2nd Prize – 2024
The Chariot – Theophilus Kwek
My grandmother’s hands are spotted like the sun.
Across the needlework an aurora blooms,
stippling the thin surface. Her skin – it ripples
in minute creases, as gauze does
when a single thread has come loose.
I smooth a finger across her pinpricked wrist.
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In a corner of the room, under the window-ledge:
an emptiness into which her wheelchair
is sometimes folded. A parking-lot. I ask about
what she’s kept there throughout my childhood,
so snug in the room’s architecture
it occurs to no-one that it’s gone. 你的针车呢？
The vowels float up, against the roof of my mouth.
Grandmother stares. I repeat the phrase – zhen che –
her needle’s chariot, sturdy neck rising curved
and cool to the touch from a wooden deck harnessed
to its Singer frame. Oh, Kenny must have cleared it
says Big Aunt, still watching the TV
where the commercials are stitched so seamlessly
you’d think they were part of the show.
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Already then, we’d found some other use for it,
as a table or as time went by, another flat surface
on which the things of this earth could accumulate.
Its great wheel, which had run great distances
no longer ran, nor would grandmother’s foot
ply the brass pedal to ease it from its rust.
On its outstretched wing we piled bedsheets, pillows,
even the cot that dangled one grandson then another
from the ceiling, a fold in the fabric all that it took
to wrap us up in sleep. These years it slept,
bobbin empty, as we watched over it, or it us,
its one elbow crooked and steadfast over the wood.
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Gloves. Ma insists they were gloves, though
in the clammy heat I can’t fathom why a factory
would’ve made them here. Easier to picture
the foreman going door to door to hand them out,
all the mothers in the neighbourhood bent
over those round and repeating shapes. Night
after night, feet in the stirrups – and their daughters
dim-lit by a muted serial, waiting to smooth out
the fingers. On either side the pairs pile up
in a bag, left left right right, that by the morning
will go to be counted as profit, loss. The image
flickers, though in grandmother’s eye I catch
something like a doused spark, know she sees
it too. Wheels turn, somewhere a needle moves.
In her hands a thread goes taut, and runs and runs.