In the end, even his answering machine stopped giving him her messages.
Jennet didn’t plead or fight. She had created, and now she would destroy. Silently
she wrapped the flowers from the grate in tissue paper and put them away in a high
cupboard. She cleaned and blackleaded the fireplace and laid a fire with logs from her
seasoned store. Opening her embroidery box and fixing a piece of fresh canvas across
her frame, she began a new design.
Autumn dissolved into winter. Frost blackened the last disconsolate roses in Jennet’s
garden and puddles stood outside the gate. Inside, by the warmth of the fire, she sat
stitching. The picture was almost complete. She paused to prod the logs into life; sparks
flew and the room, ordered and tidy once again, was scented with pinewood.
On the frame, now tilted to avoid her swollen belly, lay the needlepoint canvas with
its faultlessly worked figures. Against Jennet’s trademark fern-stitch leaves and star-stitch
roses, her fields and skies, a canary-yellow car seemed to be accelerating out of the
canvas, speeding towards its taut surface, stretched out on the frame. A flaxen-haired
woman was at the wheel, a dark man at her side. They had no time left for pleasure,
smiled Jennet, as the nemesis behind her needle rushed nearer. For this last instant the
woman’s mouth was open, her eyes closed in a parody of ecstasy. The man’s gaze was
fixed in horror. For them, the end would always be just a second away.
Secure once more in her domain, Jennet smiled for a long time at the picture which
was the fabric of her compensation and the pattern of her revenge. Then, implacable
as Kali, solemn as Atropos, she cut the last thread, slipped her needle into its case and
folded her creatures away into her box.
20
Cauldron Anthology