Episode 9now that iš old srovės garbe

The dress sprawls across my lap, no longer the clean lines of Mondrian’s grids. The reds have bled into the whites, the blacks are smudged with grey. I meant to keep it geometric, orderly—a tribute to the order I never had. But the fabric has its own will. It remembers being torn, being mended, being worn by someone else in another life. I think of Kaunas, 1996. The old river of time, the srovės garbe—the honor of the current. I was sixteen, reading the Bible by flashlight under a blanket, my fingers raw from stitching clothes I never wore. My mother’s sewing machine hummed in the next room, a mechanical heartbeat that kept time with the rain.

Now, on the moon, I stitch for a reason I cannot name. The thread is silver, catching the light from the overhead strip. I remember the horse. Not a real horse, but the one I ran from in my dreams—black, with eyes like wet coal, hooves thudding on dirt that turned to water. The man who thought I was a man, making me run until my lungs burned and my legs dissolved into static. I was not a slave, but I learned to stitch to survive. To read overnight, to sew a life from scraps, to hide the Bible under the mattress when the door creaked open.