It's Still Life

Brigid’s Diary, 1834, The Loom Breathes

Episode I: Lyon France

The silk looms had been breathing all night, a wooden patience that learned anger one shuttle at a time.

By morning the steep streets of Lyon filled with canuts climbing toward the Croix-Rousse, silk thread clinging to their sleeves like pale cobwebs, their boots striking the stones in a rhythm I could feel in my ribs.

I felt myself pulled toward them because a body knows the slope of its own kind, and justice begins as a sound before it earns a name.

Felreil caught my sleeve as the crowd thickened, his fingers cold through the wool, and said nothing while the police began asking for papers in voices that already knew the answer.

We slipped sideways into a doorway that smelled of yeast and lamp oil, while somewhere above us the looms kept breathing, exact and indifferent.

If cloth remembers every tension laid into it, then perhaps this is what I was meant to learn — that some patterns tighten before they break, and that a wise body feels the pull before the threads snap and fly.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story, including the word “Fly”.   Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.