✨ Why Chinchilla is My Favorite Fur

as if she hid ...

Why Chinchilla is My Favorite Fur

The last dress my mother bought while we still had money was gray wool, tight to the knees, the hips circled in chinchilla. She wore it to a wedding on a ship, a few fancy dinners, and when my father left, it became her date dress. Later, it served as part of a suit for work: worn under a jacket, as if she hid the animal beneath. When the seams frayed, she cut the fur from its dying host, hung it in the back of the closet. I’d sit in the airless dark, the pelt pressed to my face, inhaling its memory of rodent musk, whiff of seawater, and a scent I thought of as loneliness—the animal’s or Mother’s,
I could never tell. 

—Tina Barry

From I Tell Henrietta, AIM Higher, Inc., Copyright © 2024. First published in Thimble Literary Magazine. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Tobias Jetter, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.