The Husband Stitch
A series of ink drawings based on the short story "The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado.
Machado's short story chronicles the life of a nameless woman from the moment she meets the man she will marry, through the end of the life she builds and shares with him.
Interspersed are cautionary tales of women misled and misunderstood, each meeting untimely ends to their own stories.
In this tale, a girl is dared to venture into a cemetery at midnight and plunge a knife into a grave supposedly to taunt the dead. She complies, and ends up pinning herself to the ground by mistake. It's uncertain whether she dies of exposure or of fright.
A young girl's family is ripped from her by a pack of wolves. The girl disappears, but rumors circulate around town about sightings of her: that she's become feral herself, that she's attacked the neighbor's livestock, that she's now leading the pack herself. She is finally spotted on the banks of a river, nursing two pups.
On a trip abroad with her daughter, a mother falls ill and a doctor is called to their hotel room. The daughter is sent on a winding journey in search of medicine. When she returns she finds that not only has her mother disappeared without a trace, but the room is unrecognizable.
The story has multiple endings, one in which the daughter wanders the streets in search of a mother she can't be sure ever existed.