Samuel E Cole

Siren Stitches Samuel E Cole

A mid-thirties couple uses the internet to define, and redefine, their marriage. Marla struggles to sell her dead teenage son's Audi. A nine-year-old Bohra Girl from India has no control of a burgeoning body predetermined to suffer by other people's hands. A family riddled with obscurities and lies lose everything, and then a little more. A disparate woman can't stop the inner voices. A little boy goes to great lengths to engender a father figure. Brothers take comfort in each other's demise. Braden comes home for Thanksgiving from college and finds an unexpected distraction from familial angst and ruination. Gender is confronted on a death bed and a secret adoption is revealed by an old man in a booth at Perkin's.




At the dinner table, our parent's one request, Connie sat hunchback and tight-lipped, growling at the bread rolls, squinting at the glasses of lemonade, and rearranging the silverware into an X. No one queried her thoughts or asked for an opinion. But I could hear her--screaming--smoothness, you stupid mother fuckers, is meant for those who haven't yet been sliced apart.
-- The Seconds after Living Wounds



At its heart, siren stitches seeks to find inroads of belonging on a fitful path scattered with (dis)entanglements and (mis)applications.