by Leah Day
“My dear rabbit, it would be an honor,” Patch said, bowing slightly.
“Honor it will be indeed,” Ms. Bunny said, crossing her arms in front of her tiny chest. “I have an idea that will significantly speed up this journey. What do you think about flying, cat?”
Chapter 6 - Hello Sunshine, Good-bye Sunshine
They began stitching the wings immediately. Mally pulled out the tattered fabric from her bookbag while Ms. Bunny threaded needles and tried to talk Patch into the joys of flight.
“Look at it this way, you’ll never be easy prey to a snarl or that horrible Ripping Witch again.”
“At the expense of becoming a flying orange and green cat,” Patch said, pacing. “I have only ever wanted to be one of those things.”
“Clashing colors?” Mally guessed.
“No! A cat! I only ever wanted to be a cat. I want to lay in the sun and sleep all day. I have no desire to get involved with crazy witches or crafty rabbits. And I certainly never wanted to fly.”
“Well, you’re getting these wings,” Ms. Bunny said firmly. “They don’t work right on Mally because she’s human and I’m not big enough to wear them. You’re just the right size and I think with a bit of luck they will work just like real bird wings when stitched to your back.”
“You’re missing, or simply ignoring the tiny detail that I have no desire to fly. They’ll be wasted on me.”
“I’m stitching them on anyway. It’s up to you to use them.” And with that, Ms. Bunny settled herself on a low rock and set to work sewing up the holes in Mally’s wing with tiny, even stitches. Mally helped, pulling squares and strips of blue fabric from the nearby stream to reinforce the seams that had ripped during her flight.
Surprisingly, Patch helped as well. As Mally was threading her needle, he reached out and gently took it from her hand. “May I?”
“Of course. I didn’t know you could sew. Do you want to help?”
He quirked a half smile and said, “Sure. I know better than to argue with a girl when her mind is made up. If fixing these wings gets us moving again, I’ll help.”
His paws were huge, but he easily held the needle between his sharp claws and created a line of perfectly spaced stitches through the fabrics. Mally looked at their combined hands and paws stitching the wings and giggled. “I wonder what Grandma would say if she could see us. I’m just not sure she’d believe what she was seeing.”
“Yes, we’re quite the quilting bee,” Patch said softly. Mally could tell he’d meant to be snarky, but it had come out differently, almost wistful.
All the fingertips of her left hand had been rubbed raw from so much stitching, but it no longer felt odd to grip the needle and thread. She still couldn’t make stitches as small or neat as Ms. Bunny’s, but they were getting better. The thimble on her thumb now felt like a second skin and she rarely looped the thread the wrong way around a seam, which had happened so frequently to her just hours (or was it days?) before.
They sat together stitching in the grass, Ms. Bunny’s pink dress spread out over the rock. A breeze ran through Mally’s hair and she stopped to tilt her face to the sun. Quilst always seemed to be the perfect temperature and it made her wish they could sit and stitch together forever.
“That’s it,” Ms. Bunny said, slicing off her last thread tail with the little blade.
Mally stood and held the patchwork up to the light. “What do you think? Do you see any holes?”
“Nope, they’re all patched up and ready to go. More patches for Patch,” Ms. Bunny said with a grin.
Patch rolled his eyes as he laid down on his belly in the grass so they could position the wings over his back.
“Where do you think they should go? I’ve seen pictures of gryphons and they’re usually somewhere in the middle.” Mally said, shifting the colorful wings on the cat’s broad back. They played with the arrangement until it felt just right with the fabric positioned several inches below Patch’s dark green star. Mally climbed over his back to check the placement and make sure they would work even if she was riding.
“When did I offer to play horsie for the return trip?” Patch grumbled. “Give a girl one ride and she’ll expect you to take her everywhere.”
“You don’t have to carry us anywhere,” Mally said, slipping off his back. “I’m just making sure it will work just in case I need to ride, but only if you want to carry me.”
“No worries, little Maker. My back can’t get worse than it already is. More patches for Patch, indeed.” With that, the cat closed his eyes and rested his head in his paws.
Mally and Ms. Bunny set to work. They didn’t have pins so they used all the needles in the sewing box to hold the wings in place. Then Ms. Bunny taught Mally how to baste the fabrics together with long stitches.
“See? It’s the biggest stitch you’ll ever take and it’s just to hold the pieces together temporarily. We’ll pull this out after we’ve stitched the wings on properly.” The doll demonstrated, sliding the entire needle through the wings, into Patch’s back, then back up to the wings, taking a stitch that was nearly an inch long. She used white thread that contrasted sharply with the blue fabric so they could see the stitches clearly.
Mally loved the big basting stitches. Finally! Here was a type of sewing that didn’t require tiny, perfectly spaced stitches.
In no time the repaired wings were basted in place securely. Mally and Ms. Bunny knotted their threads at the same time and stepped back. The fabric lay crumpled against Patch’s sides and he looked thoroughly content to continue his nap in the tall yarn grass.
“Come on cat, wake up and give the wings a try. See if you can move them,” Ms. Bunny demanded.
“I said you could stitch them on, I didn’t say I’d use them.”
“Patch, we just want to make sure they’re in the right place. Aerodynamics and stuff, can you just try?” Mally asked.
“You still don’t understand how things work here, little Maker. If you stitch wings to a creature like me, it doesn’t matter where you put them. You could have stitched them to the top of my head and it would still work.”
“Oh, that’s an idea!” Ms. Bunny started forward, needle in hand, but Patch sprang off the ground and leapt out of her reach.
As he did, the wings billowed out on both sides, expanding to more than twelve feet wide and the little doll was blown backwards off her feet. Ms. Bunny rolled down the hill, coming to rest with her dress pulled up over her head. Mally burst out laughing as she stumbled, trying to get back onto her feet and tug her dress down at the same time.
“I’d say they work, Ms. Bunny! What do you think?” Mally called.
Ms. Bunny finally managed to right herself and fix her clothes. “Yes, I’m sure that was very funny. Come on, try flying one lap around this Closed Door and I’ll be satisfied.”
“I’m not interested in your satisfaction, rabbit,” Patch said, neatly folding the wings and tucking them against his sides. “I’ll take them exactly as they are and that will work just fine. I appreciate the extra decoration. Now why don’t you both climb on and you can stitch them down properly while I get us out of here. I see darkness on the horizon. That usually means more snarls on the way and there is nowhere to hide in these open fields.”
Mally turned to squint in the direction Patch indicated. It looked like a black haze in the distance. Her heart pounded at the memory of Menda’s crazy face and her thread spiders stitching her in place.
“We’ve got to go!” Mally bent and began tossing thread spools and fabric scraps haphazardly back into the sewing box. “Come on, Ms. Bunny. The snarls are coming!”
They set off immediately, Mally and her doll scrambling up the cat’s back, but instead of returning the way they’d come, Patch advised a new path, following the streams that bordered the bottom edge of the quilt.
“Let’s stay as far from
the witch’s mountain as we can,” he suggested and for once Ms. Bunny didn’t accuse him of leading them into a trap. “If we follow the streams through the lower forest we can run along the bottom edge of Quilst and that may be faster.”
“The edge? Could we leave the quilt?” Mally asked.
“I don’t think we can right now,” Ms. Bunny said. She was looking beyond the rolling fields and streams to a strip of black fabric that bordered the quilt. “It just stretches out into darkness. I certainly wouldn’t advise wandering off that way. You might get lost and never find your way home.”
“I agree, rabbit,” Patch said. “This quilt isn’t finished, is it, Mally?”
“No, Grandma had only pieced the quilt top. She hasn’t sandwiched it with batting or started quilting it.” Mally was proud of how much she knew about quilting, even if her stitching still left a lot to be desired. She’d watched Grandma work through all the steps many times and had often helped baste the layers together.
“Maybe when that step is complete, these rips will be less of an issue.” Patch said, skirting around a small hole in the quilt that had been cleverly hidden in the shadow of a rock.
“Oh yes, Grandma will fix everything. And if that evil cow rips more holes, it’ll just open into the batting once the quilt is a sandwich.” Mally scanned the landscape for more traps hiding in plain sight. “Will this path take us next to the Great Tree? We’re going to stop and look for Grandma before leaving, right?”
Neither Patch nor Ms. Bunny answered for a long moment.
“Maybe. We’ll see.” Ms. Bunny offered only the most annoying noncommittal answer in the world. “It will depend on if you can help me sew these wings down properly. It’s not going to be easy, especially while riding on his back.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll do anything so long as we can at least go inside the Great Tree.” Mally said, pulling out her needle and thread. “Just wait until you see it, Ms. Bunny, if it’s anything like I imagined it, it’s going to be amazing!”
Patch settled into a steady pace, loping over the rolling hills with a smooth, rocking motion. Mally gripped his back with her legs and watched as Ms. Bunny made a stitch through the center of the wings, into the cat’s back fabric, and back up so her needle didn’t get lost in his body. It was tricky work, made even harder because Patch was moving.
But she didn’t give up or complain. Mally wanted so desperately to see the Great Tree she focused all her attention on forming each stitch. She memorized Patch’s movement and was soon keeping up a steady rhythm in time with his paws hitting the landscape. But her stitches weren’t as small or as evenly spaced as Ms. Bunny’s. There was just no way she could manage it while they moved.
When her friend saw the stitches, she suggested adding an occasional back stitch. “Insert the needle back into that stitch and pull it through again. Now the thread is doubled up over the fabric, which makes that stitch even stronger than before.”
Mally gave it a try, and even though it took more time, she felt confident her stitches were secure.
In short order nine parallel lines of thread ran through Patch’s wings, locking them permanently to his back. Ms. Bunny began pulling out the basting stitches and Mally giggled as she tied off her thread tails.
“Being laughed at while getting stitched on isn’t a pleasant experience. What have you stitched on my back?” Patch asked.
“Just more clashing thread,” Mally said, leaning down to wrap her hands around his shoulders for a hug. At some point, she had decided that what Patch needed most was more hugs and she was determined to help with that. “I ran out of thread, so I had to use orange over the blue. Just don’t enter any fashion contests!”
Patch grumbled and Mally felt suddenly awkward. “It looks really good, Patch. We stitched long lines so your wings will never rip out like before and I would have matched the color if we’d had more thread.”
“I’m sure it’s fine, little Maker.”
“Would you like to try them out?” Mally asked.
“I’d rather wait. The Ripping Witch has no idea where we are right now. Let’s not advertise our location with my great clashing patchwork bu–”
“I agree,” Ms. Bunny interrupted. “If Menda sees us take flight, she might feel the need to make something that flies too, and I remember she mentioned something about bats back in the mountain. Just in case we have to walk the whole way I have an idea for getting across the field without falling into another pit.”
Mally pulled her bookbag over and Ms. Bunny shifted to sit on Patch’s neck. They spread out the scraps they’d collected in the woods and from the stream across his back. The brown, green and blue scraps had gotten very wrinkled from being stuffed into the bag so many times. The doll set to work arranging the fabrics into a narrow strip about twelve inches wide.
“What are we going to make?”
“A path. I think if we piece together a long strip of fabric, we could use it to cover the holes in the field around the Great Tree.”
“So it will be like our own Yellow Brick Road?” Mally asked excitedly.
“In a way, but it won’t be all yellow. We don’t have time to be picky.” Ms. Bunny said, looking at the fabrics. “We’ll call it the Nature Path. It looks like all we have are green, brown, and blue fabrics from the landscape. How about that?”
Mally loved the idea and quickly grabbed two strips to sew together. Ms. Bunny handed her a threaded needle and said, “We’re stitching for speed here, so it doesn’t matter how big or awful your stitches are. We’ll need to make this as long as we can so let’s make it a race.”
Ms. Bunny grabbed a threaded needle and began slipping it through the fabric. Up, down, up, down the needle flashed in her paw as she stacked a row of stitches on the thin bit of metal. Then she pulled the needle through and a line of huge stitches appeared, securing a brown and blue strip together. In seconds, she was done and starting on another blue strip. Her stitches were so long Mally could have stuck her fingers through the gaps in the seams.
“But that stitching isn’t very secure, is it?”
“No, but that’s not the point,” Ms. Bunny said. “This is just like the basting we did on the wings. We need the path to be more secure than the landscape, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. We’re just trying to make something to support our weight one time.”
Mally understood and tried to copy her. The stitching she’d done on Patch’s back was very different and she kept forgetting what she was doing and inserting the needle in the wrong direction. But it didn’t seem to matter. Ms. Bunny had already added six strips to her part of the path before Mally finished her first.
She grabbed a pale blue strip and focused on sliding the fabric up and down to chain the stitches onto her needle. Then she slid the thread through the fabric and found more than four inches secured together. She stacked more stitches and pulled through again and was suddenly at the end of the fabric. She knotted the thread quickly and grabbed a new strip.
Like magic, the stitching method clicked and Mally’s fingers flew!
As Patch pounded over the landscape, heading for a dark forest in the distance, Mally and Ms. Bunny stitched their way steadily through the entire collection of scraps. As the Nature Path grew longer, Ms. Bunny rolled it up and stashed the ends into Mally’s bookbag so it wouldn’t get tangled on the cat’s legs.
When their fabric ran low, Mally leaned over the edge of Patch’s back and skimmed her fingers through the stream. She pulled out fistfuls of white, gray, and blue strips to add to the path. Needles flashed, and the patchwork grew longer still. She was just shifting to grab another handful of fabric from the stream when Patch slowed his pace.
He was staring pointedly at something up ahead. Mally followed his gaze and found a dense maze of massive trees, tightly packed together. They had reached the lower forest. Unlike the green woods near the mount
ains, these trees were stitched much closer together and in bright shades of the fall with orange, red, and yellow leaves. The widest open space was the little stream that flowed haphazardly between the giant trunks. But even that gap was no longer wide enough to fit Patch’s current size.
“Looks like our taxi ride is over,” Mally said, sliding off his back. “Thank you for carrying us this far, Patch.”
“I live to serve,” Patch said sardonically, but he smiled sheepishly when she wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed.
Ms. Bunny hopped down. “Let’s take some scraps from the trees and stream and keep stitching as we walk.”
Mally had been looking forward to a break from stitching, but she didn’t argue as the little doll rolled up the patchwork and tucked it into the bookbag, leaving the ends dangling out of the top. Mally pulled the straps over her shoulders, then held out a hand for Ms. Bunny to climb on.
They waded up the stream, following the twists and turns as it wound around boulders and wide tree trunks. Just like she’d found before, the water wasn’t actually wet, but it did feel noticeably cool and refreshing. Mally fished around and pulled out handfuls of blue and gray strips from the stream and handed them to Ms. Bunny. When she neared a tree, she collected bright orange and yellow fabric leaves.
As they walked, Patch rapidly shrank in size. It gave Mally a start as they were rounding a tight bend in the stream and both she and the cat were able to walk through the narrow space side by side. Now he was the size of a large dog, his head barely reaching her hip. Surprisingly, the freshly stitched wings shrank too and Patch folded them smoothly at his sides, as if he’d had them his whole life.
“That is so cool, Patch,” Mally said. “Does it hurt at all?”
“Pain is all about perspective. It’s easier to shrink than grow and only hurts if seams get ripped in the change. Half of the seams you fixed were ripped from growing so fast before I caught you.”
Mally was shocked. “I thought all those seams were ripped when you crash landed in the woods!”