Stitchery

Devon Monk

Devon Monk (www.sff.net/campbell-awards/98auth.htm# Monk) lives in Salem, Oregon, with her husband and two sons, in what she describes as “a fourth-generation home, where the walls are reputed to be elastic and the back door is never closed.” Her stories have appeared in Altair, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Odyssey, Pulp Eternity, and MZB’s Sword and Sorceress Anthology. She also writes a column and essays for a national fishing and hunting magazine. She is a member of the Next Wave Writers’ Collective, along with fellow writers Charlene Brusso, Lynn Flewelling, James Hartley, and Jason Tanner.

“Stitchery” appeared in Black Gate, the ambitious new genre fantasy magazine (subtitled Adventures in Fantasy Literature) in its second year of publication. This surreal tale is a really fantastic fantasy story, wild and outside, and worth comparing to the work of R.A. Lafferty. It’s in the SF & fantasy tradition of stories about rural families with special talents, exploited by everyone from Ray Bradbury to Zenna Henderson in the last half-century or so. It’s about families, love, and caring for others, about everyday heroism.

Stitchery

Tilly shaded her eyes with her hand and peered over at the house. The grandma was sitting on the second-story window ledge, one bare foot rocking in the wind. Tilly had told her spring was a time of pastels and pinks, of fresh new things, but the grandma never paid her any mind. An endless trail of knitting spilled from her needles to the porch roof below, red as Christmas berries and as cheerfully out of season as the old girl herself.

Tilly sighed. Ever since she’d found the grandma at the DMV, knitting up all the wasted time folks left behind, she’d wondered what to do with her. The DMV people had wanted to send her to an old folks home, but Tilly had stepped in and taken the grandma home instead. Anyone who had the patience to catch up loose seconds and save them for later deserved to be looked after, as far as Tilly was concerned, even if the old girl wasn’t in her right mind most of the time.

But then, most of Tilly’s good intentions made for bad decisions. She shook her head and caught sight of her own hand held up to the sun. Patchwork scars deep in her flesh showed like a crazy-work of seams beneath her skin. Ned never liked to look at her hand when she put a light behind it, and Tilly didn’t blame him. Normal folks stayed away from stitchery like her. As long as she didn’t talk to Ned about stitching, they got along fine. She liked having him around, enough that she was pretty sure she’d fallen in love with the man, even if she’d never come out and told him so.

The beast beside her shifted and groaned, golden hooves sinking into the soft soil. Tilly looked down and tightened her grip on its halter.

“Ned!” she hollered. “I need your help with the beast.” She stroked the poor thing’s neck and squinted at Ned’s boots, which stuck out from under the old gray Chevy in front of the house. The grandma, two stories up, hummed and knitted.

The beast lowered its head. Tilly stepped back. She’d secured half a tennis ball over its forehead nub with duct tape that wrapped around its jaw, but she wasn’t stupid enough to get in the way of the beast’s head. She’d seen it root up anthills and such with that nub. Didn’t matter it was broke, it still worked.

Clouds stretched across the sky, fizzled away and still Ned didn’t come out from under the truck. “Damn,” she whispered. She patted the beast’s neck a couple times and wondered what its coat really felt like. Ned had described it to her once, his hands being the ones he was born with and still full of feeling. He’d said the beast’s coat was as soft and silky as her copper-brown hair. Tilly smiled at the memory. That man had a way with words.

“Ned! Now, ya hear?”

“Yes dear,” the grandma called back.

“Not you, Granny. Ned.”

“Really? I’m not sleepy. But if you say so.”

Tilly caught sight of her easing back in through the window, then watched as she pulled the knitted scarf up and up like a red tongue. Tilly figured the grandma was making to come down to her.

“No. You stay there!”

And of course, that’s when Ned decided to scoot himself out from under the truck and show his heads.

“Make up your mind,” Right Ned called out to her. Left Ned just grinned that hard grin of his around a strand of grass in his teeth.

These were the kind of moments when she wished she’d never stopped work on that heat-seeking dung thrower.

Tilly took a nice deep lungful of pollen-laden air, sneezed and let go of the beast’s halter while she wiped oil from her eyes. She hated her tears. Unlike Ned’s, or the grandma’s, hers were oily and smelled like hot sulfur. If she didn’t scrub them off right away, they left streaks down her freckled cheeks.

Once Tilly could see straight again, she noticed the poor beast was even lower to the ground.

She cleared her throat and put some volume in her voice. “Ned, get over here, both of you! And Granny, you stay right where you are. Just keep knitting. You’re doing fine.”

The grandma poked her head out the window. A teasing wind lifted the white tendrils of her hair like dandelion down riding a child’s wish. She waved one hand, bracelets clinking. “I’ll be right there.”

Tilly sighed. Best intentions and all that.

Ned walked over to where she and the beast stood under the apple tree. He was wearing his clean overalls today, which meant he wasn’t thinking to get any real work done. Time to put another thought in those heads of his, she thought.

“Ned, you know you’re my boyfriend, and I like you plenty, right?”

Right Ned nodded. “I reckon, Tilly,” he said in that shy soft way that made her wish she’d rubbed off the stains beneath her eyes.

“Then you know that sometimes I need help with things around the property.”

Left Ned must have known where she was going, ‘cause he made that here-we-go-again look.

Tilly ignored him.

“The beast is looking pretty poor and I’m not sure what it needs. My hands don’t work much for this, but yours should. Would you try and figure out what it wants?”

“Tilly,” Right Ned said, “you know I gave up mingling with creatures when I gave up chew last winter.”

“I know. And I know what it is, me asking this of you. But touching a mind isn’t as addicting as chew, is it? And you kicked that habit, right? I mean, I wouldn’t ask you to do it, but I just don’t have any ideas left.”

As if she’d told it to do so, the beast dropped and lay on its side. It stretched its neck out and rolled its eyes, each breath an effort.

Right Ned sighed, but Left Ned said, “You know I hate this, Til. You know I can’t ever do it just once.”

She looked down at the beast to avoid Left Ned’s gaze. “If you have to, you could always mingle with me, Ned.” She waited a moment, but there wasn’t nothing but the sound of the beast’s labored breathing. Tilly felt heat pulse out from the center of her cheeks and she swore inwardly. No matter how hard she tried, she just never seemed to handle things right. Ned and she were lovers, but he never touched her mind, not even when he was in the fever grip of passion. She hadn’t asked him why, but figured it was her patchwork nature he took a dislike to. She swallowed once and tried again. “I mean if you’d want that.”

“Tilly,” Right Ned said, his voice soft.

“For the beast,” Tilly cut in. Mingling was his business, and if he preferred animal minds, then that’s the way it’d be. But there was no reason he should refuse to help the beast. “Please, Ned?”

Right Ned looked down at the beast with something like sympathy in his eyes. Left Ned just glared at Tilly hard and long.

Sometimes, Tilly thought, that man was a real pain.

“Just to see what it wants,” Right Ned said.

Tilly nodded and Ned kneeled down. He held his hands above the beast’s dirty white flanks.

Tilly watched, like she used to way back in his circus days, while Ned finally got his heads together, closed both sets of eyes and placed his palms on the once snowy-white side of the beast. Ned stiffened. He lifted up off of his heels a bit, then his whole body slumped.

Tilly bit her lip and waited. She knew it’d been a long time since he’d done this, and she hoped she was right about him not getting stuck mind-to-mind cozy with the ailing beast.

That’s what had ended his days in the circus. He’d mingled with the ringmaster’s daughter, and made her scream. The girl accused him of being dirty, illegal, patchwork, but Tilly knew none of that was true. When Ned was born, his mama didn’t let doctors change the way he looked. Ned, all both of him, was more natural than most folks, certainly more than Tilly.

Ned still didn’t move. His heads were bent so low, if she caught him from a side-view, she’d think he only had one head. His shoulders were hunched, soul-sensing fingers spread wide and palm-tight against the beast.

“Too hard,” both Neds said, and Tilly shivered despite the warm air. When those boys worked in unison, it gave her the creeps.

The beast grunted, but it seemed each breath took just a little longer getting to.

“Warm, sunlit fields and soft, untouched laps. Home.” Right Ned looked up at her, tears caught on his girl-pretty lashes. “Tilly, the beast wants to die.”

“No,” she said shaking her head. This had been the first beast she’d taken in, back when Mother and Father had left her to tend the property and all the souls within. It couldn’t be old enough to die. “You’re wrong, Ned,” she said.

But Right Ned had closed his eyes again, bent toward the beast like his ears were in his palms.

Left Ned stared at her. She knew that look. It was the same one he used when the Sheriff had tried to take him to the medical research center back when he was just a little boy.

“You check again,” she said. “Tell it we fenced the back field and the grass is plenty sweet, sweeter than those crazy dreams it’s having. Tell it there’s no reason to die.”

“There’s no time left for it, Til,” Left Ned said. “Belly-wailing isn’t gonna change anything.”

She scowled, torn between trying to decide if she should take the beast to a doctor in town, or try to fix it herself. Then she heard the steady click, click of knitting needles coming closer. The grandma shuffled up to them, wearing a pale yellow nightgown and a pair of Tilly’s black panties underneath. She knitted and looped, her huge black bag hanging from the crook of her arm. The yarn coming out of the bag was white now, instead of red.

Tilly gave Left Ned a look to let him know this wasn’t done yet then turned to the grandma.

“Granny, why you coming down here? I told you it was okay to keep knitting back at the house.”

“Yes, dear. But there’s no time left, so I thought I’d come down. It’s going to rain, you know.”

Tilly glanced up at the sky. The sun was so hot, it’d practically burned a hole in the blue. Weren’t a chance clouds could gather on a day like this.

“Sure thing, Granny,” Tilly said gently. “You go on back to the house now. Don’t want you to get wet.”

She nodded. “So sweet,” she said.

The beast groaned and Tilly spun on Ned.

“What did you do? You better not tell it to die, Ned, or so help me I’ll give you headaches you’ll never forget.”

“Oh,” the grandma said. “Maybe a little more time then?” She stopped knitting and began unraveling the string on the scarf, starting on the red side, farthest away from the loops of white thread on the needles. As she pulled, the yarn disappeared, melting before it even hit the ground. The beast took a couple nice, clear breaths, and moved its head a bit.

“Tilly, let it go,” Right Ned said. “This fellow is old. It’s his time to die.”

“You’re just being pigheaded, Til,” Left Ned said.

Right Ned cleared his throat and Tilly knew he’d been thinking the same thing, just hadn’t had the guts to say it.

The grandma hummed and pulled thread.

“It’s not going to die,” Tilly said.

“Tilly,” said Right Ned, “it doesn’t want to live anymore.”

“I don’t care what it wants,” Tilly said, trying to keep the sound of tears out of her voice. “I’m going to take it into town to the doctor. You tell it to hold on. Spring isn’t no time for dying.”

“No time,” the grandma agreed.

Granny stopped pulling on her yarn and right that second, the beast stopped breathing.

Under the apple tree got real quiet all of a sudden. Tilly glanced at the beast, lying still, its eyes fogged over and rolled up at that hard hot sun. Then she glanced at Ned. He looked white too, deathly white. That’s when she remembered he still had his hands and probably his mind on the beast.

Damn. She took a couple big steps forward and pushed Ned hard. He tipped over onto the back of his nice clean overalls. He was stiff, his arms stuck up in the air, hands flat against the wind.

“Breathe, Ned,” she said, as she moved around to touch his face with her fingers. “Both of you.”

Ned breathed. He shuddered once and Left Ned moaned softly, then clamped his mouth hard.

Right Ned wiped tears from his eyes. “Holy, Tilly, that hurts, you know.”

“Well you should have taken your hands off the beast before,” and right there she just couldn’t say anymore. The beast was dead, poor thing, and it was her fault. If she would have made up her mind faster, if she would have just taken it down to the doctor the moment she knew it was ill, it would still be alive. Tilly looked down at the pitiful collection of hide and bone and a hard hand of grief closed her throat.

Tears slipped down her face. She should have done something, anything, to save it.

The grandma tottered over to her, her huge knitting bag swinging on her elbow. She shushed Tilly and patted her arm with a paper-dry hand. “There, now, sweetness,” she crooned. “There just wasn’t any time left for it.”

“Sure, Granny,” Tilly whispered, eyeing the seven feet of red knitting that trailed from her bag. Seemed like there was plenty of time if the grandma had wanted to give it up. But Tilly didn’t say anymore. That time was the grandma’s to keep or give.

The grandma brightened. “Who wants some hot cocoa?” She took up the needles and pulled a handful of white thread from the bag. Loop, tuck, remove, she knitted her way slowly back to the house.

Tilly leaned against the trunk of the apple tree.

“I’m real sorry, Tilly,” Right Ned said.

“It was my fault,” Tilly said. “I didn’t do the right thing. I didn’t do anything. I killed it.”

Left Ned said, “Shee-it,” and spat.

“Tilly, you know better,” Right Ned said gently. “Everything dies.”

Ned came over and stood close by her, his arm wrapped over her shoulders. He was warm and strong and it felt real good to be comforted by him right then, though Tilly wouldn’t have asked him to do it. She supposed that was one of the things she liked about him. He always seemed to know the right thing to do.

The wind picked up and a flock of starlings threw shadows against the ground. Tilly knew she had to fix what she’d done wrong. She pulled away from Ned and shivered as wind cooled the sweat down her back.

“I need you to go into town and get some pigs for the lizard. Would you do that for me, Ned?”

“Sure, Tilly, but…”

“But nothing,” she said, maybe a little too fast. She smiled. “I’m fine, really. I’ve just got some burying to do.”

Ned stood, and for a moment, both heads stared at her hard. She stared back at him.

“You did all you could, Tilly,” Right Ned said.

Tilly nodded.

Ned turned and walked to the house. Tilly watched him swing into the battered Chevy. It wasn’t until he had wrestled the truck down the road and around the bend that she looked at the beast again.

“But this mistake I can fix,” she said.

The beast didn’t reply, which was good considering the state it was in.

Tilly rolled up the sleeves of her cotton shirt. She picked up the beast and carried it to Father’s workshop.

The workshop was away from the house a bit—down on the creek bank and so covered in brambles, not a brick or window showed through. Tilly was sweating pretty hard by the time she reached the door. She shifted the beast’s weight, leaned back and stuck her fingers through bramble runners to catch and lift the wooden latch. Thorns scratched her hands, deep enough to be painful. She pushed the door open and stepped in.

It was cool and damp here, and smelled like earth, and river and sharp antiseptics. The shop was about the size of a double-wide horse stall, but instead of hay on the ground, there was concrete. A tall wide table took up most of the middle of the room and drawers lined the walls.

Tilly laid the beast on the table, then flipped the switch by the door. Lights powered by the water wheel up-creek snapped, clicked, then flickered on. Father told her it wasn’t right to run the workshop on the house’s electricity. He said all the power needed to do stitchery was in the river itself.

Tilly rubbed her hands on her jeans and saw the long scratches on her fingers. Blood seeped out, just enough to make sure the cuts were clean. Then hot pain flashed across her fingers. She breathed out real hard a couple times and tipped her palms to the light. The cuts were gone.

She was glad Ned wasn’t here to see that.

“Awfully dark in here, dear.”

Tilly spun. The grandma stood in the doorway and was practically naked, her thin nightgown translucent from the sunlight at her back. The knitting bag swung at her elbow, needles sticking out of the top of the bag like giant insect feelers.

“Granny, what are you doing down here?”

“I thought there’d be a little time before it rains.” She shuffled into the room, her hands clasped in front of her. “Oh, now. Here’s the poor thing. Is there anything we can do for it?” she asked.

Tilly shut the door and stood next to the table. “I think so. But I might need a little time.”

“Oh my, yes.” The grandma smiled and rummaged for her knitting.

Tilly opened drawers, and shivered at the cold air they expelled. One drawer was filled with thin spools of crystal thread—thread that held new parts to old parts and melted into whatever kind of flesh or muscle or bone needed so the new and old accepted each other as a complete whole. Tilly figured it was those crystal stitches in her hands that heated up so bad whenever she healed. She took a spool of the thread and opened another drawer.

Needles, wires, jars of liquid, delicate saws, tubes with rainbow colored labels, and every once in awhile, the leftover bits of something Father hadn’t managed to put back together, filled the drawers. In one of the bigger drawers, Tilly found the body of a small pony. Its legs were missing, and its coat was brown, but other than that, it was nearly perfect.

“Granny,” Tilly said as she put on a pair of heavy gloves, “I could use a little time now.”

The grandma hummed and pulled stitches.

Tilly lifted the cold-preserved pony out of the drawer, and set it on the table next to the beast.

The room temperature had dropped to near-freezing. Tilly’s breath came out in clouds, and her skin was cold with old sweat. She took off the gloves and used one of the saws on the beast’s legs. She used tiny hot crystal stitches to attach the legs to the pony. Next, she removed and attached the forehead nub. Crystal thread and needle slid through bone and flesh equally and sent a thin line of steam into the cold air.

“My, you do this well,” the grandma said.

“I just hope I do it right.” Tilly opened the beast’s chest and searched for its heart.

“Right as rain,” the grandma said, “don’t you worry, dear.”

Right as rain, Tilly thought. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never done anything right in her life. She pushed that thought out of her mind and paid attention instead, to the beast.

Long after dark, she heard the grumble of the Chevy. Ned must have bartered with Mr. Campbell for the pigs, which was fine. Tilly liked a man who could stick to a budget.

The truck growled past the house and straight out to the lizard’s corral.

Tilly got up from the chair she’d been dozing in and stretched stiffness out of her arms and back. She pulled her coat from the corner closet and listened a minute for the grandma. All was quiet from her upstairs room.

Tilly slipped out the front door, the screen snicking shut behind her. The night air was clear and cold. Stars chipped holes in the otherwise soft, black sky. Way off in the west, the moon hung, distant and oblivious to anything earthly. Tilly crossed her arms over her chest, and headed out to see if Ned needed any help with the pigs.

The track to the lizard’s corral was rutted and hard to follow, but Tilly’s feet knew it as well as every other inch of ground on the run-down ranch. She’d been down this path with Mother and Father the day she was born, and later, when she’d lost a year to the hot healing. Father said he’d carried her in his arms back and forth on the road, letting her body cool in the living air. That was a long time ago, before they left for better things in the big city.

The wind slipped down from the stars, carrying a breath of ice with it. Tilly shivered. She wondered if Ned would understand what she’d done. Wondered if he’d leave when he found out. Ned believed that stitchery was wrong. He never had himself re-made, though he’d had a chance to when he was a boy, before the laws against such things were passed.

Tilly took the curve in the track and walked into the grass. She could smell the lizard, musty and dry, like mold found in old closets, but ten or a hundred times stronger than that.

She expected to hear the pigs, but only heard the lizard shifting inside the fence—his claws sheathing in and out of the ground, like shovel blades cutting dirt.

There was a boat-sail snap and Tilly felt heat as the lizard pulled its wings away from its body, but no charred smell of pig-ka-bob, no flame in the air.

Something was wrong.

Tilly picked up the pace and climbed the fence. She ducked the electric line at the top, sidled through the bars and dropped down inside the corral.

The lizard, a good four-feet taller than her, swung his big triangle head her way, eyes shining with ambient moonlight. It didn’t see too good anymore, so Tilly held still and let it smell her. Then she walked across the corral toward the silent pigs in the fenced-off feeding chute.

As she drew closer, she saw a bigger shadow in with the pigs. Ned was on his knees in the middle of them all, hands spread wide and pushed tight against dirty hides.

Freak, Tilly thought fondly. You’ll mingle with pig brains, but won’t touch your willing girlfriend.

“Ned,” she said. She unlatched the electric wire at the gate to the chute and stepped in. “Now who’s being pigheaded?”

Left Ned looked up and scowled. Right Ned looked up too, but his pretty eyes were glazed, his face slack.

“Ned. Let the pigs go,” she said, her words soft and sure, and for Right Ned only.

He looked down at his hands and after a minute seemed to realize they were on the pigs. He drew back, embarrassed.

Left Ned chuckled.

“Sorry,” Right Ned said. “I’m sorry, Tilly. It was just after today. Getting caught in the dying, I guess, I needed to feel living again. I told you once I do it, I want it more.” He stepped away from the pigs and rubbed his palms on his overalls. “I’m sorry.” The pigs began grunting and rooting around.

“That’s okay,” Tilly said because he didn’t know what she’d done either. “Let’s go on back to the house and get some sleep, okay?”

The night was interrupted by a whinny. It was a far off, spooky sound, but any fool could tell what it was. The beast.

Ned was no fool. “Tilly,” he said, “what did you do?”

“I fixed it up a bit, that’s all.”

“Did you bring the beast back from death?” Real honest horror carried his words up an octave.

“Granny and I, we used a little time so I could get the fix-up bits out of Father’s workshop and apply them to the beast. I didn’t really stitch it, Ned, I took parts of the old beast and made a new beast just like it.”

“Holy, Tilly,” Ned said. “That’s plain wrong. You don’t fix up dead things and you don’t make copies of them. Don’t you know how illegal that is? For Holy sake, it’s why your Daddy left you.”

“You’re talking crazy,” Tilly said, trying to be calm, even though he was starting to scare her. “Father and Mother went to the big city for better things.”

“For jail time, Tilly. They went to jail. Because they made things, like the beast, the lizard and worse, they re-made their own…” He stopped a second, then looked down at his feet. When he looked back up at her, she knew he was dead serious.

“Now you promise me,” both Neds said in chilling unison, “right now, right this second, that you will never stitch nothing or nobody back together again.”

“But, Ned,” she said, feeling shaky inside and wanting more than anything for him to stop acting crazy.

“But nothing,” he said. “Promise me.”

She took a deep breath. It was a scary thing giving the power of a promise away, but Ned was real upset and she figured they’d have time to talk this over later.

“I promise,” she said.

Just then, the lizard opened its wings and lunged whip-quick for the pigs. In the same instant, Tilly realized she had forgotten to close the electric line behind her.

The lizard aimed for the pigs but instead of pigs, it got Ned.

It felt like a cold fist punched Tilly and her mind tried hard to make sense of things. She hollered at the lizard until it dropped Ned in a bloody heap. She picked him up, stumbled out to the truck and managed to get him into the front seat, though he wasn’t conscious.

“You keep living,” she said, her words rough with panic. She ground gears and the truck sped down the rutted road. “Keep living.”

Both Neds were silent, their eyes cinched with pain.

Once she made the house, she lifted Ned out of the truck careful as she could. She took him into the front room and laid him on the couch. Blood the color of the grandma’s knitting covered him, darkest over his stomach. She peeked under his shirt and swore. The bites were deep, and Ned’s life pumped out with every breath. He was going to bleed out before she could get the crystal thread from the workshop.

She needed more time.

The grandma.

She ran across the wood floor, then up the stairs, up and up, and the stairs kept on going and she wasn’t getting any closer to the end of them, until finally, she reached the landing.

She ran to the right, to the grandma’s room, but her feet took twice as long as they should to get her there, and on the way she noticed the hall was in need of new paint, and a layer of dust had grown along the edge of the floor, and then finally, finally, she got to the grandma’s room and opened the door.

The grandma was sitting in her bed, pulling red yarn out stitch by stitch, just wasting time.

“Granny, you got to help me. Ned’s hurt bad.”

The length of red knitting that had been at least seven feet long this morning was down to its last foot, and shrinking ever closer to white.

The grandma looked up and smiled. “Hello, Tilly. It’s going to rain, you know.”

Tilly ran across the room, grabbed the grandma by the wrist and took her, bag and all, down the stairs.

The only thing different about Ned since she’d left him, was the pool of blood on the floor had grown.

“Granny, you stay here and pull out a little time for him while I go get the stitchery from the workshop.” Then Tilly stopped. She’d promised Ned she’d never stitch nothing or nobody again.

Holy…

Thip, thip, thip, the grandma sat herself down in the old rocker and unwove another row of red.

Tilly stepped over to Ned and looked at his wounds again. The blood flow wasn’t stopping.

Thip, thip, thip, stitch after stitch of time pulled out.

“Ned,” Tilly said, hoping he could hear her. “I have to fix you up. Just some stitching, but nothing fancy. You’ll still be you—not like what I did to the beast, okay?”

Tilly couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw Right Ned shake his head.

She looked at the grandma, saw how she was trying to pull the yarn real slow so it would last.

“Ned,” Tilly said, “you can’t die.”

Thip, thip, thip.

There were only a few rows of red left, and then the grandma would be into the white. As soon as the white was gone, there’d be no time left. She had to do something now.

She knelt down and put her hands above Ned’s stomach, her unnatural, patchwork hands. She closed her eyes, just the way she’d seen Ned do it. Then she tried to find his spirit, the living thing that made him what he was. Somehow, she had to convince him to stay living until she could stitch him.

She sensed his heartbeat and the sluggish push of blood under her fingers. Briefly, something else flashed past her closed eyes, something sweet as honey and fresh as lemons. Ned’s soul.

She held on to the idea of that, hoping it wasn’t just her imagination. Her feet and face and hands tingled as she wrapped her mental self gently as she could around that warm sweet core of him.

“Please keep living, Ned. I love you.”

The words seeped down, running through her skin to his skin. Words filled his veins where there wasn’t enough blood. His heartbeat stuttered and fell into beat with the rhythm of time unstitching.

“Spring’s supposed to be a time of life, not death. You and I have a lot of living left.” Tilly poured her soul into those words, and felt the brush of his mind against hers. Then she felt his breath as if it were her own—his pain shooting through her body, his fear sharp within her mind. She kept her thoughts calm, sending snatches of happy memories to him, until his pain and fear eased. “Live, Ned.” She whispered, and then she opened her eyes.

Thip, thip, thip. The grandma pulled yarn. Tilly looked over her shoulder. The white yarn was almost gone.

“No,” she said.

Thip. The last loop.

She felt the world shudder and pause.

Beneath her hands, Ned’s heart stopped.

Tilly took a deep breath and watched Ned’s chest rise. His heart stumbled and began beating on its own again.

“Keep breathing,” Tilly said while she got to her feet. She was dizzy, but somehow managed to find the trauma-kit in the kitchen, filled with cotton thread, painkillers and antiseptics.

Tilly concentrated on breathing whenever Ned forgot, and tried to send him memories of warm summer days. She didn’t know if the grandma helped her sew and dress Ned’s wounds or not. But the tingling she’d felt in her hands and feet and face ever since she’d started touching Ned’s mind all picked the same moment to rush inward. It was like the world had just taped her up and pulled that tape away, stripping her to the bone.

She didn’t know she had passed out until she woke, down in the bed Ned and she shared. Ned was beside her, his breath no longer connected to hers, warm and real and alive all on its own, against her cheek.

Tilly stared up at the ceiling for awhile, blinking back tears. She’d made mistake after mistake—let the beast die, stitched, left the gate open, and had made Ned live too. She’d kept her promise, but keeping it had almost killed him. She hadn’t stitched, but she’d done something else he’d never wanted. She mingled with his mind and touched his soul. She’d made him a part of her long enough to keep him alive, even though his body had been set on dying.

Now she knew why touching a mind once wasn’t ever enough for him.

Ned shifted. He woke with a quiet moan and she propped up on her elbow to get a good look at the both of him.

Right Ned opened his eyes. “Did you… ?”

She shook her head. “No. You’re healing on your own.”

“How?” he asked.

“Shhh,” she said, resisting the urge to reach out and touch his mind again. “I—we mingled. I’m sorry I touched you that way, but I couldn’t bear the death of you.” Guilt soured her stomach, and her tears dropped to the sheets.

“You mingled with me?” Right Ned asked. Then a faint smile touched his mouth. “With your hands?”

“I know it’s wrong…”

“It isn’t wrong, Tilly.”

Right Ned swallowed, so Left Ned said, “Wasn’t that I hated the thought of being close to you…”

“… I just wanted it so fierce,” Right Ned said, “I knew I’d never let go once we touched that way. If you ever left me, or told me you didn’t want me around, I knew I couldn’t leave you.”

Tilly couldn’t believe what he was saying, but felt the truth in his words as if they were her own. All this time, he had wanted her too much, so he hadn’t touched her at all.

“Now, that kind of thinking won’t do us any good,” she said. “I love you, Ned. Both of you.”

Ned smiled, and though he didn’t say it, Tilly felt his love spread tenderly across her mind.

This time, Tilly knew just what to do. She leaned down and very gently kissed first Right Ned, then Left Ned, then Right Ned again, touching him with her mind, her soul and her patchwork hands.

The End

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