by Noella Royce
"I wouldn't put it quite like that." He hurried to the cages that covered the window and I followed, hustling him out of the way so I could do it for him.
"How would you put it, then? What the hell is her problem with me?" There'd been times in the past when I'd been in costume at conventions or out in public and random people had called me a slut or an underdressed ho, but at least then I knew what I was being attacked for. Thalia's fury had me flabbergasted.
He turned on the lights, now refusing to meet my eyes. "It's not personal, I promise. She just has some prejudices."
"About what? She was snarling at me about throwing off energy, my 'byzantine' skills, and of somehow mocking her with my ignorance, and I have no goddamn idea what she's talking about! I don't even know her, and she hates me. I'm just a damn bartender and retail slave! No offense."
"None taken." He was unlocking the register now.
"Frank." I put a hand on his arm, forcing him to look at me. "What the hell is going on with her?"
He sighed, his sweet eyes sad. "I'm sorry, Veda. It's hard to explain, for several reasons."
"Can you try? Aren't you guys together or something?"
"We're on a break; there's something we disagree on, something fundamental, and we can't be together until it sorts out. That may be never." He looked up at me. "But she accused you of mocking her? Really?"
"She did. Like I knew exactly what she was talking about, which is patently untrue."
He sighed. "Ah, so she doesn't believe I kept my promise, then. I'm not surprised."
"Promise about what? Frank, you're killing me. This conversation is almost as weird as the one I had with Thalia."
He smiled. "It would be, wouldn't it? I'm sorry, Veda, I would be frustrated as well. I take my oath seriously, so there's only so much I can say, but I do feel I can follow the letter of the law and still make my point." He squared his shoulders and his face returned to the fatherly, inviting mien I was used to. "Have you considered my offer to use the sewing resources here?"
"You're changing the subject!"
"I am, yes," he said serenely. "I can't discuss Thalia with you, but I do recommend you stay away from the Sage for now." He nodded at my tea. "You want anything, I'll send Amari or Kristen over to grab it, okay?"
"Promise?" I really like the tea, no lie.
"Promise. Sewing?" he prompted.
I decided to let it go; that wench and her odd attack weren't going to ruin my mood, and if I was going to stay in Maywen, it was clear I was going to need to accept a healthy amount of bafflement each day. "Okay, so it's funny you bring it up again; I actually woke up this morning with a huge urge to create something, like, for the first time in forever. And I've got some money I can put towards it—can't use it for anything else, actually—and it'd be great to spend it in your store."
"Excellent. So you spoke to Vholes, then!"
"Wait, you know about my trust?" Maybe he really was my benefactor.
Frank ignored the question. Typical. "Come on, let me show you my pride and joy; we've got a couple of minutes." He indicated I should follow him upstairs, suddenly full of joy and no longer upset that his woman was freezing him out for some very odd reason that might, but might not, involve me, and opened up a door in the back.
Inside was a small, nondescript blue room that was surprisingly clean and dust free. Being a corner, there were windows on each side, and there was a stunning view of the edge of campus and the tree-lined walkway that led into the heart of the central lawn.
There were two worktables that stood in the middle of the space—one that held a large cutting board, an iron, and a pressing board; and the other that held an old, metal, recessed sewing machine. It was a gleaming enameled black color, with the word "Universal" emblazoned in the side.
My brain saw that old contraption and focused on it instantly, noting that it looked quite like the machine I'd inherited from my grandma and used until I'd been able to afford a nicer, new one with all the bells and whistles.
"You know," I said quietly, running my hand gently along its top, touching the spool thread, "I gave one of these old glories away once because I thought I'd grown beyond it. I've regretted it ever since."
Frank beamed. "Yes, she's a beauty; been in my possession for thirty years, and I've kept her in amazing shape. Come on, let me show you what I've got. In these drawers, you should find everything you need." He indicated a couple of large metal cabinets. "That includes presser feet, needles, my personal collection of thread, markers, those fancy new bias tape makers, and a lot more." Something wistful stole into his expression. "Other than teaching Kristen, I haven't sewn much in the past ten years. Once I embraced my mediocrity, it was hard to find the passion to create anymore. That's one of my regrets."
"I'm sure you're not mediocre." I furrowed my brows. "If you've been sewing for years, you probably have a whole variety of skills I don't. What things do you feel you can't do?"
"Oh, I can make a three-piece suit," he said with a dismissive wave, "but that's not what I mean, and I'm not the important one. What's important is you, my dear." He put his hands on my shoulders. "You need to create, and burn off some of the stress I'm sure you're feeling, what with the culture shock of moving to Maywen and trying to acclimate yourself to our unique ways. I'd love you to take advantage of my supplies and machines and let your creativity flow again."
Why was my boss, who barely knew me, so damn invested in my using his sewing machine? "Thanks?" I was still unclear what was happening, despite the fact I could almost hear the machine singing to me, suggesting all manner of wonderful things we could craft together.
Wow, my weird-ass dreams really were starting to get to me if I was at the point where I basically thought a metal contraption could telepathically beam thoughts into my head.
"I'll take that as a yes. Sit down, sit down!" I found myself being placed into the chair in front of the sewing machine, and he gave my shoulders a squeeze. "Don't go anywhere; I'm going to get you some fabric!"
A few minutes later, he returned to find me slowly touching the machine, noting how it was in much better shape than my grandma's old workhouse. "Here we go!" He dropped a stack of bolts of fabrics on the desk and petted them. "I think these will do nicely."
Picking through them, I saw they were of good quality, mostly simple swathes of color, but then I got to the bottom.
There was a black knit bolt with a shimmer to it, and I looked closely to see it had little pieces of gold and green embedded in the weave, unusual for a knit fabric. "Oh my," I breathed, and pulled it out from the stack to look at it closer. Running it through my fingers, I saw it was soft and high-quality, and I wondered what it would feel like next to my skin.
"That's the one, is it?" He nodded. "I thought it might be; I was quite enamored of that myself. Wonderful. You can get started, make whatever you want, dear. You're here until when?"
"Six?" I was utterly baffled. What the hell was going on? But my hand was clutching the fabric as if it didn't want—no, refused—to release it. I needed to make something from this beautiful material, something fabulous and sparkly and special.
"Great! How about we let you sew until one, and then you can have lunch and work for a few hours. How does sound?"
"It sounds weird, that's how. Frank, are you telling me you're going to pay me to sit and sew random shit back here while the others work? Does that really seem fair?" I could only imagine how resentful that would make Amari and Kristen; I was too new to start pissing off my coworkers. I started to stand, pushing against the singing desire in my blood to reconnect with my creative side. "How about I get started some night when I don't have to bartend? We can talk shop and—"
"Sit down."
That had been the closest thing to an order I'd ever heard Frank utter in my admittedly short time working for him. My bum hit the wooden chair with a thud.
"Good! Now you are going to sew, and you're not going to worry about anything else, and Amari
and Kristen are going to be just fine. This is important to me and I don't mind paying you to do it."
"Frank—"
"It's important to me, Veda," he repeated with great emphasis. "Will you humor me? Just a little bit?"
I sighed, giving in and feeling a rush of relief as I did so. Man, I was obviously an idiot to think I could deny my creative side. "I don't know what to make, and don't have a pattern."
"Oh, I'm sure you'll think of something!" I swore my boss was about to burst from excitement at seeing me in front of the machine.
"There you guys are!" Amari stuck his head around the door. "You do know you left the front door open and the store unattended, right? There was no one here, but that can't be the best idea."
Frank waved his hand as if he didn't care if his store was emptied by the time he returned. "Yes, yes, thank you, Amari. By the way, you don't mind if Veda sits in here and does some therapeutic sewing, do you? She needs to unwind and I don't expect today to be very busy."
Amari's eyes widened. "Yeah, of course. Do whatever you need to," he said to me with a shockingly supportive smile. "Kristen and I can handle it."
"Thanks?"
"Right!" With another pet on my shoulder, Frank moved towards the door. "Have fun, my dear!"
The door closed behind him with a click, and I took a deep breath. "Okay, then, this isn't utterly unexpected or strange at all."
A part of my brain was telling me that I needed to question this more, because what was happening was extremely bizarre, and I needed to feel the fabric in my hands, letting its dense fibers talk to me.
That's when I blacked out.
6
When I say blacked out, I mean reality and memory seemed to fully disappear to me. One minute I was staring at fabric, the next, the door was slamming open and I snapped awake to find myself in front of the sewing machine.
"Veda!" it was Kristen, looking frazzled. "I'm so sorry to interrupt, and Frank will kill me when he gets back from running errands, but some teacher brought his whole class to look at paints and it's absolute chaos down there. Amari's manning the register, but—oh."
She looked around the room, stunned, and I followed her gaze and winced.
The little sewing room was absolutely chaos. The bolt I used had been flung on the floor, largely unraveled, and cut pieces were littered on the cutting table. There was a spool of elastic strewn across the table next to me.
Many of the metal drawers were pulled open, and there were machine pieces and other supplies flung all over the place.
Had I turned into some sort of rabid dog? Why didn't I remember anything?
"I'll clean it up," I promised Kristen, deeply embarrassed. My upper body was tired as well, as if my muscles had been hunched up and working for an extended period of time.
"Whatever; show me what you made!" She hurried forward and I blinked down to see I was holding a garment in my hands, one made from the fabric I thought I'd been touching just a moment before. "What is it?"
"Um, it's a, uh..." I lifted it up and held it out in front of me. "A skirt, I guess?" The hem almost touched the floor when I brought it to my waist, and I noted that it had a very winsome swing to its drape. My fingers tingled when I touched the fabric, and I swore there was a purring sound in my mind.
Had there been drugs in my tea? Maybe there were drugs. That's the only thing that could describe this thoroughly bizarre experience.
"That's what it appears to be, yeah." Her nose wrinkled and she looked oddly disappointed. "Is that it?"
"What?" I created a skirt in some sort of fugue state without a pattern and she was disappointed?
Apparently my expression spoke volumes, because she covered her mouth and turned red. "I'm so sorry! It's great! Come down when you have a chance!"
Before I could respond, she had left, her footsteps pounding down the stairs. I was left in the maelstrom of the mess I'd created, clutching this simple, nicely made skirt that I don't even remember designing or thinking about.
And yet despite the utter strangeness of that fact, I was deeply, incredibly proud of myself. I couldn't help but bring it up to my nose for a sniff. "Aren't you beautiful," I cooed to it, and buried my face in the knit fabric.
And then I stopped, because why the hell was I flirting with my skirt? Was I that hard up for a touch of creativity?
Flinging it down on the table, I ran downstairs and saw that Kristen hadn't been lying—the store was utter chaos.
There was a gangly, middle-aged man in the middle of the store yelling at his students and waving his arms joyously like some sort of conductor, telling them what to and not to buy. "Marisa, I told you, you're a watercolor girl, an Aquarius! Be true to yourself and get away from those acrylics!"
In response, the young woman looked startled and dropped the tubes of expensive acrylics on the floor and flitted over to the watercolors, leaving the paints scattered on the ground.
I stood next to Amari. "Dear god."
"I know, right?" He was ringing up a girl with long lavender hair who was buying forty individual color pencils. "Have you considered buying a set?" he asked her. "You'll save money that way."
She sniffed and raised her chin. "Those sets aren't right, and they're not unique. I need colors that reflect me."
"I'm sure you do." I tried not to giggle at his bone-dry tone.
"I'm going out there," I told him, and flung myself into the fray, assisting the students and trying to keep them from putting everything back in the wrong place. "Stop stealing," I chastised one young man who was stuffing pencil sharpeners in his bag, and told a young woman to stop testing the origami paper by opening the packages and folding cranes.
Deciding the best plan of action was to herd them all to the register, I was boxing about four of the students in like errant chickens when I met Kristen in the sketchbook aisle.
"Veda." She put her hand on my arm and stopped me, which unfortunately let my chicken herd escape and scatter to the wind. "I am so sorry about earlier; your skirt is really nice. I wasn't thinking."
Honestly, I'd forgotten all about about her comment. "It's okay," I said distractedly, seeing my little thief inch towards the art markers and thinking it was time for the cops, "although if you'd like to explain to me why all of you seem to think it's such a big deal that I start sewing—"
"Young lady!" a voice boomed next to me, and I turned to see the lanky professor with his wild hair staring at me, unblinking.
"Yes?" I wasn't more than ten, maybe fifteen, years younger than him so I didn't think I quite deserved the 'young lady' honorific.
He swirled his hands around my face before snapping them wide, almost hitting one of his students in the face. "You are made up of stars," he intoned. "Stars! You are the universe, narrowed down into a sharp point of specific talent, and you must keep both yourself and your fountain of fabulous creativity safe or they'll eat you alive, darling. Alive!"
"Who's they?"
He glanced around, as if someone was listening to us other than a wide-eyed Kristen, then leaned in; I smelled pot from his clothes. Maybe Adin was his dealer. "The original ones, you see; the crows and vultures who birthed and became the bats. They tire of stalemate and wish to be the big cheeses around here again. But you won't let that happen, will you?" He was now so close I was bending over backward to get away from him. "Yesssss?"
"You mean, not let crows take over Maywen?" I was so confused.
"Or bats. Maywen should also not be run by the bats." He seemed pleased I'd responded, nodding to himself vigorously. "And be careful around those bat-crow hybrids; they're the most dangerous of them all, especially that watchful colleague of mine."
"Look, sir, I—"
He snapped up straight, as if I hadn't spoken, and twirled his long arms in the air. "Everyone, we are done here! Make your purchases and regroup outside!"
"And stop stealing shit," I said faintly. This man was way too much, and I was very confused.
"Yes, good po
int, good point. Brandon, stop stealing shit! You give all those things in your bag to the nice lady right now!"
The professor swept away to inspect his students' haul, and I was left dumbfounded, standing next to an equally stunned Kristen. She then rushed to the second register to support Amari and I approached the chastised figure of Brandon, who dumped the purloined markers and pencil sharpeners in my hands and rushed outside.
As the last of the students rolled out and we surveyed the damage to the store, the professor stopped at the door and waved at us cheerfully. "Amari, you haven't been updating your Instagram lately; you must not stop feeding the beast we call art. If you do, it shall consume you. Sweet newcomer," this was at me, "heed my words: don't turn your back on the crows!"
As the door bells jangled closed, Amari's shoulders slumped and he shook his head. "Why the college continues to employee that nutball I'll never know. I took a class in undergrad from him and I don't think I ever recovered. He once had us all spend a week on these massive self-portraits, and then at the end had us destroy them in front of the class. We were graded on how creatively we annihilated our work."
"That sounds pretty awesome," Kristen said wistfully. "I'd love a professor like that."
"Yeah, okay, maybe you would, being equally nuts, but it wasn't my jam. We also held séances in order to reach the spirit of our muses, for fuck's sake. Also, he likes to keep tabs on all his former students and make sure we're still creating art, and he's relentless when we take a break. He's utterly fucking exhausting."
I was still rattled by everything he'd told me. First I black out during a sewing session and then some oddball professor starts prattling at me about crows and bats. "Do you guys know what he was talking about with all that animal talk, and being full of stars? What the fuck was that?"
There it was—that glance of 'don't tell her anything' between my coworkers.
"He's just certified insane, that's all. I wouldn't worry about it," Amari said.
That was it. I couldn't take this shit any longer. I brought my open palm down on the counter to smack it and they both jumped. "Don't worry about it? Don't worry about it? First, I lose three hours and can't remember what the hell happened, then some madman tells me to watch for bats and birds, and now you two are lying to me, and I'm supposed to just move on with my day? What the hell is happening around here? Is there some sort of chemical in the water that's messing with my and everybody's brain? Is this all some sort of sick, elaborate plot to drive me crazy? Do we have a really bad gas leak that wipes out consciousness but somehow fucking allows me to use my hands? Why the hell won't any of you talk to me?"