NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Loose Threads

Fiction by ​​Molly Gabriel

That winter, we pressed together under the covers in flannel pajamas and fleece pullovers. I liked my bare feet against his socked ones. The big spoon. I liked his hair in my face, the thick, soft of it feathering against my lips.
 
It didn’t feel like hair. Not curled and kinky nor sleek and fine. All day his nervous hands wrung and tugged it to a swirled point. The color of raw earth, a brown bear. It fuzzed and slid along his pillowcase. Each tendril coiled easily round my finger. Delicate and firm—like yarn wound round my hands, fingers upright and still, a second skin—he warmed me through to my toes.
 
I imagined the thick mass of it rooted inside, all the way down his woolled veins to the socked soles of his feet.
 
*
 
Snow blanketed the yard. We went broke. We watched TV in winter coats. We watched our breath escape our mouths.
 
Under the covers, I bit him. Parentheses of crowded teeth marks punctuated the apples of his cheeks, his wrists, his chin. I savored the peeks of exposed flesh, his shivering skin.
 
He turned over to sleep. He curled into himself with cold. I twined myself around him. My teeth chattered. I licked a swath of his hair, spun it in my fingers, readied as if for a needle. I imagined ripping, tearing him open.
 
I considered sinking my hands into the yarn of his woven insides.
 
*
 
The frost thinned. He dragged me to the library. He pulled books from the shelves about the GRE. His face pinked with the rush of free, heated air. He sank into the olive and burnt orange easy chair. He removed his coat. He stuffed his gloves in his pocket. He tugged his hair, twisted one long cone with his hands. He chewed at the pink of his bottom lip. Concentrated.
 
I kept my scarf wrapped tightly around my neck. I nodded my head forward as I pretended to scan the shelves. I grazed my lips against the wool. I sank my teeth in. My eyes closed, I glimpsed night. The loose threads caught on my fangs.
 
*
 
He stayed late at the library. He took classes to take tests. He worked night shifts. I laid in bed alone. I drifted off.
 
He woke me with the heft of his weight in our bed. I still wore my flannels, but the air had grown warm enough to throw my fleece, limp and discarded, over the back of his chair.
 
I imagined grabbing the threads of his hair—strangling it free from his scalp—winding it around his wrists in place of my hands.
 
*
 
He shaved his head. Without mention or warning, he arrived home with a greyed shadow in place of his hair. His scalp dingy as the frost that barely hid the dog turds on our lawn.
 
I cried. I wept into my pillow, the heels of my hands. The soft, sweet of him hidden. The clumped and piled knots of his pelt cast to the floor of a Cheap Cuts, swept into the garbage, scattered to nowhere—never slipping through my fingers, never sprinkled into my open hands.
 
*
 
I stopped sleeping. The air warmed. The new wet in the atmosphere softened our skin. I ran my palms along his skull, the bristles burned my nerves.
 
I preyed while he slept. I failed to nuzzle the newly domesticated animal of his head.
 
Hands against the grizzled nothing, I realized I felt like something wild.
 
*
 
Covers thrown back, I bit hard. I drew blood. I tore open a hole in his arm.
 
He cried out, sat up, draped the arm across his lap. He licked blood from the wound—turned it to me.
 
(The gorgeous earth of him. Deep soil. The smell of an open mouth, gasping for rain.)
 
The bundles of yarn, the thick, bloody swatch of it pulsed under his flesh. Blood dripped. I poked a finger in. He yowled. I pressed. I coiled my fingertips along a few loose strands. He whimpered like a wounded dog. And I pulled.
 
           

Molly Gabriel

Molly Gabriel is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Hobart, Okay Donkey Magazine, Barren Magazine, and The Best Small Fictions 2020. She is the recipient of the Robert Fox Award for Young Writers. She lives in Cleveland with her husband and toddler. She’s on Twitter at @m_ollygabriel.
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