Harold, to her, was enormous. Truthfully, she didn’t actually know how tall he was— he could’ve been only 5’7 or 5’8. But he was bigger than her, and that’s all she needed to know.
He treated her like a child. He said her sewing was a sweet preoccupying game, all it’s funny little spools and bright colors to busy her simple mind. She spent hours poring over her work, cramping her stitches together smaller and smaller, trying to make them disappear altogether. Her fingers would curl up even after she had stopped, clutching for a needle she had already put away. She would show him her progress through her twisted hands, how the fabric seamlessly turned into a pair of pants or a dress, and he would laugh and pat her on the head. “Good job, Fifi,” he would tell her, forcing his voice an octave higher, accentuating the syllable job so that she would feel about two feet tall. “Fifi” was a name Harold had made up. It had nothing to do with her actual name, which she sometimes suspected he had forgotten.
At first, Harold had hated her sewing. “You’re my wife, not my maid. I may f*** both of you, but there is a distinction,” he would laugh, and rip the thread out of her hands. One day she got angry, and wouldn’t let him take it from her. The pins in the fabric burrowed into her fingers but she held tighter and tighter, until he knocked the side of her head and she couldn’t feel anything anymore. After that, she left the house more and more. She would spend hours slumped in the booth of a highway-side diner, drinking milkshake after milkshake, praying she would get fat, that maybe then he wouldn’t want to touch her. Ralph, a freckled, sixteen-year-old boy behind the counter, would tell her dumb jokes to try and get her to laugh. It was uncomfortable at first, how much he blatantly loved her— the way his whole face would light up when she walked into the restaurant, how he saved her pieces of pie he thought she would like. His naivete made her wince, but after a while she grew warm to the idea there was still a form of unadulterated love in the world. She was mostly a fun distraction for Ralph, something for him to look forward to and to keep him from drowning in the mundanity of his job. She didn’t mind so much that she was virtually a figment of his imagination; she was used to it, and welcomed the company.
One Thursday she came back from the diner and Harold was waiting for her. He called her a lot of names, never her own. He went outside with a baseball bat and smashed her car in, then came inside and smashed her ribcage in, and then retreated to the section of the house she wasn’t allowed to enter. She looked down at her shirt and saw the buttons had been ripped off and tumbled into the grooves where the walls met the floor. They were usually a pearly white, matching the neat simple fabric, but somehow the light caught them and made them look completely transparent, like bits of window had shattered and skittered into the corner.
After that, Harold didn’t let her out of the house. She wouldn’t have left anyway— she realized the little trips outside gave her a false sense of independence, which was dangerous. Harold started to encourage her little hobby, seeing it as a way to keep her busy, mocking her finished creations with a lift of his eyebrows and a sarcastically smiled, “Nice work, Fifi!” She ignored him, keeping her back arched over her work, usually embroidering letters into the pockets of her pants or the collar of her pajamas. Never her own initials, always a combination of two or three letters she thought looked nice together in her curly sort of writing: QN, JBK, CL. Always careful to avoid FF, for Fifi— fs didn’t come out pretty anyway.
For months, her eyes only followed her needle, sewing pictures of bears and mountains into tablecloths, only stopping to be dragged to bed by Harold when he was drunk or felt she needed a reminder that he was there. Months passed, and eventually she set her hands to rest and got up to get a glass of water. She passed by a window, and the brightness and the whiteness shone through so suddenly she almost forgot any last remaining piece she had of herself. Was it winter already? She couldn’t remember the exact date, but it felt too early for snow… And as she looked, she started to make sense of what she was seeing. The white wasn’t snow at all, but a great empty space. A tree was still growing, almost pitch-black against the blankness, outside the window— but it’s trunk disappeared not into dirt but into emptiness. If she squinted, she could see another tree, farther away, down the street… But the street didn’t exist. It had vanished along with the grass and the sky and the neighborhood, and all that remained was the trees. It terrified her, this sudden, apparently non-existent reality, and she stumbled to the front door, needing to get outside in order to reassure herself it was a trick of the light. So often in her life she had seen flickers of this world— a little bit of her childhood bedroom had disappeared when her dad threatened her with a belt, the her school had lost roof tiles after her math teacher asked her to stay after and then rubbed his genitals along the back of her chair. The tiles returned though, like everything else. Eventually the empty spots had filled up again, and she just told herself it was her mind playing tricks on her. This time though, it felt different. Her heart pounded its way down her spine and she tasted something bad in the back of her mouth— this time, this time was not just an optical illusion.
She crossed to the entryway, and immediately heard Harold above her walking to the stairs. Panic ripped through the back of her neck, and she fumbled, having forgotten which way to turn a doorknob. Harold said her name, and it sounded like a child, and he said her real name, and it was quiet and so close to genuine, and for a moment she was too scared to stay, too scared to leave. But then he started crashing down the steps, alcohol slurring even the sounds of his feet, and the place where her ribs had broken and healed took the place of her heart, her fingers wrapped around the handle, and then the door was unlocked and she curled her twisted fingers around the edge to pull it open faster. For a moment her fingers left the house entirely, submerged in just that white, and even though her head and it’s eyeballs hadn’t crossed the threshold, all she could see or think was about that emptiness, so lonely but so open and so enigmatic and so new. For the first time, a part of her filled the space that had emptied itself through each broken memory and place in her life. Her hands opened and closed, like a fish flapping it’s gills, and she half expected to be able to hold all that whiteness right there in her palm, as if it would fit, as if it were anything at all. And then Harold’s body slammed against the door, and her fingers bent all the wrong ways, and had no choice but to retreat back, back towards the house.