It's Still Life

A Short Story

The Seamstress

She leans into the clatter of the machine, foot steady, hands coaxing fabric through with a tenderness that belies the harsh steel needle. The air is heavy, close — thick with the sweetness of cotton dust and the metallic tang of oil. Outside, New Orleans sweats; inside, she stitches against time, seams pressed sharp as promises. Her shop smells of heat and hope, though she knows both fray. She pauses, fingers resting on cloth still warm from her touch, and listens: cicadas droning, the river’s low hum, the silence that waits between each rising and falling stitch.

The Air

I press close around her, heavy with my own sweat. I taste of oil and cotton dust, but she does not flinch; she inhales me as though I were bread. Her hands guide fabric, seam against seam, and I lean over her shoulder to watch — to whisper in the hush between needle strikes. I know the rhythm of her lungs, the sigh she stifles when the thread snarls. She thinks she works alone, but I am her companion, filling her mouth, her dress, her skin — the unseen witness who will carry her scent out into the sweltering streets.

The Window

The tall windows stand like weary sentinels, their small panes filmed with years of dust, each seam of putty a scar that holds them fast. Once sash-born, they have forgotten how to move; now they only admit light — fractured, stubborn, filtering through lint and thread that dance like gnats in the heat. Beyond them, the city breathes fire, pouring into the room without mercy, turning the walls into a kiln. Beneath it all, the wood floor remembers: sweat, spilled dye, the hush of bare feet. Remnants linger in the grain, and sigils carved into beams smoulder with stories the walls will not tell.

The Clock

High on the far wall, the clock presides — round face pale as a moon, hands sharp as needles, its tick-tick-tock falling steady as rain. The sound gathers in the cavernous space, ricocheting against wood and bone, threading itself through the bent shoulders of women at their machines. Each second lands in their thoughts like a dropped pin: another hem finished, another hour gone, another coin barely earned. Time is not a river here but a loom, weaving endurance into silence, binding the women together in a rhythm they did not choose, yet cannot escape.

The Remnants

They are still here: women bent over vanished treadle machines, fingers raw, breaths thick with dust. The clock ticks in a room emptied decades ago, its echo stitching absence into air. They are remnants, their energy caught in every crack and nail. Ghosts. Look closely — the light is full of them, labouring in silence, their presence louder than any song. And if you listen long enough, you will hear the room remember you too.