LatinosUSA

«All Stitched Up in Prose» by Selma Martin

From the chaise longue, where he pretended to nap,
he observed her quietly as she stitched and stitched
in the scant light filtering in through the window.
Soon darkness would swallow what was left of the
light and become too dark to continue. How perfectly
natural she sat– humming softly to herself, eyebrows
drawn, lips pursed in that melancholy way women
purse their lips when they concentrate. He could see
she was enraptured doing the very thing she wanted
to do in the quiet of the evening. He could almost feel
the little bird of her mind flitting from one idea to
another as she compared colored yarns against the
white linen. And now, as if wanting to ask his opinion,
she turned, and finding him awake and watching her, she
soon put down her needlework, made one of those loose
lax poses that come naturally to her, and at once smiled
and stretched out her arms to him. 

© selma

About ​Portrait of a Woman with Tapestry Work

Style of Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin French
Museum of Modern Art. Public domain
https://www.metmuseum.org/

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Selma Martin is a retired English teacher with 20 years of experience teaching children ESL. She believes in people’s goodness and in finding balance in simple living. She lives in Japan with her husband of 35 years. In 2018, Selma participated in a networking course whose final lesson was to publish a story on Amazon. She completed the course and self-published her short story, Wanted: Husband/Handyman, in 2019, and later, collaborating with peers from that course, she published Wanted: Husband/Handyman in Once Upon A Story: A Short Fiction Anthology. Selma has published stories on Medium for many years, in MasticadoresUSA, The Poetorium At Starlight, Short Fiction Break, Lit eZine, and Spillwords. In July 2023, she published her debut poetry collection, In the Shadow of Rainbows (Experiments in Fiction). You can find Selma as selmawrites on Instagram and Twitter, and on her website, selmamartin.com.