Pressing Pins

She tried to keep from gritting her teeth as she pressed another aluminum pin deep into the tomato-shaped cushion she'd received as a bride. Margaret felt an odd, guilty pleasure in the piercing and a reluctant satisfaction in putting just one of too many scattered pins in place. On a bright day, which seemed to be  possibly hundreds of years ago, she'd latched the red pincushion away in a sewing box, considering it nothing more than an obsessive afterthought; a cheap wedding gift from a distant cousin who meant to inject compulsive tidiness into her (then) autonomous life. Now, in the middle years of her completely un-autonomous life, Margaret had developed a disquieting attraction to the gaudy, sawdust-stuffed sewing notion.

Buy Margaret's pincushion here.