"Whoa!" she exclaimed as she passed through the door, taking off her sunglasses to stare at the boxes blockading the hallway.
"Yup," said Clara proudly. She felt deliciously official in her brand-new Captain Werewolf apron, impulse-bought from a fan site on Etsy. "It's a real place of business now."
"So this is what three hundred balls of yarn look like all packaged up?"
"More like two thousand," said Clara. "Since everyone paid up front, I was able to make the minimum for an opening order with a really cool wholesaler. This is all six installments, minus what I've already been working on. Also, they're not balled up already. I sell them like this — it's called a skein, or a hank." She held up her test sample. "It's one of your roseate spoonbills. You like?"
Danielle squished the multi-layered riot of pinks and hints of blue. "This is such a neat experience for me," she marveled. "Yeah, I really like this one! Really does the flat-nose flamingoes justice."
"Wait, what?"
"Oh, I was just being a dick to this guy. He wasn't from here, so I started making stuff up. I told him what they really were, eventually, but he believed me at first!"
Clara shook her head, grinning. "So what I could really use your help with is tying off these skeins." She lifted an off-white, undyed hank from an open box on the table. "The company ships them to me tied off too tightly to dye evenly. I need you to cut their tie and use this scrap yarn to tie a new, looser tie, maybe four per hank. This is how you undo them." She unwound the skein into a huge loop about a yard across. "Be super careful because when they're like this, if they're not tied up, they'll basically explode if you look at them funny."
"That's almost a that's-what-she-said, but it doesn't quite... nah. Nope. Turpentine." Danielle motioned as if she were scrubbing away her own bad joke from a canvas. Then she sat down and got to work.
In the nearby kitchen, Clara stuck her gloved hands into a pair of oven mitts and lifted an aluminum tray of dye, water, and yarn out of the oven. She set it on the counter next to a line of similar trays to cool. "Thanks so much for coming to help me out. I really appreciate it."
"Nah, this is my idea of fun. I could use the distraction, and I love learning about new ways to make art."
"Sorry I didn't give you something more creative to do!"
"Oh, shoot, I don't care!" Danielle snipped and tied happily in her corner. "Sometimes it's nice to just follow the directions. I'm glad you're making all the color decisions and I have no responsibility here. Just... glide."
"Tie knots and look pretty," Clara retorted, adrenaline swelling in her chest for following through with an Actual Flirt.
"So much pressure," Danielle barked in a mock-pout. "Hey, are you making pickles in there, too?"
"That's the yarn. I had to soak them in vinegar to set the dye."
"I suppose I will somehow live... without a pickle..."
"There's probably still half a jar in the fridge from when my grandparents still lived here, whenever you want to take a break," said Clara.
"Oh, this was their house?" Snip, tie. Snip, tie.
"Yeah, but when my grandma died, my parents moved Zayde in with them because he's got, like, stuff going on and couldn't live alone. So my sister and I moved in."
"You guys get along?"
"Yeah, pretty much." Clara poured the water out of an already cool tray carefully down the drain, rinsing the skeins to make sure the water ran clear. "Much better than when we were kids. We were both pretty annoying. She was really into metal, and I kept blasting, like, Les Miz on full volume."
"Musicals seem to be moving in a direction that would make you both happy," Danielle observed. “More electric guitars and rock drums?”
"Yeah, I know what you mean. Whoops!" The Phantom wove in and out of Clara's legs, and she made sure not to do anything with pigment or large pans of water until he'd finished.
Then he trotted over to inspect Danielle. She held out her knuckles for him to sniff. "I'm guessing this isn't your sister shifted into a cat, right?"
Clara grinned. "That's The Phantom. Like Phantom of the Opera, because of the tuxedo coloring and white face."
"Oh, my God, that's perfect," Danielle gushed. "You should sneak him into a church and get a picture of him walking on the organ."
"Or swinging on a chandelier." Clara swung the skein she was holding as if to illustrate, sloshing water on the floor.
"And absolutely nobody will get us arrested for this."
"Well," Clara began boldly, "not if you paint it..."
Danielle snipped and tied, snipped and tied. "I haven't actually painted in a while."
"Oh, yeah?" Clara noted that the air felt a little heavy suddenly.
"Stuff."
Clara didn't know what to say, but she also knew not every silence had to be filled. Sometimes the white spots, those left undyed and natural, were integral to the beauty of a colorway.
"I did some more pencil studies of Cinnamon and Wolfie last night, but it was just more fandom garbage," Danielle continued.
A noise at the door heralded Jasmine's arrival. She threw her purse into the couch, calling, "Hello, new person."
"Danielle, this is my sister Jasmine," Clara called from the kitchen.
"Hey," said Danielle.
"What are we doing? Still tying loops?" Jasmine floated around the kitchen, only half seriously looking for snacks before finding a water bottle.
"If you can stand more of this and you're not too tired from work," said Clara.
Jasmine waved the idea away and sat down at the table. "Whatever. I'm not standing up or getting yelled at by tourists."
"Where do you work?" asked Danielle.
"OasisLand," said Jasmine. "Get this — today someone wanted to know if the animatronic dinosaurs were real."
Clara was speechless for a moment before exclaiming "Well, they're real robots!"
"Seriously, next time someone asks me that I'm going to tell them I'm not real." Jasmine guzzled water before joining Danielle in the land of snipping and tying.
Clara held up a mason jar. Unsurprisingly, given the subject of the painting, she was running low on one of the two different pinks she was using. Time to mix more.
She opened the jar marked "Flamingo Pink," smirking as it made her remember Danielle's quirky misnomer. It didn't look pink at all in powdered form — more brown. She reached for a measuring spoon, but at just that moment, she seized up and sneezed.
Straight into the jar.
An explosion of fine pigmented dust scattered across the room. "Shit!" Clara put the jar and the spoon down carefully and then stood frozen, her eyes screwed shut.
"What happened?" called Jasmine from the other room.
Clara heard footsteps and then Danielle's voice, nearby. "Where are your towels?"
"The scrap ones are over there." Clara pointed. Then she felt the soft slide of fur against her ankle. "Oh, my God! Grab the cat."
Danielle started to laugh. "Phantom, huh? More like Sweeney Todd."
Clara took the towel from Danielle and wiped off her face carefully, then opened her eyes. The Phantom was struggling in Danielle's clumsy grasp, much of his white fur streaked with brilliant reddish pink. "I need to wash his feet." She tried not to think about the mess on the floor or the countertops. "Otherwise he'll get it all over the house or lick it off or—"
"Shh, we're cool. We got this." Danielle carried the cat to the kitchen sink. He squirmed all the way like a basket of snakes. "Can you turn on the faucet?"
Clara did, but it took both of them and several towels to subdue the poor creature as they scrubbed the pink out of his little white socks. Naturally, he shook a lot in the process.
Jasmine showed up just as the fun was ending, to check things out. By this point, The Phantom's wriggling shenanigans had spread a fine mist of pink droplets over all the flat surfaces near the sink, including the backsplash. "Oh, wow, pinkmageddon."
"Pinktastrophe," Danielle added.
"T
he Pinkening," Clara piped up.
"At night, all cats are gray," said Danielle in a voice that sounded like a movie trailer announcer, "but by day, the pink stands out."
"I think if this had ever happened to the actual Phantom of the Opera I'd have liked the show better," Jasmine observed as she resumed her post at the table.
The cat himself licked the sink water from his fur indignantly, but at least it wasn't pink dye.
Clara exhaled deeply. "Okay. It's not on any of the yarn, so we're good. This is just... a thing that happened."
"An adventure!" said Danielle.
❀
Clara's regular knit and crochet night was at one of the local LGBT centers every alternating Thursday. Sandwiched between a Tae Kwon Do studio and a pizzeria that had changed names three times since Clara was in high school, the center stood as a humble gathering place in tropical suburbia.
"Today in parasitology—" began Marisol, while freeing a strand of black hair that had formerly been hers from her knitting project.
"That's what the Marisol doll says when you press the button on the back of her neck," quipped Tae, her girlfriend.
"Hey, it's not my fault the damn class is so interesting!"
"I like your stories! You should, like, knit a tapeworm," said Aren, the nonbinary high-school kid. This week, their hair was hot pink, with an undercut. "Can't they get like fifty feet long?"
"Mmm," said Ritchie, in his best size queen voice with a smirk to match.
"Okay, ew," said Tae.
Clara sat comfortably in the old leather sofa, donated by somebody's estate, and just listened to the banter.
"If you stopped eating meat we wouldn't have to worry about any of this," pointed out Becca as she paused in her knitting to lay her hand on her pregnant belly for a moment. "Oof."
"Actually, that's not true—" Marisol began calmly, before being interrupted by a jangle at the door.
A willowy trans girl in cobalt blue hipster glasses was letting herself in while juggling Starbucks, her project bag, and a pair of inline skates. "Hey, everyone!"
"A Wild Lindsay Appears!" called Tae.
Clara waved from the sofa, and Lindsay plopped down next to her. "Congratulations! How's the sock club going so far?"
"Well, I think I'm gonna be okay..." Clara grinned uneasily. "I mean, I'm not getting as much sleep as I should, but I've got a ton of the first month dyed already. Jasmine's helping. And Danielle. Hey, if any of you want to come over and help, I can pay."
"What about volunteer hours? For scholarships?" asked Aren hopefully.
"Um," said Clara. "Let me look at the guidelines for your scholarship and I'll find a way to make it work."
"Is this the first month?" Lindsay fondled the fingerless mitten growing from Clara's needles, and Clara nodded. "It's gorgeous! I'm so glad I got my spot right when you posted instead of putting it off."
"Thanks!"
"Yeah, it's really a knockout. People will be talking about that," Tae agreed.
"I hope they say mostly good things," said Clara. "I've already gotten some weird messages, like from someone who tried to get a spot the first night but her card was declined and when she got it fixed I'd already closed it. And a couple people in the club are asking for coordinating solids for all the heels and toes, not just when I feel like it, and that's not what my plan was."
"It's all about boundaries," said Marilyn, a fat, middle-aged trans woman wearing a flowing hippie skirt and a black teeshirt where the slogan “Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death” was punctuated by Keith Haring art in white. "I've been selling these canes longer than some of you've been alive, and I could tell you some stories.” She gestured with her own cane, which was handpainted to look like a rattlesnake. “Customer wants it 'more green, like a shark.' Customer wants me to sign a waiver that I'll never make another one exactly like it. Customer wants me to put a goddamn blade inside. How does that saying go? No is a complete sentence?"
Clara nodded. "You're totally right. I'm trying my best." Marilyn was the oldest one among them and could be counted on to have something wise to say whether the topic be queer liberation or a particularly thorny instruction in a knitting pattern.
"Give them an inch," said Marilyn gravely, thumping her cane on the ground, "and they'll take Broward Boulevard."
"And get stuck in traffic," Tae quipped.
"A Christmas shark could be green," said Ritchie.
Everybody looked at him, dumbfounded by the non-sequitur. Tae spoke for the room. "The fuck is a Christmas shark?"
"Maybe if it had algae growing on its scales," Marisol suggested helpfully. "Actually, there's a microscopic organism that produces chlorophyll and swims—it's called Euglena."
"Are any of your yarns going to be green?" asked Aren.
"I can't tell," Clara giggled. "That'll spoil the surprise! But if you really wanted to, you could cheat and look at Danielle's website."
"Who's Danielle?"
"Danielle Solomon, the artist whose paintings I based this round of club on," said Clara.
"I love her stuff," Lindsay gushed. "I'm so glad you found her gallery! She makes me want to go hiking. Like a beach hike."
"She's been drawing me fandom art, too," said Clara, getting out her phone. "Wanna see?"
The sketch of Cinnamon Blade had shown up in the early dark hours, so that it was the first thing Clara saw when she dismissed her alarm. Dressed in the black Captain Werewolf costume instead of her silver catsuit, Blade stood on a cliff overlooking the ocean with her red hair unfurled in the wind. Clara was magnetized by the expression on her face — it wasn't so much a frown as a look of resigned disappointment and deep, deep pain.
Despite this, the picture still bore an overall message of strength.
In Soviet Russia, insomnia can't sleep YOU was Danielle's only garbled caption.
"Whoa, that's intense," Lindsay breathed.
Aren scampered over to see. "Is that Cinnamon Blade? Is that if Captain Werewolf died?"
"Danielle said it was for an AU where he betrayed the team and she had to take over," Clara explained.
"Whoa," said Aren. "I don't really read stuff that dark."
"Me, either, but I still like the picture." Clara's stomach felt vaguely queasy at the idea of Captain Werewolf doing anything like that
"She has a lot of talent," said Marilyn, glancing at the picture as Aren passed her the phone.
"I am ridiculously lucky to be working with her," Clara agreed. "She's the reason I sold so many. I had no idea, but her uncle is Snowplow Solomon and he retweeted my ad while I was asleep."
Ritchie suddenly sat upright in his chair, shifting his bulk forward. "Wait, Snowplow Solomon's Danielle's uncle? As in David Solomon the comedian?"
"Yeah, that's why I'm working overtime. Triple overtime. Wait, what's wrong?"
Ritchie bit his lip and furrowed his brow. "She okay?"
It was the last thing Clara was expecting him to say. "Yeah? I think so? What are you talking about?"
Ritchie's glance flitted around the room as if he were looking to the others for cues. "Um. I saw a thing on a Facebook trending."
"I wish I could turn that off," Marilyn grumbled.
"I'll show you later," said Aren.
Clara felt a little sick. "Did he die today or something?" she asked cautiously.
"No, no, nothing like that." Ritchie put up one hand. "You know what? It's none of my business. But—Danielle might could use some... support. Or something." He paused. "You can look it up if you want but there's no reason it needs to come from me."
Clara wanted to shrink into herself. Was Danielle ill? Like, seriously ill? Well, she'd do her best to be whatever that meant Danielle needed.
Sinking lower into the cushy sofa, Clara remembered Danielle's response to her reaction to the picture. It helped me last night when I couldn't get to sleep.
Couldn't get to sleep...
❀
Clara wound yarn on autopilot, the swif
t beside her spinning in pink delirium. The burning in her arm muscle only partially distracted her from sentences that had become her constant inner dialogue — what was in the news about Danielle's uncle? If he hadn't died, why would Danielle need support?
And, more cogently, what would it mean if Clara peeked?
Well, it was obviously something a lot of other people knew, so maybe it wasn't that big of an evil to just simply find out. Clara picked up her phone and loaded Facebook, then closed the tab. No. This felt incredibly tacky. Friends didn't find out about friends' life crises from the news. It was only her business if Danielle wanted to make it her business.
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