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FICTION Melodi Goff It was a dog's job, and whatever powers had named the tools of her trade had known it. Loom, warp, woof, yarn--something unusually big, misshapen--and something whose Latin root means "rupture." But she kept at her work, sending the shuttle singing through the warp and humming the tune her mother had always hummed. Maybe her grand- mother, or her grandmother's grandmother, had known the words to the tune: all that remained now in the family was a hummed melody. Her daughter knew it, but she hummed it in an office; her son knew it, and he sometimes caught himself whistling the harmony as he watched various machines create precise metal tools unblemished by human hands. His father had whistled that same harmony in the fields, or at his anvil. The ringing of his hammer, the low whistling, and the humming and whooshing from their mother's loom, was the West Virginia lullaby each child loved and longed for. Only half the tune could be played now, and its endurance through uncounted generations was spent. So she found herself musing over her work, sensing death looming over her and longing to woof at it, but knowing the
Appalachian Review – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jan 8, 1996
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