Knitting a Body 2005

Knitting a Body 2005

As she looked over her shoulder towards the clock on the wall, the clack, clack, click, click stopped, she had not as yet accomplished the art of knitting while she faced away from the needles, although her thoughts, could wander the world in unison with the click and slide of the needles. Now she adjusted her pose to find comfort in the realignment of her bones. When she was fully in line with the second floorboard from the wall, all seemed well. She now noticed the trough of sediment that had accumulated in the gap between the second and third floorboards was filled with the dust of days and weeks, dog hair, skin cells and size 8 knitting needles. She was curious about the stories of this detritus, as full as any minutiae at a murder scene, here, readable only by spiders. These mutinous thoughts tugged at her mind. Breathing out, she focused once again on her needles and the ball of softest flesh coloured cashmere which was unravelling itself a little more between her thighs almost as though it were ribbons of her own skin she were knitting.
The clack, clack, click, click resumed its hypnotic murmur accompanied by her low unconscious muttering ……….. pull loop onto left needle, draw onto right needle, slip stitch off… the words flew out of her mouth like flies searching for the gap at the top of a window. Slowly the hours and turns of wool were taking shape, she had long since given up using a pattern or knowing in advance what would knit itself through her repetition. She relaxed once more into her knitting and sighed as the needles and the flesh coloured cashmere took their turns.
No longer did she find herself knitting shawls for sick babies, as prayers to help them recover; her garments were becoming messages of celebration or protection for the lost, the broken, the sick or the dying. These were stories of lives transmogrified through her needles with all their accompanying treasures, tattoos and scars of daily tempest, story telling of a life, through the knitting of a body.
She was slowly becoming clearer about what was unravelling from her own doing, experience was showing her that her very being was aware when a death was approaching; her knitted garments were becoming shrouds of knitted skin, she was surprised to discover that her last garment had seemed to herald the death of her neighbour, for as she reached the last knitted hair of soft grey cashmere, his life had ended quite peacefully, in his sleep. She now felt she had no control, and that each time the needles took up their task, they clicked and they clacked as the red shoes had danced. As she knitted in the evening light, she looked in surprise and then in horror as a likeness of her sister’s foot was forming in the rows emitting from her needles. The click and the clack of her needles was tolling again.