Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry (©1998 by Phyllis Alesia Perry).

The narrator, Lizzie, received her grandmother Grace’s trunk and letter from Eva, Grace’s sister.

Mother spreads Grandma Grace’s quilt on the living room floor and sits at its edge, like a small animal beached on the shore of a great ocean. She wears white pumps and her peach-colored silk dress with the white collar, and still holds in one hand the fan that she inadvertently took from church. Daddy, leaning his six-foot-four-inches against the doorway to the dining room, dabs at a coffee stain on his white shirt and then considers the quilt from behind his steaming cup.

I balance myself on the arm of the sofa, clutching Grace’s letter and watching the shapes and colors dance. Daddy had insisted that we take everything out of the trunk and this is what was underneath the papers and stuff. Now-faded pictures skim its surface, people run lightly across, time moves, and there is, everywhere, water.

It is obviously the quilt Grace referred to in her letter, the one that she hoped would help her solve her problem, whatever that had been.

Mother's eyes have glazed over a bit. Trance-like, she touches an applique of a child. "I used to have a dress that color," she murmurs.

Daddy comes into the living room and squats down to look. “So, what was the big secret?” he asks, casually sipping. I hope he doesn't spill coffee on it. “It’s all really interesting. But no reason to hide it away, is there? All that mystery, all that talk about giving it at the right time to the right person.” He rolls his eyes. “That trunk should be your property, shouldn’t it, Sarah?"

“The letter says quite clearly that Mama wanted it to go to a granddaughter. I guess Mama's sister Eva thought Lizzie should be the granddaughter and that now was the time,” says Mother, breathing deep and fanning herself. She still stares at the quilt. “What kind of quilt is that anyway? Just some pictures stuck to a background. No rhyme or reason. She wrote about it like it was supposed to mean something.” She looks over at me, sitting on the sofa.

Of course the pictures mean something. I follow two figures walking down a road with baskets on their heads. A woman and a child. Their footprints stride behind side-by-side and then the smaller prints—the child’s—branch off and end at the edge of a large body of water.

It’s a story. My skin tingles just below the surface. My arms ache and I massage one and then the other, gently.

“Looks like it ended up with the right person, though,” says Mother. “Just mysterious enough and quirky enough for Lizzie, don’t you think, John?” She smiles at me, but there is no light in her eyes. I feel as if I'm hurting her and I don't know what to do to make it stop. Mother can just have the whole thing, if she wants. But she doesn't seem to. Despite her obvious curiosity, she keeps referring to it as “Lizzie's trunk. Lizzie’s quilt."

I hold her eyes for a moment, but she looks away and stares at the living room wall. I follow her eyes and meet the long-ago gaze of Grace Mobley Lancaster, who seems to take in the whole room from that flat, faded photograph that hangs there among other dead family members. What were you thinking? I ask her silently.

Daddy begins folding the quilt and Mother gets up with a little shake of her head and begins helping him.

“Yeah,” says Daddy. “This all fits you, Lizzie. Strange letters, quilts, and old dusty bits of the past. I think your Grandma Grace must have had some kind of premonition about you."

“Why don’t you take it, Mother?” I say, watching my mother’s down-turned face. “It really is yours, don’t you think?"

“No, it's not mine.” She puts the quilt back in the bottom of the trunk and begins piling things on top. Daddy disappears into the kitchen for what I know will be cup number two.

“Besides,” she says, shrugging. “My mother’s been gone for a long time. What good is some old quilt to me?” Something lingers on the other side of her words. Sadness, maybe. Something that tugs at my heart and won’t let go.

* * *

On nights like this, dreams come soft.

I lie half-fading into sleep, and a brown woman marches across the bed, wading through the moonlight. She is wrapped in color, a woman-child beside her. She adds her footprints to others on the road to the market, on the threads laid on the surface of my bed.

The quilt engulfs the twin bed, and I have folded it in half. I am safe underneath the story of my life; the brown woman is safe underneath my palm. On her way to the market.

It is hot, but I pull the quilt up to my chin. As always when the moon is full, I have drawn the curtain back to drink in the night. The room is bright as day, but the twilight world of dreams has arrived.