Inside a hay barn with three walls, “The Red Line” began with a Spanish song, “Cu Currucucu Paloma.” I walked to a corner of mirrors where I collected dead animals I found on the farm that week: three mice, a crow, a fly, and many snail shells. I sat naked on a chair with a granite rock underneath. I begin to pull a red thread from within a vase that spilled water over the snail shells on a shovel. I wrapped the thread tightly around my arm, it looked like a piece of ham as it strangled my arm. I began to unravel, I walked toward my peers, I passed the thread to every person in the barn and we became knots. I lead them inside the barn, one by one, all holding on to the thread.

Grieving inside out, the red line passes between fingers and tissue. It is wet with water that keeps the cut flowers alive. I was told the millers’ wife lost her only child on this hill, so we sat on the hill on a pile of hay covered in lace holding the red line feeling the ones we’ve lost. Some of us cried.

The rock is a weight of a collective grieving and the heaviness it brings me. The red line became a materialized mapping of grief and memories. An often internalized process was shared and tied us together through the labor of a love song.