The Patchwork Flag (169 Words)
“It’s raining.”
“Aye. It is.”
She could feel his eyes on her. She didn’t look up from her work, her precise needle stitching together corduroy and silk.
Her husband sat beside her. He lifted the patchwork at one fold, feeling the texture.
“Is this Maggie?”
The woman raised her head, her face inscrutable. “Yes. It’s Maggie.”
“It was her favorite,” the man said. “The blue one. I remember her wearing it on a Sunday.”
His wife put her needle aside. “Help me,” she said. “I want to see how it looks.”
They lifted her work between them. The patchwork’s varied textures remembered many lives, lives that had been lost for freedom and at the unmerciful will of a tyrant—the lives of too many loved ones.
“This is the flag we will stand by,” said the man quietly. “They will see it and know us for who we are.”
The woman laughed in spite of the tears in her eyes. “Ragged and shabby,” she said, “but very much alive.”
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Written in response to Daily Prompt, “Inscrutable,” and CYW 2018’s “Gray.“
WALLIE'S WENTLETRAP 