by Kelly Chastain

You sewed us together with nimble fingers. In the quiet hours, I fumbled through the junk drawer; a dull needle impaled my thumb. With desperate stitches I wove a margin between us. The thread of disquiet basted our seams. I hugged this patchwork armor around my shoulders. The threadbare corners puckered and frayed, my ragged edges blindly hemmed. Then you peeled it away. Each thin layer gone. My skin, chapped and bruised, pink in the new light. You brushed your lips against me as if your life depended on it, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell you that mine did too.

Kelly Chastain is a graduate of Pacific University with a BA in Creative Writing. She works in both fiction and nonfiction, and has been published in The Burrow Press Review, Isthmus Review, Cactus Heart Press, Outside In, Silk Road Review, and has work anthologized in Traveler’s Tales Best Travel Writing Volume 10, among others. Currently, she blogs at kellychastain.com, and is working on a historical novel, and a series of short stories set in London during the worst night of the Blitz.