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.
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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.
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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.
