Assistant Editor Andy Sia: In this story, wool is both material and an absorbing emblem. Wool mats, entwining death, culpability, labor and hope. Yes: I love this story and the strange charge of Carly Berwick’s music.
Listen to Berwick read the story:
Wool
The wool smells like offal, and we shout sorrowfully at the idea of ewes shorn near their slit lambs. Shut up, the sisters say: Stop being sentimental. We put the wool into giant buckets and lift our skirts and bury it in piss. Some of us knead it until the death is off. We know it is serviceable when oil pools on the surface.
The sisters teach us our duties when we arrive, one by one, torn from other labors, from shame, from our obvious insufficiencies. We need much moral improvement. We lay the wool in the sun to dry, or more often, when there is no sun, we stretch it between ourselves in pairs and blow on it as if we are north and south winds.
We soften the clean fleece by rolling it in our palms, kneading it as if it is one another’s knotted backs. When it feels close to the silky hair of our brothers and sisters—whose hot breath and fat limbs we once slept near, little lambs—we soak it in crushed dandelions and vegetables. Beets stain our hands; we cover our eyes at night and see the sun.
We have much to fix, the sisters tell us. We are incorrigible. We agree, and at night we become worse. Purple hands roam bruises and scrapes until we sigh like both the east and west winds. The sisters call from their room: Enough!
We agree. We are awake all night whispering. We leave the next day, the uric fleeces abandoned. Why had we let the sisters have dominion for so long? They have the authority of God and their benefactor, a local purveyor of weapons and art, but they are just three in number and we thirteen. It is easy in the end to walk. Six who cannot bear the vastness quickly turn back. But the rest find wildness a comfort.
We travel by foot northwest away from the mountains, past the clanging cows, until we find by a great river a boat. It is filled with bandaged men, and we cover their eyes and blow. A sunflower field, says one. The setting sun, says another. Angels.
They want us to stay, but they smell like death. We feel as bad for them as for the ewes. But how could we let them preside? Enough, we say, and we tuck our hems into our waistbands and cross the border.
Carly Berwick is a writer and teacher based in Jersey City, NJ. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Milk Candy Review, Subnivean, Parentheses Journal, and elsewhere. She also writes about education and culture. You can find more of her work at carlyberwick.com.
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