fiction

by Ocean teu

Ruth Asawa School of the Arts San Francisco

Casey knew her mom, Lola, could knit anything. Knit curtains billowed over the doorways, lanterns puffed from the ceilings, and the walls were pinned with tapestries of emerald valleys and turreted castles. In the center of the garden, a ring of magnolia trees flowered pink against the clouds, and a sweater encircled each of their trunks, delicate like the wings of a dragonfly. Yarns in creams, opals, and ivories looped into tight knots, and at night starlight snagged on the tips of the fibers, causing them to glow from the inside out.

The week before, Casey had begged for a tent that could hang from her bedroom ceiling. Lola visualized the frame, the panels, the door, how the pieces would thread together. She smiled down at Casey, and unknotted Casey’s hair with her fingertips.

After she read Casey a bedtime story, Lola walked to the living room and picked up her needles. She made the first loop, and the fireplace burned dark in front of her.

The next morning, a tent dangled in the corner of Casey’s room. Silver boned and silk draped like willow branches. Casey ran to the tent and lay inside. Sequins of sunlight danced across her vision and made her head fuzzy. She sat up and peered at the fabric. She squinted, and could just distinguish them: the stitches that prevented everything from being unraveled.

The day before her eleventh birthday, Casey asked for a gift more intricate than anything she had asked Lola to knit before. “Please Mom?” Casey said. She rested her head lopsided in Lola’s lap, the joints of her knees and elbows overlapped across the sofa. Lola stared out the window, then looked down at Casey and nodded.

In the morning, a four foot tall package tilted against Casey’s bedroom wall. As she tore the paper off, excitement swirled down her skin in waves. The last shred of paper spiraled to the carpet, and a girl stood in front of her, with dark eyes, half grown teeth, and a soft widow’s peak: an identical twin. Casey embraced her, her fingers curled against her twin’s spine. She rotated the head to see every angle, and pressed a hand over her twin’s heart, the other over her own. Their two hearts beat in tandem, parallel thump thump thumps. Casey inspected for stitches but the needlework was so fine she couldn’t make out anything at all.

Lola watched Casey and Lacey play hide and seek. Lacey pulled herself into a tree and vanished into the leaves. Casey uncovered her eyes and wove through the garden. She gazed into the tree and lifted herself upwards, the leaves closed around her. Lola’s breath speckled the window. The tree wobbled and the two girls tumbled onto the grass. They tittered and squirmed around as they leaned against the trunk. Both wore dresses with embroidered amber koi swimming across the skirt, coal eyes beaded on like dark stars. Lola stared. She was sure she could tell which one was Casey, which one was her daughter. She rolled her needles in her palms, and the silver stretched her reflection into blades of light.

Casey’s requests became more elaborate: a gown made of lightning bolts, a circus of mouse-sized cats, a miniature sun and moon that dropped from the ceiling. Whenever Casey asked Lola to knit something for her, Lacey whispered into Casey’s ear. “Yeah yeah, that’s definitely a better idea,” Casey said. She turned to Lola, “We want you to knit a maze for us in the backyard. With different paths and twists and turns and everything. So we can play a game where we see who can make it to the center first. Okay, Mom?” They giggled and slung their arms around each other's shoulders. Lola fixated on Casey, or at least the one she thought was Casey. She flicked her eyes from one girl to the other and back again. Casey and Lacey paused their giggles and grinned in unison.

The maze took Lola four days and nights to knit, each leaf and stem constructed, then strung into walls and walls and walls. As the sun rose on the fifth morning, she pocketed her needles and stepped out of the entrance. The maze branched through the garden twenty feet high. Thick ivy swallowed all the trees and flowers, now veiled by the walls shaped around them. The maze was so vast Lola couldn’t tell where it ended, or if it ended at all. As she walked back into the house a warm rain laced the air around her.

She packed Casey and Lacey lunch boxes, a crimson skinned plum for each of them, sliced and fanned into petals, and a sunflower butter sandwich cut corner to corner. At the entrance to the maze, Lola handed a lunchbox to each girl. She held a translucent umbrella over their heads, carving a space for all three of them in the rain. Casey and Lacey ran into the maze, one swerving to the left, the other to the right.

Lola sat on the porch with a ball of gold flecked yarn and her needles. Rain dripped from the roof and caught in a spiderweb. She sighed and remembered before Casey: when she fixed mirrors to the ends of the corridors and hoped to mistake her reflection for another person. She even placed parallel mirrors on either side of her bed so there were all the people she could ever want, infinite people. She used to sweep the empty guest rooms weekly, and she would always run the television, not paying attention to whether it was the news or a nature show or a rerun of a soap opera—she just wanted the static to burble through the house and fill the empty space. Her knitting needles clicked and scraped against each other, her fingers gripped tight.

The leaves fluttered in the rain like a lullaby, the melody soft and twinkly. Lola felt heavy, her vision splitting into frames. The air settled around her and she trickled into sleep. When she woke the sky was starless, the rain gone. She glanced at the back door to the house. Moonlight traced the locked door, neither girl had returned yet. She gnawed a hangnail between canines and shook her head. She lay her knitting down and walked forward—into the maze.

Lola’s bones remembered which way to go. Turn left, ten feet down this corridor, right, left, through a tunnel, around a wide bend, right, right again, toward the center, closer, closer. Ivy rose on all sides of her and the grass crinkled in rhythms beneath her feet. Foxgloves and lilies and sweetpeas and violets crawled from the bases of the walls and saturated Lola’s breath with pollen. She turned one last bend. The center of the maze lay in front of her, a clearing with the circle of magnolia trees in the middle. The yarn that wrapped their trunks haloed with pale morning light. Peacocks stalked about, feathers splayed into orchestras of eyes. On either side of the clearing, an opening in the wall led down a path, and in each opening lay a little girl, passed out on the grass.

Their rain jackets crumpled around them, socks muddied. Lola scooped up their limp bodies and slung one over each shoulder. As she took a step, their lunchboxes clattered to the ground and wedges of ruby plums spilled across the grass. The ring of trees swayed in front of her, the branches braided high and domed to create a hollow. Two sweatered trunks bent away from each other and formed a door just taller than her. She slipped inside, and the branches curved around her, a deep earthy smell mixed with the sweetness of the magnolias. She lay the girls down and positioned them shoulder to shoulder, their heads crowned by roots. She exhaled, and unknotted their hair with her fingers, opened their palms toward the sky. They were beautiful: shadows cobwebbing their faces, eyes closed, lips parted. Lola couldn’t discern which one was Casey, and which one was Lacey. She slid a hand behind each neck and searched with the pads of her fingertips. She could feel it, the spot where she had tucked the yarn back in. Even their stitches were identical.