Scorched Fold, Wet Thread

The rain comes before I can plan. It soaks the linen and the paper I’ve collected along the route where vegetables spill and yesterday’s news turns to paste underfoot. I wring and fold each cloth the way I used to when someone at home caught a fever—twist, squeeze, spread flat. That gesture—repeated, not for show—etches a kind of geography into the surface. You see the gather where the water sat, the seam where I held too tight. Some mornings, the paper scorches right through. The edges fray into black threads, and I let them. I want you to see failure isn’t hidden. The cloth covers, but it doesn’t conceal. I stitched with my fingers stinging from the twine. Two shards tumbled from the market gutter; their chips record the slip of someone’s hand. That’s what I mended in—evidence that something was carried, broken, and still held. The care is all on the surface, like a table set for those who need to see what remains whole enough to use. Some things are only understood by the hands.