My name is not Stitches, but I would not blame you for thinking so. I’ve worked in the BlandTech statistics department for twenty-one years now and that’s what everyone calls me. “Done already, Stitches?” my coworkers will whistle. “Another perfect report from Stitches!” my managers will cheer. The source of the nickname is two fold.
The first reason is the most obvious; I am a woman of handicraft. I know the basics, of course, replace a button, close a tear, patch a hole, but those feats only impress my coworkers. It’s the creation, not the mending, that I delight in. Pardon my boast, but I know how to crochet, embroider, knit, quilt, and sew with the accuracy of a scientific calculator and the speed of a lightning bolt. Every piece of clothing in my closet is handmade, from my casual pink sweater with the queen anne’s lace collar to my business suit-–black as pitch and softer than silk. For the office Christmas party, I’ve taken it upon myself to knit each and every guest a sweater with a unique design tailored to their personalities. My coworker’s response to my gift depends on their time spent at the company. New hires will wear it at the party to give the impression my gift will not be buried in the trash. Seniors will throw it in the nearest waste bin whether I’m watching or not.
The second reason for my nickname is cleverly concealed behind the first so that new hires can be indoctrinated immediately; I am not a very emotional woman. If something is funny, I exhale. If something is awe-inspiring, I lift my eyebrows. If something is horribly tragic, I lower my eyebrows. I do not adjust my spectacles or twiddle my thumbs or fidget with my curls. The only moment my spine moves from its perfect posture is when I perform my hourly stretches. None of this is personal. I assure you as I have assured my coworkers during my countless social missteps. However, “It’s fine” is a poor response to an apology. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble if they had instead told me, “You have disturbed and insulted me, you mechanical thing! Go away!” Instead, I learned their joke secondhand from behind the water cooler. I was stitched up, they said. I had stitched my mouth shut, my heart shut, my soul shut, and my legs shut. They were not wrong. My feelings had been cut out and patched with leathered apathy long before I came to the company. But what? Was I supposed to humor them with an explanation? No, I decided. I kept my secret, and they kept their joke.
Enough about poor Stitches. This is not a story of her misery. It is a story of January 13th, a Tuesday I believe, when I left work at 5:27 PM. The twenty-seven matters because I left work three minutes early. As such, I had time to observe the evening cityscape. Tina’s Taco Trolly was as alliterative as ever. Its spiced beef is still forever marred by the surrounding stench of gasoline and cannabis. The snow piles were three days old and dirtier than my chai. The store fronts were blinding, the billboards moreso. The lights were so distracting that my heel nearly punctured the disembodied hands on the sidewalk.
Then I realized how odd that sentence was. I stepped back.
Yes, there it was, a pair of human hands without a human: cold, wrinkled and gray.
I knelt down, leaving the clueless crowds to bustle around me.
“Now what are you doing here?”
The fingers twitched. Post-mortem spasms, I wondered, but spasms don’t typically draw letters in the air with their pointer finger. So, letter by letter, I watched the hands “speak”:
“It was our master’s lover. When we texted good night, we typed too slowly. When we held her hand, she called us perverted. When we pulled dollars from his wallet, we pulled far too few. When his lover complained, our master cut us off and swore to find a new pair.”
“What rubbish.” I muttered. I could practically imagine the sort of sassy young gold digger this “master” had fallen for. It left more bile in my throat than the hands did.
But then…the hands looked so cold and lonesome. It wasn’t their fault their master was a fool.
It took me one glance to determine their measurements, two seconds to fish my knitting needles and a ball of yarn from my tote, and three minutes to craft a scarlet pair of gloves.
When I tugged the gloves over their wrist, the hands began spelling: T-H-A-N-
“Never mind that.” I said. “Just move along before you’re flattened.”
Thus, I went right on my way without a single glance over my shoulder. If I had, I might have seen the hands rising up on their newly-gloved fingertips and scuttling just behind me.
On I went for about five more minutes.
When I passed the entrance to the Downbright Mall, I noticed a gang of adolescents surrounding the central fountain. No cigarettes, no public displays of affection, just a group of semi-concerned trendsetters watching as one of them prodded the water with a selfie stick.
It is not my nature to mettle in nonsense, but I found myself walking over regardless. I had a hunch–in my head, not my posture–and I was correct.
Lurking in the depths of the marble fountain was a massive brain: cold, lumpy, and gray.
I stepped right up to the ledge, slapped away the selfie stick, and plunged my hands into the water. My fingers burned cold. The adolescents shrieked and ran to loiter elsewhere. I was left with a slimy blob of neurons, twisted like the cords behind a computer.
“Now how did you get in there?” I asked, ignoring my oncoming frostbite as the brain pulsed in my hands. Its thoughts were direct, jumping straight into my own brain, with the following narrative:
“I dreamed of apartments together, of white rose weddings, of children by the twos and threes, and of long nights in rocking chairs. When I urged my master to share his dreams, his lover called him selfish. How dare he not ask for her dreams first! He must be out of his mind! So my master threw me away and swore to find a better one.”
“Pitiful.” Whether I muttered about the lover or the master, I was not sure. The master was too quick, too brutish, too wild, but…why didn’t the lover try to listen?
Had she been afraid as I had? Or was she merely cruel?
Either way, it was not the brain’s thought. The brain was made for fantasy; it was only doing its job.
After I dried both my hands and the brain with tissues, I set my needles to work. This time, I left the brain with a very fluffy turquoise hat with a matching pom pom at its tip.
“Stay out of the water. You’ll get a brain freeze.” I thought faster than the brain could thank me. Away I went, with the hands still crawling behind me…and a gooshing brain rolling along behind the hands.
Just like cursed clockwork, I found myself stopping again. This time I passed a dark alley between a Rock-and-Roll Museum and the Hard Place Pub. A little black mutt was barking with a vengeance at something.
I looked. I didn’t know what it was. A rounded beanbag? Made of flesh, stitched with nerves? And giraffe horns? Pasta pipes? Tubes?
Then I remembered my high school Biology class.
The dog was barking at a human heart: cold, bloody, and gray.
With scrap of leftover lunch jerky and a firm nudge from my heel, the mutt was dealt with.
“And what are you doing in an alleyway?”
Ka-thump! Ka-thump! Ka-thump! The heart pulsed, dripping blood from its gray pipes. Its words were inside the beats. This is what it said:
“I never forgot the others: the blond who bled him dry, the freckled who spoke without care, the pierced who felt very little. Most of all, I remembered the very first, whose gift he always kept hanging in his closet. When my master’s lover found it, she screamed and cursed and threatened to cut out his heart for its treachery. My master beat her to it. He hurled me out the window and swore to find a better one.”
“A lovesick fool.” I hissed. Imagine being with so many women and having so little care for any of them! The hypocrisy tasted bitter. Even I had not forgotten my first, my last, my only love.
The heart wants what the heart wants, I thought, and right now it wants to be warm. I knitted an amber scarf with burgundy stripes and braided tassels. The heart beat faster as I wrapped the scarf around it. I paid it no mind, not even when I wiped the blood from my fingers.
“Stay away from strays.” I warned, returning to my route. The hands still crawled, the brain still rolled, and now the heart slid itself along with the help of a slippery blood spill.
The rule of three would have the story end right here.
Sadly, my life has never been so tidy.
On every leg of my walk home, I found some new body part as cold and gray as the last. Every time I did, I stopped to listen and knit something to shield it against the winter winds.
For a pair of ears, lavender earmuffs.
For a loose hip, a braided black belt.
For a pair of feet, tangerine socks.
For a drippy nose, a snowy white muffler.
By the time I’d reached my apartment door, my sewing bag was empty and my brain was full of thoughts. I pulled the key from my bag, unlocked the door, stepped inside, and–
Finally saw the parade of well-dressed body parts that had followed me home.
I felt a migraine coming on.
“Do you…need something?”
They all answered at once–throbbing, pulsing, twitching, squirming, snapping, thumping, clicking–and they all asked the same thing.
“Let us do something to thank you!”
My insides curdled. It was just like something he’d have said.
…
A tear snuck behind my glasses. It was exactly like something he’d have said.
…
“Come inside before you freeze. I’ll tell you how you can thank me.”
I closed the door behind them, made sure the bloodier ones didn't leave stains on my carpet. Then I reached into my sewing bag for the only thing left.
A black spool of thread and a needle.
I set them on the ground. The body parts waited.
“You can thank me by helping yourself.” I said. “I’ve never cared for mending things, but I can tell you what stitch to use.”
The body parts considered my tools.
Then scarlet-gloved hands reached for the needle and thread. The brain pulsed. The heart beat. The rest of the body agreed.
We all set to work.
Toes to feet, feet to shins, shins to thighs, thighs to waste: I showed them how to use the backstitch, the strongest stitch there was.
Hands to arms, arms to chest, thighs to chest, chest to neck: About halfway through we stopped for coffee, though only the tongue and I seemed interested.
Neck to chin, chin to cheeks, cheeks to ears, ears to skull: The organs all tucked themselves into the cavity before sealing the whole thing shut with a ladder stitch.
And there he was, the so-called Master, standing in my living room dressed in the rainbow of knit things I’d made for him.
Not that I’d known it was him.
“...hello Emalyn.” He said.
“Cedric.” I said.
“It’s been a long time.” He said.
“Yes.” I said.
Then we said nothing.
“I missed you.” He said.
“Is that why you were with so many other women?”
“...yes.” He hung his head. “It was.”
I tapped my finger on the bar counter.
“I…I kept wanting it to be you.” He said. “When I texted “Good Morning”, I always wished it was your number. When I held their hands, I kept thinking they were yours. I did everything I could to keep my mouth shut and their wishes granted because I didn’t do it for you. I tried until it hurt. Until I tore myself apart.”
“If you didn’t love them, you shouldn’t have been with them.” I worried I might stain the carpet myself with how hot my blood was boiling. “You shouldn’t have loved anyone if you weren’t absolutely sure. You should have given up on all that lovestruck nonsense all together.”
“Is that what you did?”
I bit my lip. I blinked back another tear. The patch on my feelings was coming undone. I should have used a backstitch.
“Emalyn…” He held my hands in the gloves I’d made him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for pushing so hard. I’m sorry for not understanding you.”
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry.” I gulped. “If you’re sorry, I’d have to be sorry too, and I don’t want to be. We were both young, foolish, too immature to have been in love at all. It’s nothing personal.”
“Can we…” His voice ran dry.
I pulled back the scarlet gloves to see the messy black stitches underneath. It wasn’t perfect sewing, but I wasn’t a perfect teacher either.
“Cedric,” A few seams ripped on my patched-up feelings. “Would you like to get some coffee? Catch up on old times?”
“...didn’t we just take a coffee break?”
“Dinner then. And we’ll each pay our own way. We’re adults, after all.”
Cedric's smile was just as bright as it had always been.
We had dinner that night. We had breakfast a few days later. We had lunch after that. And lots of dirty chai. Every time we met, he came dressed head to toe in the rainbow of knitting I’d made for him. The only exception was Christmas. For Christmas, he arrived in the heart-patterned sweater I’d knitted for him all those years ago, back when we’d met, fell in love, fell apart, and believed that nothing would ever bring us back together. What a childish thought.
There’s nothing in this world that a few stitches can’t fix.