The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Story Interrupted by Connie Soper

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Loose Ends

I’m at loose ends, he used to say. Like a puppet, I wondered, arms and legs
dangling, disconnected from its body? Long strings of yarn unspooled from
the skein, a scarf not yet knitted? Perhaps the fray in fabric—the more it’s
pulled the more it unravels. Who said it, anyway, ghosting his own un-

finished story? I can’t remember if it was the one married to the purity of his
convictions. We slept summer nights in a teepee, rose to mornings soft as
feathers. His thread the green of gentle beginnings, organic smell of grass,
spring’s energy. Or, maybe the poet who spun words to sonnets, fluid language

rippling to my core—folded on Japanese paper, origami birds he gave to me.
His thread bohemian black, dark as ancient river stone. My hands would knot these
loose ends, half-scraps and fistful of tangle, but here’s gold thread, circling
a bracelet around my wrist, the way our little rented boat circled the bay, loop-

ing netted traps as we hoisted our Dungeness cache to feast on bounty sucked
from claws, wild strawberries, sweet amber wine. A long silken filament coursed
through him as if he had swallowed the sun, lit from within. I pluck at it still.

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