she’ll catch her death in that drafty old shed, and that’s even if she hadn’t seen Hazel with Happy in the woods. As it is Mama’s stuck to her side like a burr snagged on the hem of her dress, glaring at Happy with narrowed eyes over pursed lips and her spinning wheel. She hasn’t told Daddy or Jeb what she saw, though. If she had Happy’d be on his way down the cart path, snowfall or no.

Or maybe he wouldn’t. Hazel thought Mama crashing through the brush and catching him up against her would be enough but here he is, stuffing more of Daddy’s tobacco into his cob pipe.

Mama had waited until the last of the hogs were rounded up, until the men had set to their bloody task silencing squeal after squeal. She waited until she and Hazel and the little ones wandered back up the cart path after the luncheon, Edie and Harlan chasing after each other up the trail. Only then did she grab Hazel by the arm, spinning her around.

“What did you do?” she’d whispered. “Did you ask him to meet you up the hill?”

Hazel had tried to yank her arm free but Mama held tight. Looking into her tired eyes Hazel saw fear, raw and large, but something else too, something that made her belly gnaw despite the lunch she’d choked down. It was the same hateful gleam she saw in Happy’s eyes when he loomed over her, only turned inside out like a sock so that the tender insides showed.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Hazel said, tears burning the corners of her eyes.

Mama looked at her hard, then cleared her throat in that way she did when she’d said her piece and would not be discussing anything further.

“Let’s get on home and get supper on.” Mama patted her arm once before starting after Harlan and Edie.

“He’ll be gone tomorrow,” she’d said, sure and soft as a prayer. “There’s nothing else for him here.”

By the fireside Hazel sets her knitting in her lap, watching Mama as she draws her hand out and in, out and in, the loose fluff of wool clutched in her fingers coiling into a tight strand and winding around the bobbin of her spinning wheel. Happy tosses a coin with his thumb and catches it out of the air. It’s a little something extra from the other farmers for his help with the hogs. Hazel rubs her thumb over the bite on her wrist, still raised and ugly red.

Every few flicks of his coin Happy glances at her. Outside in the barn the cats let mice almost get away before dragging them back again, claws sunk deep enough to hold but not so deep as to take mouse life and end the game.

***

In the dead of night Hazel sits at her loom and weaves. The spiders listen for muffled footfalls in the snow. It stopped falling sometime around midday, and now the moon shines bright and clear through the slit windows. She passes the shuttle back and forth, back and forth in the weak guttering light of her oil lamp, extra woolen shawls and coat bundled tight around her. The coverlet’s nearly done, the finished portion folded neat and warm at her feet. The red honeysuckle pattern twines and whorls like a spider’s web strung between two trees. It’s slow going with her hands trembling from the cold, but Hazel knows how to wait.

She crept down the stairs in stocking feet to keep from waking Mama and Daddy, but on the pallet by the hearth Happy will have heard the door latch scrape.

Lie in wait the spiders whisper. Let him come.

The door creaks behind her, then a rush of cold air at her back. Icy fingers tuck back her hair and trace down the side of her neck. She swallows and clacks down the beam to tighten her newest row. A hand slides down her shoulder and grips through her many layers. Another reaches to fumble at her shawls and coat buttons.

See how he wants.

“Not here,” she says, placing a hand over his to still his tugging at her clothes. “It might wake Mama and Daddy.” He doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word, so she turns on the loom’s small bench to face him. “They’ll come lookin’ if they find me out of bed.”

“I reckon you’re right. But seeing as there’s snow knee deep over this whole ridge, this’ll have to do.” He resumes his rummaging with her coat and slides a freezing hand inside. He cups and paws her softest parts like a hog rooting in the brush. Hazel grits her teeth.

See how he forgets himself.

“I know a place.” She wishes her voice sounded strong and sure, but his eyes flicker wide in the lamplight. He likes her better afraid.

“The old woodshed.” She grips the beam to keep from leaning away. “Dry, and far enough not to wake the house.”

He stops his pawing at her, then grins and hauls her to her feet.

He does not know what you can do.

Happy holds the lantern aloft with one hand and grips her arm tight with the other. Their boots slip and slide in the snow, the wet cold soaking through Hazel’s socks. She wishes he’d let go of her so she could find her balance on the slick slope.

The moon shines so bright off the snow she hardly needs the lantern. The further up they climb she finds she has to squint against the glare.

“Not far now,” she says, a rasping tremor grating her voice.

They emerge into a clearing where wind-beaten trees hunch and bend. Happy releases her and holds the lantern high, squinting into the brush.

“Where’s this woodshed?” he asks, swinging the lantern back and forth. Finding nothing but snowy branches he whips around toward her. He stares for a moment, then narrows his eyes as he leans the lantern closer to peer at her face.

“What’s the matter with your eyes?”

Nothing at all she thinks. I can see you perfectly fine. She tries to say so, but all that comes out is a hoarse click that scrapes at the back of her throat.

Happy steps backward, boots sliding in the snow. He casts his gaze about the clearing but they’re alone up here, exactly as he hoped they would be.

“You—you stay away.”

Hazel’s back hunches, pitching her forward to crawl on her hands. Happy stumbles. She slinks along after him as he backs away. Even if he runs she’ll be faster. Her mouth feels too full and so she opens it, spreading cramped pincers wide. Happy cries out as the lantern slips from his hand.

Glass shatters. Yellow light snuffs out. A patch of spilt lamp oil stains the moonlit snow.

Happy fumbles in the dark, scrambling for purchase on the wet ground. Hazel creeps forward. She does not need to run. Up here there’s not a soul to hear him scream.

***

Hazel wakes at her loom to the sound of her name called from far away. The spiders rustle from sleep, silent in their holes. She’s hunched over the loom’s beam, her neck stiff from sleeping on folded arms and the cold aching in her bones. Her mouth’s bone dry and tastes like metal and something rotten.

Blinking hard, she pushes herself to sitting, only to let her throbbing head drop back onto her coat sleeves.

The loom house door bangs open behind her. She clamps her hand over her ears, squeezes her eyes shut against the burst of morning light off the snow.

“Hazel!” Mama wails, and then she’s wrapped up so tight in Mama’s arms she may never breathe right again.

“What are you doin’ out here you fool girl?” Mama says, but her voice is all tenderness and tears. Hazel sags against her and shivers.

“Daddy and I came downstairs and found the hearth pallet empty, then Edie started just a wailin’ and carryin’ on that you weren’t in your bed. Like to have scared me half to death.” Mama rubs her hands up and down Hazel’s arms to warm her as she pulls her to her feet.

Hazel sips broth from a brown earthenware mug. She’s wrapped in a nest of quilts by the fire, Edie chattering at her side. When they couldn’t find no sign of her or Happy, she says, Daddy and Jeb took off with the dogs into the woods straight away. Daddy came back a while ago, clapping her tight to him before setting off again to get Jeb. Neither of them’s found hide nor hair of Happy.

“I never did trust that man.” Mama’s puttering over by the stove, frying up some leftover grits into cakes for breakfast.

Hazel closes her eyes. She’s tried to remember how she ended up in the loom house in her coat and sopping wet boots, but no matter how many times Mama or Edie asks all she can recall is weaving at her loom in the lamplight, the piercing white of the moon on the snow, and the salt of blood warm on her tongue.

Lulled by the crackling fire and the smell of fatback sizzling in the pan she’s almost drifted off to sleep in her chair when the door slams open and rattles the cabin wall. Mama clatters a pot lid on the stove.

“Good gracious!” she shouts at Jeb where he’s stomping the snow from his boots. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Daddy’s gone for the sheriff,” Jeb says, breathless and pink-cheeked like he’s run all the way there, a floppy wool hat clutched in his fist.

When Daddy gets back with the sheriff and his boys that afternoon Hazel insists on coming along. Mama tries to keep her sat by the fire, saying she’s too weak to be gallivanting all over the mountain. Maybe that’s true, but while Daddy and the Sheriff are having their say about the best way to go about things Hazel shoots Jeb a long hard look. He glares back at first, but maybe he understands more than she thinks because he dips his head and goes to fetch her boots without a word.

She clings to his arm as they follow Daddy and the sheriff up the trail, the snow sodden and soft, sinking beneath their steps. They slip and slide their way up the ridge while she slowly recalls cold hands groping at her chest and yellow lantern light bouncing off white snow.

When they reach the clearing Daddy and the Sheriff jerk to a stop in front of them. Jeb tries to hold her back but Hazel brushes off his arms and steps around to see.

Dried sticky red smears the lichen-mottled trees. Pools so dark they’re almost black melt dents in the white ground. The sheriff fishes a handkerchief from his pocket.

“Sakes alive,” he says, his voice muffled by the cloth pressed over his mouth.

At the center of the clearing a body’s wrapped shoulders to ankles in a tight white bundle, the worn-out boots poking out the bottom the only thing left of Happy to recognize. Where the head should be there’s a mangled stump, the snow around it congealed with an explosion of red-black blood.

The sheriff and Daddy speak in clipped, hushed words. His two boys stare with their mouths slung wide open, not daring to move any closer. Hazel feels Jeb’s eyes on her as she steps forward. From the edge of the clearing the bundle looks like the knot in a spider’s web that used to be a fly. Up closer though, if she tilts her head just right, she can make out an order to the strands—a pattern of sorts, repeating over and over down the length of sticky white. Kneeling down in the snow, she turns so the silk catches the light. She sucks in a breath, but then lets it out long and slow. The men will never see it. They would never even know to look. Woven into that awful shroud, she can just make out the twining vines and half circle flowers of the honeysuckle weave.

***

Hazel sits at her loom and weaves, binding off the coverlet’s last row. The spiders click and sing at a job well done. She runs her hands over the finished fabric in her lap. The red worked up just as pretty as she’d hoped, bright as blood splattered across new snow.

***

Shannon Purdy Jones is a bisexual writer and bookseller who writes about women and queer people behaving badly. An avid believer in the power of literary community, she is a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network, co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC, and a volunteer author coordinator for the Greensboro Bound Authors Engaging Students Program. When not writing she can be found growing vegetables in her front yard and perplexing the neighbors. Instagram @shannonpurdyjones.