Letters from the Wild Garlic

**Letter One**

Dear Calvin,

I'm writing this from the hotel lobby in Lamentin, which has the kind of furniture that pretends to be antique and a ceiling fan that wobbles like it's considering quitting. You probably got home from the studio an hour ago and found the note I left on the fridge, and you're probably doing that thing where you read it twice and then go water something.

I'm fine. The conference is fine. The papers are about colonial-era stitch density in ecclesiastical vestments, which sounds like something I'd love and mostly isn't. I'm thirty-four years old and I've been sensible for so long that I think I forgot how to be anything else, and that's the real reason I booked this trip on a Tuesday night while you were in the shower. Not the conference. The escape.

Here is the strange part. My room overlooks a shed. A chipped-cement shed with a rusted roof, and it turns out it's a cold-press for hazelnut oil, and every evening around six they run the press and the smell comes up through my window and sits on top of everything I own. Crushed nuts and something warm underneath, almost like toasted bread. It should be awful. It is not awful. I lie on the bed with the window open and the faulty light buzzing across the way, flickering like it's sending code, and I breathe it in and feel briefly like someone who does unreasonable things.

I miss you. I'll write again tomorrow. Eat something that isn't crackers.

Janie

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**Letter Two**

Calvin,

Today I found out the Feast of the Wild Garlic is this weekend. There's a battlefield site outside town where wild garlic grows in soil people swear was soaked with old blood a few centuries back, and every year pilgrims walk out there and pick bundles and there's a procession and somebody sells garlic soap. I watched a woman argue about soap prices for ten minutes. It was the most alive I've felt since I arrived.

The conference drags. I sit in the back row and embroider during the dull papers, which is fair, because half the presenters are describing needlework they've only seen in photographs. In my kit I found a roll of gaffer tape, the wide black kind, leftover from the theater floor at the symposium two years ago. You remember, the venue with the chipped floorboards we kept getting blamed for. It's been rattling around in there ever since, half-used, the edge all fuzzy.

Here's the confession part, and I don't know why I'm telling you this in a letter instead of on the phone, except that letters let me be braver than I am. I sat on the bed last night and wrapped a strip of it around my wrist. Not tight, not for any reason, just to feel it. The pull of it. The flat pressure of something holding me down for no purpose at all. I wore it under my sleeve through two sessions today and kept pressing my thumb against it.

I don't have a good explanation for you yet. Maybe I don't need one. The garlic smell is on my hands from the market and the hazelnut smell is in the curtains and I feel like I'm slowly saying something out loud to myself.

Love, Janie

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**Letter Three**

Dear Calvin,

Third night. The press shed ran late tonight and the light buzzed until almost eleven, and I dreamed about you, and I'm going to tell you about it because apparently I've stopped having shame, at least on hotel stationery.

In the dream you were working, in that way you do, bent over a banner with your needles lined up on the magnet like little soldiers. Only in the dream the needles ended up on me. You were pressing the points in lightly, just dragging the tips along the inside of my thighs, tracing where the stitches would go, and you weren't saying anything, and I wasn't allowed to move, and I woke up with the sheet twisted around one leg and my heart going hard.

I know that's a strange thing to send a man in the mail. It's not even the strangest part. The strangest part is what I keep circling around, night after night, the thing I told myself I'd say on the last page of this letter and now have to actually say. I want to feel held down, Calvin. Not by hands. By something flat and unforgiving and wrong. I keep thinking about that tape roll and the phrase that keeps arriving in my head is the wrong kind of tightness, and I want it, and I've wanted it for longer than I've admitted to anyone, including myself.

There. It's in writing now. You own an embroidery business, you know better than anyone that once a stitch is set you can't pretend it isn't there.

Don't call yet. I'm not ready. But I'm working up to something.

Janie

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**Voicemail Transcript, Thursday, 7:42 a.m. Local Time**

Calvin. Hi. It's me. I know, I said don't call and then I called, that's allowed, I checked. Sorry about the hour, I couldn't sleep, the press started up early today and the whole window smells like a bakery that's made of nuts.

Listen, I want to ask you something and my voice is going to sound rushed because the lobby man is looking at me. Could you send me a fragment? From the Lamentin commission, the old tapestry piece, the corner with the broken border we were going to unpick anyway. Not for work. I just want to hold something of yours that isn't a phone. I want to look at the wrong side of the stitching, where nobody's supposed to look, and think about you making it.

I'll explain everything when I'm home. Or before. Probably before. I keep drafting the explanation in my head and it starts with so, honey, remember that roll of gaffer tape.

Okay. The man is definitely looking at me now. Send the fragment. I love you. Goodbye.

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**Letter Five**

Calvin,

I did something today and I've been sitting on the bed for an hour deciding whether to tell you, and you know me, so of course I'm telling you.

I went into the press shed.

Not officially. The door was open, one of those propped-with-a-brick doors, and the conference was in its afternoon session about digital documentation of seam allowances, and I just walked the other way. Inside it's all chipped cement and one enormous metal drum, warm along one side where the press runs, and the whole place reeks of hazelnut, thick enough that you can taste it. The faulty light buzzes overhead like the world's worst mosquito. There were no people. Just the drum and me.

I pressed my cheek against the drum. It was warm and oily and slightly gritty and I stood there like a complete lunatic with my eyes closed, and I said it. Out loud. To nobody. The thing I've been building toward all week in these letters, the thing I couldn't say in our kitchen over pasta.

The tape isn't for sewing, Calvin. It was never for sewing. I didn't pack it by accident. I've been carrying it around for two years waiting for a room where I could admit that what I want, what I dreamed about and wrote to you about in a letter I'm now terrified you've read, is to be wrapped in it. Bound in it. To lie there stuck and held and utterly unable to move while you do whatever you want to me, slowly, the way you work a border.

I said it to a drum, in a shed that smells like cookies. And then I laughed until I had to sit down on a crate, because I'm thirty-four years old and I flew across the