The narrator insists its toes, and when her father talks to her, he asks her where the grocer would even get toes. No, her mother tells the young girl, it was potatoes. She prefaces the story by telling us, “I have always been a teller of stories” before she proceeds to talk about going to the store with her mother and screaming because she saw toes.
This thread of determining truth runs throughout the story, and at one point, the narrator talks about, when she was a child, telling her parents that the grocer sold toes in his store. These tales are horror tales, and the woman links them to events in her life, helping her, and us as readers, understand the truth before what occurs in the story. The woman peppers, amongst the moments of her relationship with her husband and son, tales, what we may call folk tales or urban myths, of women. The woman narrator of the story details her relationship with her husband, how she knew from the moment she saw him she would marry him, to the birth of their son and to their son leaving for college, leaving the woman and her husband in the house alone. I do not know, right now, how to fully unpack Machado’s “The Husband Stitch”, but as I reread it in preparation for class, I started thinking about how we tell stories and how we determine what is true or not. Today, I just want to focus on “The Husband Stitch.” I plan to write more about The Low, Low Woods in future posts. While the story does not deal with issues of race, it serves as a good lead in to The Low, Low Woods and the themes present within that text.
I haven’t read all of the stories yet, but after reading “The Husband Stitch,” the opening story in the collection, I knew I had to include it in the course. He was teaching Machado’s collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, in one of his courses, and he let me borrow the book. As I thought about texts for my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” course, a Jaydn DeWald suggested I read Carmen Maria Machado and Dani’s The Low, Low Woods, a graphic novel that deals with issues of patriarchy, sexual assault, and trauma.
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