“Don’t,” I say, turning, and he frowns, his eyes unreadable in the dim light.
“Seriously?”
I try to think of something to say, some lighthearted dishonesty that will keep him standing in this spot, but there’s no amount of water that will loosen the words he wants to hear.
“Are you sick or something?” I shake my head, and he steps forward and places his hand against my forehead. “You’re warm. Let’s get you back to bed. Probably just a cold. Nothing to worry about. Poor lamb.”
“I can do it. You should go. Don’t want to carry it home to your family.”
He clenches his hands into fists, and I bare my teeth. “Goodbye, Cameron.”
If he says anything else, I don’t hear because I move out of the kitchen, away from him, from the intangible thing I built there, and go back to my bedroom.
I lie down. I sleep.
***
I notice the spot while I’m in the shower the next morning. On my left hip, a small, raised bump turned bright red. It doesn’t itch, but I put some cortisone cream on it anyway. Cover it with a bandage. Probably a spider bite. Or a mosquito.
At school Cameron passes me in the hallway, but I look in the other direction, smile at the children as they file past.
Edith is already in her seat when I unlock the classroom door. She lifts her head and blinks as I switch on the overhead lights.
“Good morning, Ms. Pratchett.” Her voice is sing song. Too childish for a girl of twelve.
“Edith, did someone let you in? A janitor? Or another teacher?”
“No,” she says.
“How did you get in here?”
“Did you go out into the garden last night, Ms. Pratchett? Did you dig a hole way, way down? Did you peek?”
I set down my bag, my coffee, and close the door behind me. “Edith, you have to stop this. There’s nothing in the garden, okay? Just plants and dirt.”
She untucks her shirt and lifts it so her right hip is exposed. “See? I have one, too. A spot. Like yours.”
My hands go cold. “Put your shirt down this instant,” I say, but the room feels small, and my breath comes in shallow bursts, and Edith smiles and does what I’ve asked.
The door bangs open behind me, four other students chattering among themselves, and I move to my desk and try not to look at Edith.
Underneath the bandage, the spot itches.
***
“Trade with me. Just for the rest of the week. I’ll pick up whatever duty you want. Lunch. Morning. Doesn’t matter. I’ll do next week, too.” Kathryn looks back at me with overwrought sympathy.
“So sorry, love. I can’t. Trey has tennis right after the last bell, and if we’re late again, Coach Sellman swore she’d kick him off the team. You understand.”
“Sure. Of course,” I say.
Kathryn pats me on the arm. “Chin up, Charlotte. Only two more days to the weekend, yeah?”
I scrub my hands over my face. “Yeah. Thanks anyway, Kathryn.”
She smiles and turns back to her lunch, and I try to force myself to eat my sandwich, but each bite is dry as sawdust. I wait for the bell to ring, and then stuff what’s left into the trashcan.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a blurred rush of seconds, and when the final bell rings, I clap my hands over my ears. The students don’t even notice as they rush out the door. I close my eyes and tip my head back and wait for the ringing to stop. When I look up again, even Edith isn’t in her desk.
I know where it is she’s gone.
But she isn’t on the bench. She’s already in the garden, crouched down, her face streaked with dirt, her fingers tracing dark patterns over her arms. No one else seems to notice what it is she’s doing. The other children mill past her, but they don’t stop to stare.
Invisible, I think, but I can see her skin, her hair. Solid. Real.
I sit on the bench and listen to the sounds of her hands scrabbling through dirt and her teeth opening and closing. Around us, the sky tumbles down into shadow; the other children long gone.
“Your mother isn’t coming, is she?”
“But she’s here. She’s finally finished.”
I don’t go and look. Close my ears to the sound of the ground cracking open as something crawls to the surface.
***
Cameron calls four times, the message light on the machine blinking deep red, and I go searching through the kitchen cabinets for the bottle of bourbon I always keep behind the rice and oatmeal and other bland things that add up to my life.
Ten fingers later, and my body feels loose, like every muscle has come untethered. My phone rings again, and the machine picks up. Cameron’s voice coming through the speaker all tinny and hollow in its anger and pitched just above a whisper. His wife sleeping somewhere above him while he calls the co-worker he’s been fucking for three months to tell her he wasn’t the one who’d wanted this. It had always been her. She threw herself at him, remember? The back-to-school faculty dinner at Rosaria’s where she’d had too much red wine and pulled him into the little hallway that led to the restrooms.
I tug the phone out of the wall, my fingers smarting from the force, and fold myself onto the floor. The shadows on the wall shift and come apart, strange devils wound into a dervish, and I lift my glass in a mock toast and laugh.
How easy, how quiet to disappear inside whatever it is that’s come awake. The mother. Her naked body climbing to the surface, reborn and emerging into the sunlight. Not disappeared but something else altogether. Our bodies like so much dust. Beautiful.
I’m not sure when it is I put on my shoes, but I’m running, and my muscles burn and burn underneath thin skin, and I pull my shirt over my head, and the moon shines silver overhead. The spot on my hip is bigger now. A deep bruise.
I tip my head back. I scream.
***
Edith isn’t at school the next day, but I knew she wouldn’t be. The void space where she should be seems to breathe and shift. Even when the children are at recess, the wide room gaping and empty, her seat still seems occupied. I run my hands over the polished wood of her desk, but there’s nothing there to feel. No vibration, so sensation of something solid or tingling along the backs of my hands. I hover there, letting my fingers tremble through the air. I don’t hear the classroom door open and close.
“We need to talk.” Cameron’s voice. The edge in it razor sharp.
I turn, and he’s standing behind the door, his back pressed against the wall so if someone were to pass by and peek through the window, they wouldn’t see him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say and turn back to Edith’s desk.
“What the hell is going on with you, Charlotte?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You’ve been acting crazy since last week. And this?” He gestures toward me, toward the desk. “What are you doing in here?”
“Nothing. You should go.”
“Charlotte,” he says and takes a step forward, realizes he might be seen, and shrinks back against the wall like some insect caught in the light. “Listen. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Doesn’t it?” I let my hands drift across the desk’s surface slow and dreamlike, trace my name and Edith’s name across the wood.
I don’t look back at him, at the things I’ve buried and ignored. “Please go, Cameron.”
“You’re a real bitch, you know that?” he says, and the door closes behind him.
Something damp brushes against my fingers.
“Edith,” I say.
The bell rings.
***
I wait for all the children to go home. They shout to each other with Friday afternoon glee, and I smile at them from my place on the bench.
Cameron watches from across the parking lot, his face blank, but then he leaves, and I wonder how many pieces of myself have died at his feet.
For a long time, I’ve called it love. Told myself it’s what I wanted.
Only when it’s completely dark do I stand and make my way to the garden. I lie down in the dirt. Close my eyes. “Please,” I say because I want to disappear, too.
“It isn’t like that, Ms. Pratchett,” Edith says, but she isn’t there when I open my eyes.
“You said she was finished. You said it was time.”
Edith doesn’t respond, and I lift my shirt, pass my fingers over the swollen, tender skin. “It isn’t a bruise is it, Edith. It’s something else.”
“Yes,” she says. Her invisible fingers press against me, and I cry out in pain.
Edith goes silent, and I watch the sky, the clouds low and a lighter shade of night.
I fall asleep there, tucked among the quiet, growing things, and in the morning, nothing has changed.
***
I don’t go home. I spend the day crouched down, my hands scrabbling through the dirt, my teeth closing around any wriggling creature I find. The thing under my skin stretches, and I watch it move, rub my hands over the hard mound it has created for itself.
All of these things I’ve buried. All of these things I’ve wanted dead and rotten. “Disappeared,” I whisper.
When the time comes, I’ll put this squirming thing inside of me in the dirt, and it will bloom. Become something else.
Something beautiful.
KNITTER
Christopher Coake
Imagine a small village, in a world not unlike, yet not too much like, your own.
To the west of the village lies a thick deciduous wood, carpeting the foothills of a high mountain range. To its east, past a wide, dark river, stretches a vast grassy plain. The village is located at a bend where the river, having tumbled down from the mountains, grows deep and calm. A few hundred souls live here, in small houses built from logs and sod. To these people, what lies on the other side of the mountains, on the far edge of the plain, is largely a mystery (I can tell you: They wouldn’t want to know). Though these people visit other villages, most accessible by horse-drawn cart or barge, they live the bulk of their lives confined to this place, its possibilities, its memories. A few days’ journey downriver, where the water empties into an ocean, is a city, but while the villagers might find an excuse to visit, few ever aspire to live there.
Imagine this place: A cluster of small houses with canted roofs, upon which grow wigs of rippling yellow prairie grass. Insinuating afternoon winds blow down from the mountains, scented by ice and evergreen. An old tree stands in the center of the village, lightning-struck and agonized, older, it is said, than gods (the villagers believe in gods, but I can tell you they do not exist). The skies above are depthless and vast.
At night you would be astonished by the number of visible stars, though their strange patterns, the colorful galactic clouds aglow between them, would fill you with unease.
Would you find these people strange? Yes.
But not too strange. The villagers are more or less like the people you see around you. Their skin is smooth and honey-colored; they wear their hair long and braided; their eyes are dark and deep. Their teeth, yes, are a little sharper than yours. These people tear meat from the bones of animals, but they also bake sweets and warm breads. They play instruments and sing bawdy songs. They read books. They dream; they marry and have families; they aspire.
For the most part, they fear what you do.
They fear drought, and barter with their gods for rain and snow. They fear funnel clouds writhing down from towering thunderheads to touch the plains. They fear pain in the joint, in the root of the tooth. Tumors and blights. Loneliness. Murder. Unrequited love. Shame.
And you must know this, too. They fear monsters.
Imagine: In deep holes under the river live fish with long, snakelike bodies and wide unhingeable jaws; they have seized splashing children and mothers doing wash. Above the high peaks wheel cruel, featherless birds the size of kites. Squat, scaled things roam in prides far across the plains. In the heart of the forest, wings rasping like saws, live wasps the size of birds, the sting of which—it is said—can silver a woman’s hair.
Here is a secret I will share with you: In a hollow at the center of the world, coiled into a tight ball the size of a moon, sleeps a dragon. No one who lives on this world suspects. Its presence has no bearing on anything else I will tell you, but you must know of it nevertheless. You must live with the knowing. If someday the dragon wakes, this world will end. It has never woken before, but I can tell you it dreams.
Every monster dreams. Every monster imagines, aspires.
For instance, the dragon was probably put there—who knows why?—by a knitter.
Knitters: This is the name given to the most fearsome of the monsters of this world. What else could such beings be named? When they are visible to the naked eye—which is almost never, and for reasons no one understands—they are terrifying. They are shaped like people, but are taller, thinner; their skin is hairless and bone-white; they have spindly, unsettling, many-jointed arms; those arms end in sharp points, and these constantly stab and darn the air, like the needles with which a granny knits a scarf. They have heads on long necks: featureless, yet attentive, turning this way and that.
They knit and unknit the world, and this is terrifying to behold.
***
I will tell you now about a man and woman of this village. Their tale is a sad one; you must know this at the outset, though its ending might yet surprise you.
The man, when he was a boy only ten years old, saw a knitter. Many people—the happy, blessed ones—live their entire lives never beholding such a horror. Our boy, however, was not so lucky.
This occurred when he was away from the village, near the river, on a cool afternoon in the early autumn. He was alone. He wandered, throwing stones, daydreaming of the future, of his life as a man. He aspired. He dreamed, of happiness, of a wife, of children. If he did not know the particulars of such a life, no matter; he walked along, happily untroubled, guessing.
And then, in the dimming light, he saw it at the edge of his vision—where knitters are said to reside, flashes of omen and unease—but when our boy whipped around, this knitter remained in view. The boy’s skin prickled. The knitter loomed only a short distance away, pale and busy, half-hidden behind a tall, old tree, its arms dipping and fishing at nothing. The knitter seemed to look at the boy; it cocked its head.
Then its needles darned the air on either side of the trunk, and seemed to catch, and the trunk of the tree shuddered, as though seen through a heat-ripple, and then the knitter crossed its arms, and the world on either side of the tree—there is no other way to put this—folded over, and then the tree was gone, and the knitter too.
The boy was a boy, as prone to curiosity as fear. He hurried to the place the knitter had been, where the tree—a tree the boy had touched, and into the sturdy boughs of which he had climbed—had been rooted.
It was not only gone; it had never been. It left behind no stump, no fallen leaves, no turned-over earth. The ground was undisturbed, thickly-covered by grass and bush, the soil beneath firm and dry to the touch.
Only then, then, did the boy begin to understand the doom that had befallen him. He ran, weeping, for home. He did not dare look back; he was sure, if he did, that he would see the knitter, looming, ready to unmake him too.
***
This is what knitters do. They make, and they unmake.
Most of the time no one in this world can know exactly what a knitter has created, what one has stolen. Knitters work in secret, the world changing at their whim, no one the wiser; the changes they make, you see, extend beyond the world of flesh and blood and stone and wood, and into time. If a knitter takes a tree, it removes that tree not only from the world as it is, but also from the memories of those who knew it. If it makes a tree, then the tree has always been—along with all the times the tree has been seen, touched, climbed.
But sometimes—who knows why?—this making, this unmaking, is not wholly perfect. This is the way of this
world. Its people must live with the knowing.
As a villager walks along the riverbank, for instance, past a large sunbleached stone, he might grow puzzled, and the world might seem . . . not right. Changed. And if he puts his hands on the old stone, the one he’s seen every day of his life, the stone might seem to him, for half a moment, alien, superimposed over a landscape where he is sure—sure—nothing ought to be.
Elsewhere a woman might look out her window, upon the figure of her beloved husband working in the yard, and—for a harrowing moment—think, I have no husband, I have never had a husband, and yet there he is, chopping wood, his shirt tied around his head to catch his sweat, stopping to smile and wave.
Is he real, or did a knitter make him real?
The villagers joke, when they trip upon a shoe: A knitter set it there.
They joke, upon losing a key: A knitter took it, gods know where.
Why must this world be so cruel, so strange?
If you find a knitter, ask it. This is what they say.
***
Let’s return to our boy, running home, terrified.
He’d seen a knitter. And this knitter had done the most terrible thing of which its kind is capable: It took away part of the world, but it left a witness.
Left a memory, living, in the boy’s mind.
To be so afflicted, the boy knew—all the people of this world know, and now so do you—is to be cursed. Not with ill fortune (no matter what happens to our boy); no; this curse is the peculiar burden of nonexistent things. What is one to do with a memory of an unmade tree? Without soil in which to root itself, the tree might now grow wild and tangled within the mind, might bear poison fruit, might draw down unexpected lightning.
The boy had to live with this: This dream, this loss, this grief.
Along the way, without realizing it, he ran past the knitter (see it, cocking its sightless head?).
The knitter jabbed the air, threaded and cut.
A young girl stood where no young girl had stood before.
She ran home to her mother, in the house next door to the boy’s. Her mother greeted her, embraced her; then she stared after her as the girl went to her bedroom and picked up a wooden doll and sat, smiling, on the floor beside a sniffing, tail-thumping dog. Her daughter. Her beloved daughter. The daughter for whom she’d always yearned. The puppy for which the daughter had clamored and begged, now grown. All was well. Yes. The mother’s heart swelled with love.
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