HOUSE QUILTING | Fiction by Julia Strayer

Locals whisper it’s graffiti, but it’s more like appliqué quilting, except I do it on our white farmhouse so everyone can see. A quilt is a gift of love, pieces of fabric that embody a person’s life, stitched together to carry memory.

I spent winter months in the cold barn jigsawing plywood shapes, sanding, painting, sealing. I nailed them to the house in spring, after snow thawed and wept from the gutters to make a muddy mess of the yard. Maisie and I back and forth through it with ladder, hammer, nails. She’s usually with my husband, or herding anything that moves—geese, ducks, cats, sometimes cows, and chickens if we’d let her in the pen. She’s still afraid to leave me alone.

I climbed to the top of the ladder and tacked a line of large red and blue dump truck shapes across the top of the house, under the eaves, above the second-floor windows. The trucks alternate facing left and right in pairs. I thought about running them all in the same direction, but I was afraid they’d be tempted to drive off the house and over the countryside. I was afraid they’d leave us.

It’s surprising how far I can see at the top of the ladder, how far the world stretches itself for us.

I nailed purple and orange dinosaurs around the dining room window, and a large tree trunk on the left side of the house, reaching upward the whole height, as if it’s trying to hug the chimney. A climbing tree with branches that encircle the front door. Blue birds in the leaves, a nest with speckled eggs. A space ship launching from the bottom floor on the right side of the house, with large yellow stars and sun above it. It’s a good start. I don’t want to forget what might have been.

A needle and thread would’ve been too quiet. I needed splinters. My husband has only wanted his routine.

Maisie knew from the beginning, before I knew. That’s when she started resting her head on my belly, but she was still my husband’s dog. The doctor said a boy. Maisie probably knew that too.

My grandmother gifted me a quilt when my husband and I married. I think of her often.

Last fall, the boy stopped growing, like he changed his mind and no longer wanted me as his mother. Maisie was there for the cramping and blood, pacing, licking at my fingers so I’d know I wasn’t alone.

I guess I wasn’t the mother he’d hoped for.

Since then, Maisie’s been following me wherever I go. It’s been six months and still she won’t leave me alone, even when my husband calls for her. The world keeps on and people keep doing what people do, and dogs keep doing what dogs do, but I don’t understand how. I can’t decide what to wear or what to eat because none of it matters.

The locals whispering about the house don’t know. How could they? And just because he wasn’t born doesn’t mean he wasn’t real or that I hadn’t wished for trucks and dinosaurs, treehouses and rocket ships.

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