| THE LORELEI SIGNAL |
.
| Written by Jeremiah Job Levine / Artwork by Lee Kuruganti |
| Norn |
She didn’t usually pick things up from the subway seats, but she wanted this. It wasn’t like picking up a
newspaper that God knew who had been sitting on and thumbing through with hands that hadn’t been
washed in three weeks. It wasn’t as sneaky as picking up a wallet that had slipped its pocket, or as
desperate as claiming half a pair of gloves in the hope you might find another one that would almost match it.
This was yarn, the only addiction that had any real hold on her.
Wasn’t just any kind of yarn, either. You could tell at a glance this wasn't any nasty department store acrylic
yarn, and one touch confirmed it. This was the kind of yarn that taunted you in little downtown boutiques
owned by wispy young women who spent most of the day knitting little Fair Isle sweaters for weirdly mutated
dolls their crafty friends had made. Beautiful, unobtainable, just-came-in-from-Italy yarn. Natural, solid, but
light as a feather, and gorgeously tinted in variegated earth tones with accents in cooler colors.
Take me, take me, it shrieked at her.
Tiara would have gray hair and crippling arthritis before she could justify buying yarn like that. Her friend
Raeshon might have told her go ahead girl, treat yourself for once, you deserve it. But Tiara would never
spend so much money on yarn.
Her mother had reminded her many a time, usually while knitting something practical from scraps of yarn left
over from other projects, that crochet was a hobby, not a business, and it used twice as much yarn as
knitting. Crochet, she would say with a disapproving look, was not a practical craft for poor people. Tiara had
never quite gotten over the guilty feeling this gave her. But she had never cared for knitting. She was a
capable knitter, but much better at crochet. Even Mom had eventually come to accept that Tiara was just born
to crochet.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” a heavyset woman was gesturing at the yarn on the seat, waiting for her to pick it
up, since it was obviously hers.
She didn’t say no, that’s not mine, some old lady dressed like Yoda’s girlfriend dropped that there. She didn’t
say it’s yours if you want it. She didn’t say do you know where the Lost and Found is?
She said sure can, and picked up the yarn that wanted to be hers. Her right hand automatically tucked the
cap she had been working on into her backpack with the hook still looped inside a half-done double crochet,
and she sat there fingering the new yarn.
~ * ~
She wondered what the old woman had been planning to do with the yarn. She couldn’t picture the lady as a
conceptual artist or a DIY scenester, which were the two kinds of women you would usually see using this
kind of yarn. She was too old and…solid…to be one of those people. She looked more like the kind of lady who
would be making a machine-washable blanket for a granddaughter, or a fisherman’s sweater that would
actually be worn by a fisherman. Something practical and useful.
She would have to do something useful with the yarn, she guessed. It had come to her as a windfall, and she
wouldn’t feel right using it up on some frivolous project. She would have to do some good with it. Pay it
forward. That was just natural.
But what could you do with one ball of yarn? A hat? Tiara’s heart would break if she used it all up on one hat.
And how much good would that do, anyway?
Then again, maybe she could use it to embellish other things that did good, like the chemo caps. She knew far
too well how plain most chemo caps were. You didn’t want to go too crazy on them, because you never knew
how the recipients’ tastes ran, but a narrow border or a stripe of that yarn would add a special touch that
nobody in their right mind could object to.
There was an allergy issue, though, wasn’t there? Didn’t they say to use only acrylic or cotton yarn for chemo
caps? Come to think of it, Tiara couldn’t even tell what the yarn was made from. It felt like some kind of wool,
maybe a merino, but it was weightless, like an exotic synthetic. She would have to go to one of those fancy
yarn shops to try and find out. And she could ask Alice about the allergen problem next time she dropped off
a load at the hospital. She had a handful of chemo caps done, so she was just about due for a visit anyway.
~ * ~
Lucy never minded her working on odd projects behind the counter when business was slow. She was
working on a tiny lace motif when Raeshon walked past her window and waved.
Tiara waved her in.
“You look like shit, girl. You need coffee.”
“I need a miracle, not some damn cup of coffee cost three times what it ought to.”
“I know, but we ain’t had a customer since ten o’clock, so you buy yourself a cup of coffee if you want to see
your new hat.”
Raeshon’s face lit up with a smile that had become all too rare in the last six months, and she stepped right
up to the counter. “You finished it? Lemme see.”
“It’s not finished yet, but it’s pretty close. You might as well try it on before I wrap it up.” She put her
backpack on the counter and rifled through it for Raeshon’s hat. But it was the yarn that really caught
Raeshon’s attention.
“Oh my God, tell me you used that yarn for my hat!” she practically squealed.
Tiara shook her head. “I just found that,” she explained. “It’s beautiful, though, isn’t it? This is yours.”
Disappointment too strong to hide flickered across Raeshon’s face before she got her smile working. But it
wasn’t the same smile Tiara had seen before.
“It’s real pretty,” Raeshon said. “No, really. I love it. But couldn’t you do something in that other yarn? I’ll pay
you for it.”
“Girl, even if you could pay me I can’t find any more of that yarn. I went to two stores to try and find out what
it is, and they never even saw anything like it before.”
Raeshon nodded understandingly, but Tiara knew her real face well enough to know the disappointment had
not magically dissipated.
“Tell you what,” Tiara suggested. “I’ll put some of that yarn in it. Not the whole hat, but enough that you’ll
know it’s there. Okay?”
Yes, yes, please, said Raeshon’s eyes. Her voice said, “you gonna start it all over again? You don’t need to do
that, Tiara. It’s okay.”
“You don’t worry about it. Take me maybe one night to do it. This pattern’s easy.”
“Well, okay. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“All right then. Listen, I got to get going. You come by later on, say hi to Aunt Laverne. I’ll make some dinner.”
“Okay then.”
~ * ~
She had lied to Raeshon. The hat didn't have a pattern, easy or not. She had made it up as she went along.
Like Raeshon herself, the hat was funky, but not ridiculously so. It would catch people’s eyes without
screaming Chemo Cap, yo, bald girl over here. The brim would not only keep the sun off her tenderized skin,
but shade half her face to hide the fact she had no eyebrows. A lace stitch for the top would shade her head
while allowing the breeze to pass through, and motifs around the crown suggested irises.
At first, Tiara wasn’t going to frog the whole hat. She had thought about going back to where the motifs
joined the brim, adding a row or two of the found yarn and calling it a day. But her fingers seemed to have
other plans, and she couldn’t stop ripping out stitches. She pulled out row after row, thinking of the look in
Raeshon’s eyes when she saw the yarn in her bag, remembering the Raeshon she had known before cancer
ran her over. It wasn’t enough that this hat looked good, or even that it looked good on Raeshon. It had to
be Raeshon, the way she used to be.
When her fingers stopped pulling out stitches, she wiped her eyes and found she had frogged everything but
the crown of the hat.
The flower motifs had been all wrong. Again her hands seemed to anticipate her thoughts, making new
flowers before she even knew what she wanted. Instead of irises, they made sunflowers. They were Rae’s
favorites, and they would give her energy.
The sunflowers went into square motifs, each one bordered by a single row of the found yarn. It set the
flowers off beautifully, and matched the rest of the hat quite well. She made up a sort of stitch that looked
like a crow’s foot to blend the yarn into the brim of the hat. She wasn’t sure it would look right, but she liked
the idea that these new motifs and yarn would merge naturally into Raeshon’s life.
It came out pretty nice, she thought. It was decidedly untraditional, but she was happy with it, and she only
hoped Raeshon would be bold enough to wear it. The old, pre-cancer Rae would have, she knew; she wasn’t
so sure about the new one.
But she did wear it. And a week later, her cancer went into remission.
~ * ~
“It takes five years before they declare you cancer-free,” Raeshon reminded her. Tiara didn’t care. She knew
Raeshon was healthy. She didn’t need the doctors to confirm it. She didn’t even care how it had happened.
She was too happy to have the old, healthy Raeshon back to worry about hows and whys.
It was enough that she was back.
In the meantime, Tiara had made two more chemo caps, inserting a row or two of the found yarn in each of
them with the same crow’s foot stitch she couldn’t remember ever seeing in a pattern. She delivered the
whole bunch to the hospital, where the nurses lavished them with more praise than she really thought they
deserved. Alice, who did a little knitting herself and knew enough about crochet to recognize good technique
when she saw it, was especially delighted with them.
A few weeks later, Alice stopped at the coffee shop to buy a couple of muffins, and told her by the way that
every one of the recipients of her gifts was now miraculously healthy.
“You’re a healer, yarn girl,” she laughed. “You need to make us some more of them hats. It’s nice to be
getting rid of some patients the good way.”
Tiara laughed it off, but the big nurse insisted.
“You know, one of them old girls was supposed to be terminal for God knows how long now. Only thing
keeping her alive was she was too damn stubborn to die. But she was gonna go sooner or later. You can’t
fight cancer forever.
“That old lady is back from the dead now. Back from the dead, Tiara.”
Tiara didn’t believe a word of it, but Alice’s voice came echoing back on the subway ride home. A lot of people
survived cancer, she knew. But it was odd, especially the part about the supposedly terminal old lady.
It was only later, when she lay awake in her bed, that she remembered a story Mom had liked to tell, about
the women who used their weaving or knitting for magic. Supposedly they could make blankets that healed,
charms that cursed or made people fall in love. Mom used to claim her great-aunt Angelique had been one of
these knitting witches.
But Mom had believed in all kinds of magic. Towards the end, Tiara remembered being dragged along to all
sorts of weird-smelling hoodoo shops where Mom would consult old men and women with Caribbean or
African accents, buying charms and potions from them. But no magic she ever found had been able to help her.
What if she had been right, though? What if there were such things out there? Tiara damn sure wasn’t any
kind of witch, but maybe the woman who had dropped the yarn was. Or maybe the yarn itself was magic.
Holding that yarn in her hands, and remembering the change in Raeshon, she could almost believe it.
Maybe she ought to take another trip to the yarn shops. She still wanted find more of that yarn, or at least
find out what it was. She wasn’t going to ask about witchcraft, of course, but it would be nice to at least have
some idea what kind of yarn it was.
~ * ~
Halfway down Fourth Street, Tiara saw something she had never noticed before. Tucked in between a
secondhand clothes shop and a store called Sylvan Toys was a sign that said Yarn Over – Second Floor.
She had just about given up on ever finding another skein of that yarn, but she had almost used it all up, and
if there was anything to what Alice said it was simply her duty to find more of it. So she followed the sign up
the stairs to a typical second-story New York store, a couple of rooms lined with cubbyholes reaching up to
the ceiling and absolutely crammed with yarn of every color she could imagine. She looked around at all the
yarns she couldn’t afford. Merino. Alpaca. Buffalo. Blends of cashmere and Australian possum in colors that
could make you go blind. She reflected sourly that they probably had some yarn made of monkeys’ butt-fur
stashed away somewhere in there, but the bitter tone of her thoughts was tinged with excitement as she
realized if the yarn she wanted could be found anywhere in the city, it would be here.
An old, gentle voice interrupted her thoughts. “Can I help you find something?”
She turned around, hand reaching for her bag to pull the last few bits of special yarn out, lips starting to form
her question, when she realized the speaker was the woman who had dropped the yarn next to Tiara on the
subway.
“Um, no. Sorry. Thank you,” she mumbled, turning away to hide her face. She was out of the shop in seconds.
She pushed the glass door closed and stood on the landing, hand still on the door. Her entire life had trained
her to run straight down the stairs before the old woman called the cops.
Hello, 911? Yes, officer, I caught the colored girl who stole my yarn! Looks like she came to replenish her stash.
Yes, I can keep her here for ten minutes. Thank you, Officer!
But if she left, she would never find that yarn again. She knew it. And she would never find out if it did what
she thought it did. And people would keep on dying of cancer.
She saw her mother’s face. Her hand made a fist. Slowly she unclenched it and pulled the door open again.
“Yes,” she told the old woman, who was still standing there, watching her through the glass with deep brown
eyes that seemed to see all of Tiara’s secrets. “You can tell me what this is. And help me find more of it.” She
showed her the yarn.
“What do you think it is?” the crone asked gently. And Tiara could tell from her eyes that Mom had been right
all along.
“Magic,” she said.
“Of a sort. It is Fate. Have you ever heard of the Norns?”
Tiara shook her head.
“In the legends, they were hags. There were three of them. The crones who wove men’s fates. Old stories.
There were never only three of us, and only some of us are hags,” she said with a smile. “But that is what we
do, still. We shape destiny. Our dreams create the strands that bind reality.”
This was not what Tiara had expected. She could make a leap and believe in witches, but women who
controlled destiny were something else completely. She tried to think of reasons it couldn’t be true.
She couldn’t find any except that it just couldn’t be. And if it was, it wasn’t fair.
“Are you saying that everything is predestined?”
“Not at all. But the major movements of fate are set in courses much like rivers in their beds. Rivers may burst
their courses or dry up, if they are disturbed by outside influences. We only lay the beds. We don’t control the
rivers.”
“You’re still meddling with destiny. That’s God’s business, not something for some old witches to play with.”
“If there is a God, He lets us play, and He gave you the power to do what we do. We may be His agents, for
all I know. You could be one, too. I believe you were meant to be.”
Tiara snorted. “I don’t want to control destiny. I don’t believe that, even if I could do it.”
“You have healed people. I can see it in your face. You believe that, don’t you?”
She didn’t want to, but she did. It took her a while to accept that she might be one of the witch-women Mom
had spent her whole life looking for, but she wasn’t so stubborn that she would deny it.
“I can teach you how to control it, if that is what you want. Then we’ll have two Bellas. I don’t think that’s
ever happened before.” She chuckled secretively.
“Do I even have a choice?”
“Of course. You are not a drop of water in the river of your life. More like a fish. You can go forward, go back,
or even jump out of the river. If you go forward, you should know what you will face. There are three of us
here, and three trials you will have to pass.”
“What kind of trials?”
“You have passed one already. You will know the others when you have passed them.”
First trials, now riddles. She had no time for this.
“Nope, sorry.” And she left the shop.
~ * ~
She saw Alice again the next day. They talked about this and that before Alice asked if she had any more hats
for her patients.
“Not yet. How are the other ones? Still…” Alice was nodding before she finished the sentence.
“Still the same. All better. ‘Cept for the one that got the wrong meds, but he’ll be okay too.”
“You gave someone the wrong pills?”
“One of the new girls did. Happens sometimes. He’ll be okay.”
Tiara thought about this.
“Something wrong?” Alice asked gently.
“What do you do when you mess something up?”
Alice gave her a look. “Depends what. Try not to make the same mistake twice, I guess. Learn from your
mistakes, get over it and keep trying.”
“Even if somebody gets hurt by it?”
“A hospital’s just like any other place, Tiara. It’s human beings trying to do a job. People mess up sometimes.
You just do the best you can. I’ve seen people, doctors mostly, get all wrapped up in never making a single
mistake, beat themselves up over every slip, start drinking if they miss a diagnosis. You start doing that, you
might as well flush yourself away, save the time, because no matter what you do, accidents will happen.”
Tiara nodded slowly.
“You mess something up, Ti?”
For a moment Tiara considered telling Alice what had been happening to her lately, but she didn’t know
where to begin. Alice would think she was crazy anyway.
“No. No. Just thinking.”
“Mm-hmm. Beating yourself up for something you don’t even know is going to happen. That’s the worst kind.
You gotta stop that while you still can. Now go make some hats for me.”
It was hours later before Tiara realized Alice knew. Maybe not every detail, but she had a pretty good general
idea. Like Mom, she knew. Did everyone know except her?
~ * ~
Two days later she went back to the shop on Fourth Street. But the old woman wasn’t there. The only person
in the shop was a teenager sitting at a round table knitting a miniature hat on double-pointed bamboo
needles. She had corn-silk hair tied up in flawless French braids, and wore a dramatic knitted top that clung to
her annoyingly perfect little body. Obviously one of those kids that always hung around the trendiest yarn
shops, perfecting every technique they read about in the latest pattern magazines and Web forums, buying
the best yarn with Daddy’s money.
Princesses.
“May I help you?” she asked, darting her intense blue eyes towards Tiara for a second before returning to her
work.
Tiara hesitated, realizing she didn’t know the old lady’s name. “Is the owner around?”
“You mean Esther? Not here at the moment, but she should be back soon. You can help me out while you
wait, if you want to. We're making hats for preemies today.”
She was as fast as a spider. Tiara could hardly follow her fingers as the needles dipped and burrowed, click
click click around and around like a machine. It took a few moments before Tiara noticed she was working left-
handed, yarn moving from the right needle to the left. She had never seen anyone knitting like that.
“Are you a—one of them?” she asked.
The princess smiled. “Yes. I'm Bella. You must be Tiara. Did you bring your hooks?”
The old woman—Esther—had mentioned two Bellas. But this girl was so young. Sixteen? Maybe seventeen?
Tiara sat down and looked through her bag for her hooks.
“There's a couple of crochet patterns if you need them,” Bella said. She bit off the yarn, picked up a darning
needle and a scrap of a different yarn, and started to wrap the crown of the elfin hat.
Tiara looked at the patterns on the table, but they were just standard, boring, miniature hats. She could do
that sort of thing in her sleep.
She chose a ball of sky-blue yarn from the rainbow heap in the middle of the table.
“You can improvise however you want,” the girl said. “I wouldn't get too fancy with it, though. We need to
make as many as we can.”
Was this a trial?
Bella started casting on to a regular needle. Tiara decided to make what she thought of as a miniature
snowboarders' beanie. Double crochet, twelve increases per row, with a back post stitch to create ridges
where she increased. A simple pattern, but the effect of the back post stitches gave it a little flair. Down by
the brim she would make a stripe of green.
She felt a little tingle in her fingers as she started to chain. It was almost unnoticeable, a frisson, not even a
spark of static, but it gathered strength as she closed the starting chain and began to work the first row.
After that it kept getting stronger.
Maybe it was the shop, or the young girl working across the table.
“How did you, you know, become one of them?” Tiara asked, partly to keep her mind off the weird feeling and
partly because it was a little frightening to think that a girl so young had even partial control over other
people's destinies.
Like the crone, Bella seemed to read her mind, and there was a touch of arrogance in her voice when she
said, “I’ve been knitting since I was five. I knit, crochet, do naalbinding, weave, spin, sew, tat, make bobbin
lace. I learned everything I could. I’d watch people working whenever I could, ask everyone I saw knitting a
thousand questions, read every yarn book my library had. I can do this without even thinking about it.
“I'm nineteen, by the way.
“A long time ago, before I was ten, I started hearing about knitting witches. People do magic in all kinds of
ways, you know. There are kitchen witches. There are people who cast spells while they dream, mediums
who work by touch, by sight, by Tarot cards. And there are people whose magic comes in knitting.”
She kept working at the same dizzying pace while she talked. She was inhumanly fast. The frisson Tiara had
noticed grew stronger and stronger.
Bella continued, “whenever you knit or crochet, cook or whatever you do, you’re focusing psychic energy into
whatever you’re making. A lot of people actually do this unconsciously, even people who have no idea they
have any kind of gift. A kid's grandmother makes him mittens that keep him from harm, but all she wanted to
do was keep his hands warm. Or a girl knits herself a sweater that makes her grumpy every time she wears
it, because she was going through a rough time when she was making it, and the yarn kept soaking up all
that negative energy. Lots of people have a little bit of the touch and just don’t know it.”
Click, click, click, clickclickclick, like a Terminator someone had programmed to knit. She seemed to be getting
even faster. Somehow she had finished two inches of her hat, even though there was no way she had been
talking for more than a few minutes.
“But if you do have the gift, and you know about it, there are all kinds of techniques and secrets you can
learn to use it more effectively, to control the energy and make it do exactly what you want. Breathing
exercises and counting songs to focus your spirit, color progressions that relate to certain things, stitches
that trap the energy in a certain way.”
Like that crows-foot stitch, Tiara thought.
“If you have enough energy and you learn how to channel it, you can literally knit reality into a different
shape. Not many people have that much power, though. In every hundred grandmothers knitting mittens for
their babies, there's maybe five or six whose mittens really do anything. Out of twenty of those, one or two
might have the skill to apply the touch in a way they can control. Those are your professional kitchen witches.
Back when everybody made things at home, instead of just buying crap made by machines, there was a
kitchen witch in every neighborhood. Now there's not more than a hundred in the Metropolitan area.”
She had finished a hat. Tiara couldn't believe it. She counted the rows she had done, and shook her head. So
there was more to this magic stuff than healing sick people. Was Bella somehow changing the flow of time
around them? Was she supposed to fight off the effect? How could she?
Bella went on chatting, just like a gossip in a knitting circle, as she picked up another ball of yarn—light brown
this time—and started casting on again.
“It took me a few years to find a stitching witch. They hide now, you know?”
Oh, yes, Tiara knew very well how they hid.
The energy in the air was humming now. Tiara felt little sparks of static every time she did a back post stitch.
“She wasn't very strong,” Bella said, already three rows into her project and switching colors. “But she gave
me a decent start. My parents thought it was weird, me hanging out with an old woman so much, but they
just thought it was some kind of stitch and bitch thing. They had no idea what she was really teaching me.”
She switched colors again, alternating brown and white every few stitches. Tiara had finally finished her
increase rows, and she decided to try a variation of her own. This witch girl was all about Aran and Fair Isle
patterns—it looked like she was starting a Fair Isle hat now—so maybe Tiara should do something with a bit
of her own style in it. Something modern. After a minute she had an idea.
She took a ball of bright red from the pile.
Bella continued, “it wasn't long before I started doing things she hadn't taught me. Marianne found me then—
you haven't met her yet, she's awesome, really hardcore—and caught me just before I started unraveling
time. Boy, was she mad. I hadn't meant to do anything, but she said I was dangerous, and had to be
watched. Marianne's very serious about stuff like that.”
Tiara forced herself to focus on her work, to work through the buzzing, to continue the oval and rhinoceros
she had decided to plant on the front of the hat, but she felt like she was working slower and slower while
the buzzing kept getting louder, and Bella was knitting faster than she could follow. She had another little elf
hat finished already and was about to start another one, but she put down her needles for a moment and
scooted over next to Tiara.
“Let me show you something,” she said, holding her hands out.
“I know how to crochet,” Tiara said.
“Oh, I know you do,” Bella said with a laugh. “You crochet just fine. But you don't know a thing about magic.
Can I just show you something?”
Reluctantly Tiara gave her the half-made hat. Bella held up the hat to look at it, mm-hmmed approvingly, and
held the hook like a pencil.
“You want to counteract what I'm doing, right?” Tiara nodded. “Then think outside the box for a minute. Stop
thinking about a hat, and think of time instead.
“Time,” she said, wrapping the yarn over the hook several times, “is this yarn.” She made a stitch that started
like a cluster stitch and twisted around violently, so she was almost crocheting sideways. What she made
didn't look like a proper stitch at all, but like an oddly three-dimensional cluster—but when she pulled the
hook through the last loop of yarn, Tiara felt something skip inside her, and the buzzing in the air went down
an octave.
“Did you get that?” Bella asked her.
Tiara snorted and took the hat back, repeating Bella's maneuver perfectly. To her shock, the crackle of energy
seemed to flatten out again, deepening in tone. The tingling in her fingers seemed different, as if she was no
longer fighting it but flowing through it.
Bella's surprise was obvious.
“You are good,” she admitted. “But now, no more Miss Nicey Nice. You ready?”
Tiara nodded. She looked at the pattern she had been doing, calculating how many of the odd clusters she
would have to do to maintain an even pattern and still draw the rhinoceros. Then she went back to it, and
this time, even when Bella picked up her needles again, the crackling of energy wasn't nearly as bad, and the
girl seemed to have slowed down so Tiara could follow her stitching.
No, she realized. She didn't get any slower. You're faster. What she did before was slowing you down. It isn't
working as well now. You're working at normal speed again.
And Tiara's normal speed was very fast indeed.
She seemed to cast off sparks as she worked. By the time she was halfway through the rhinoceros, there
was a little cloud of sparks hovering around her, and a humming exchange of energy between her and Bella.
The longer they worked, the stronger it got. Bella was still faster than her, but she was getting faster and
faster, visibly gaining.
She finished the hat in the same time it took Bella to do a whole one. And when Bella bound off her fourth
hat, Tiara was only a few rows behind her. She breathed carefully, concentrating on wrapping that cluster
stitch meticulously, and finished the hat.
The next time she started, she thought for a moment before she chained. What if she could do a whole initial
row of those clusters? She pictured a little starburst of clustered time stitches, projecting their influence
outward through the whole hat. Carefully, she did what she saw in her mind's eye, and found herself finishing
the hat at exactly the same time Bella started binding off her last row.
The cloud of sparks that had gathered around her head drifted towards Bella, who bit her lip and shook her
head like a horse shaking flies away. As she picked up a fresh ball of yarn, she cast more sparks towards
Tiara, but this time Tiara had already started a round of clusters, and the energy seemed to hit an invisible
wall around her.
Bella grunted and redoubled her efforts, her perfect brow furrowing deeply as her fingers flew. But she
couldn't slow Tiara down any more. She could only catch up, so they finished their hats together, throwing up
a miniature hurricane of sparks that swirled around the room.
Before they could pick up fresh balls of yarn, someone said, “stop.”
Tiara looked up and noticed, for the first time, they were no longer alone. Two other women had entered the
shop and stood watching them. One of them was Esther. The other had to be Marianne. She was a tall, dark-
haired woman wearing faded jeans and a denim jacket.
“Did you have to make this into a sporting event?” Esther asked, frowning at Bella. Bella, who had seemed
intense, almost angry the whole time they had been working, smiled broadly.
“The world's a little more extreme than it was when you started out, Esther,” she replied. “Everything's a
sporting event now. Welcome to the world you made.”
Marianne shook her head, picking up the hats Tiara had made and examining them carefully.
“Always so disrespectful,” she said with a sigh.
“You didn't pick me for my manners,” Bella retorted.
“Indeed we didn't. Lucky for you. So what do you think of Tiara?”
Here it comes, Tiara thought. She hates me, of course. I shouldn't have been so fast. I should have held back a
little bit. Nobody likes being made to look bad by the new girl.
Then she thought, the hell with that. And hell with her if she can't deal with it. She was the one who made it a
competition. Why should I hold back?
To her surprise, Bella laughed and said, “she's fantastic. Seriously. Major talent. Unrefined as hell, of course.
And you know how much I suck as a teacher. But if you can teach her a little bit, she'll be amazing.”
“I thought she would,” Esther said, sitting down heavily next to Bella and fingering one of her hats. “You got
sloppy here,” she pointed out. “That's what happens when everything has to be 'extreme'. Quality suffers.”
“You've got to be kidding me,” Bella retorted. “I made six hats in an hour, and you're taking points off
because of a sloppy stitch?”
“Wait,” Tiara said. “What does this mean? Tell me what happens now. Did I pass?”
Marianne said, “not quite.”
“One more trial to go,” Tiara guessed.
“That's right.” She sounded tough, and Tiara had a pretty good idea the easy trials were over.
“Stay for a while, though,” Bella said.
“I rather think Tiara has things she needs to do,” Marianne said. Tiara looked at her carefully, wondering
what to expect.
“You'll want some of this,” the Mother Norn said, holding up a bag of yarn, while the Crone and the Maiden
watched.
~ * ~
Raeshon was waiting for her by her front door. She looked like she had been waiting for hours. At first Tiara
thought her cancer must have come back, she looked that bad. Her face was drawn tight, and there were big,
dark hollows around her eyes.
But it wasn’t her. It was Aunt Laverne.
“She’s dyin’, Tiara. We just found out. Doctors said there was nothing they could do.” Raeshon had no more
tears.
“Oh, Rae,” Tiara murmured.
“Can you…do something? Make something for her?”
“Raeshon, I don’t know.”
“Don’t say that, Ti. You made me better. I know you did. The whole building is talkin’ about how that blanket
you made for Kendra’s baby made her better, and you made a scarf that got Bea’s man to stop messing
around behind her back.”
“What?” Tiara couldn’t help laughing. “Girl, that’s just a bunch of damn people talking. I never made any scarf
for Bea.”
“Well, you still cured me.”
“You don’t know that, honey.”
“Yes I do. Please, Tiara. It’s Aunt Laverne. How many times she made you sugar cookies and hot chocolate
when your Mom was dying?”
Tiara flinched at the memory.
“You don’t have to remind me who Aunt Laverne is, Raeshon. I’ll help her if I can. You know I will. I just don't
know if I can, you know, cure her.”
She knew nothing about these things. It had been an accident when she cured Raeshon and the others. But
she would try.
“Can you come over tonight?” Raeshon asked. “I got a shift I can take at the club tonight, but I don't want to
leave her alone all night. She sleeps most of the time, but somebody should be there if she wakes up and
needs something. I'll pull out the sofa for you.”
And if she does wake up, and I see what she's going through, you know I won't be able to deny her, Tiara thought.
But she had to do it anyway. If she could. How would she have felt if someone could have helped Mom and
didn’t?
But that was exactly the problem. There had been someone who could have helped Mom, hadn’t there? And
they hadn’t. They hadn’t done anything. She wasn’t going to do that to Raeshon. She would do whatever she
could for Aunt Laverne. Whatever this crazy power was, she would use it to help. However she could.
She had a feeling a hat wasn’t going to be enough. Aunt Laverne needed more than that. She needed
something as big as her own life. Maybe a blanket.
A blanket of her life? With pictures in different colors, maybe? Or make it out of lots of little squares with
different stitches that somehow related to her life. Not a literal depiction of her life, but a symbolic one.
She would have liked to make a sort of Tree of Life design, all branching cables twisting around each other.
She had a feeling Aunt Laverne would love that. Only problem was, you couldn't make decent cables in
crochet. You could fake it, and make interesting cable-like effects, but to make a nice, fat, smooth cable you
had to knit it. How many times had her mother told her that?
Damn it anyway. Her Mom had been right about so many things. And she was still dead.
Oh, Mom. All my childhood you told me there were witches, and I never believed you. And now I am one.
Now what do I do?
~ * ~
Aunt Laverne and Rae's apartment was on the sixth floor. Just an elevator ride away, when the elevator was
working—which wasn't all the time. Luckily, today was a good day for elevators.
Aunt Laverne's apartment was not doing so well. There was death in the air. It looked the same as it always
had—Aunt Laverne hadn't redecorated since the Seventies, and the whole place was orange, brown and
black, beads and Maasai spearmen everywhere—but the air was heavy and the ancient Sony stereo, which
usually had some Marley or Motown on it, was silent.
Raeshon fluttered around the yellow-and-avocado kitchen like a bird that had come home to find its tree had
been felled by lightning and all of its nestlings crushed under the wreckage.
“She's sleeping,” she told Tiara. “Don't wake her up. She needs to rest. Probably in about an hour she'll wake
up, want some tea. She likes that bush tea. It's in the cupboard.”
“I know where the tea is, Rae. Go on, now.”
The apartment was dead quiet after Raeshon left. She could still hear the sounds of other families through
the walls, and the gurgling of pipes, just like in her own apartment, but inside there was nothing but the
ticking of a clock on the living room wall. She sat down by the kitchen table and started making a square in
Tunisian crochet. She had an idea to make a square that looked like Kente cloth in green, maroon and black.
Just the sort of thing Aunt Laverne would like.
What she would do with the square, she wasn't quite sure yet, but she knew something would come to her.
She looked up at the rustling of swinging beads, and saw Aunt Laverne enter the kitchen. Tiara knew she
was only a year older than Mom would have been, but she looked about ninety years old. Her face had sunk
away, leaving her with the face of a skull with yellow eyes, and she walked like glass splinters were stuck in
her hips.
“Hey, Tiara,” she whispered, shuffling over to the chair across from Tiara and almost managing to hide a
wince of pain as she hit the chair harder than she wanted to.
“Hey, Auntie Laverne. How you doing?” (What a stupid question!)
“Ah, you know. Same fight, different round.”
“Can I make you some tea?” Tiara asked her, setting the mock Kente cloth down. Aunt Laverne reached over
and felt the fabric, nodding.
“A cup of tea would be so nice,” she said. “But I don't want you making me anything else.”
Tiara, reaching up to get a box of rooibos tea from the shelf, froze. “What do you mean, Auntie?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. I heard some things about you lately. Heard you been taking after your Auntie
Angelique. You helped Raeshon, and that was wonderful, a wonderful thing to do. And I bet Raeshon asked
you to try to help me somehow. But I don't want any help, you understand?”
Tiara put the kettle on.
“But…”
“But nothing. If you've got a gift, you use it sensibly. You don't go around trying to save old ladies whose time
has come. I've been sick a long time. I made sure Rae never knew—Lord knows she had enough trouble with
her own cancer. But she's better now, thanks to you, and I'm getting worse. Ain't nothing anybody can or
ought to do about it. I'm tired of fighting. I ain't gonna have you trying to intervene for me when you could be
doing better things with your gift.”
“You don't understand.” Tiara kept trying to spoon some sugar into the teacup, but sugar was scattering all
over the formica counter. Her hands wouldn't work.
“I understand everything, child. I understand you're trying to make things right by your Mom. I know what
she tried to do before she died. But she was wrong, Tiara. Bible says there's a time to heal, and a time to die.
That ain't always easy, but nobody said life was.”
And how many times had Tiara's mother told her that?
“It's not fair,” she whispered.
“Yes, it is,” Aunt Laverne said, her voice stronger now. “And you got to stop this right now. You aren't trying
to save me, you're trying to save your mom. And you can't do that. Not now, not even if you had the power
back then. People have to die, Tiara.”
“When it's time for them to die, maybe!” Tiara cried out. “After they've lived their whole lives. Not dying
halfway through, leaving poor kids behind with no parents.”
“Tiara, there's six billion people on Earth. You know how many there would be if everybody lived to be a
hundred? What that would do to the planet? We would have destroyed everything wild a long time ago.
There wouldn't be a single animal left alive, except the ones we use as food. There wouldn't be any forests
left at all, just fields of wheat and rice stretching from coast to coast on every continent. And people would
still starve. And there would still be wars.
“There's a balance to life, Ti. You can't change that. Nobody can. You want to honor your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Then live the way she taught you. Remember her lessons. Not the craziness at the end, after life broke her
down. Remember her strength.”
Tiara watched the kettle, almost ready to boil. Remember her strength, she repeated silently.
How do I do that?
“I have to go lie down,” Aunt Laverne said, tiny quivers in her voice. “Could you bring me that tea when it's
ready?”
“Of course, Auntie.”
She watched Aunt Laverne shuffle into the hallway, the sweater Tiara's mother had knitted for her long ago
wrapped tightly around her bony frame. Even this distracted, Tiara's eyes ran along the neat cables of the
sweater. Her Mom made some tight cables, for sure. She always had.
An idea struck her.
The needles were still in her yarn bag. They were always there. Never used, but never forgotten. Rosewood
needles, hand carved by her grandfather for Aunt Angelique when she first started to knit, the shafts worn
mirror-smooth and gently warped over decades of use. Passed down from Aunt Angelique to Tiara's Mom, and
then to Tiara. But never used, not since her mother had passed.
“Remember her strength,” Tiara whispered.
She didn't notice the faint glow that illuminated the kitchen when she finished casting on the first row. She
had no idea how many stitches she had cast on. She was barely aware of the color of her yarn. She was
thinking of her mom's life, and hers, and Aunt Laverne's and Raeshon's. Thinking of how they wrapped around
each other, filling the spaces in between them. Girls coming out from the shade of their mothers, mothers
leaning on each other. Others, like Aunt Angelique and her grandmother, growing up in the same space
before them, sheltering them, growing around them until they fell.
She was thinking of a tree. It was Aunt Laverne's tree. On every branch, in every root, she would crochet a
square to symbolize an aspect of Aunt Laverne's life. But the tree itself, she would knit. With her mother's
needles. With her strength.
She had thought of a Tree of Life before. She hadn't done it because she didn't like to knit. Now, she was
glad she hadn't done it. A Tree of Life wasn't what Aunt Laverne needed. It was fear that had suggested that
to her. Fear and loneliness.
Now she knitted from strength, accepting her power and her mother's legacy, and it was a Tree of Life and
Death.
The glow around her intensified, the electric light seeming to fade away while dancing halos surrounded her.
She still didn't notice. She was knitting faster than she ever had before. When she finished several knitted
squares, laying them out on the linoleum to plan the pattern, the lights hovered over her shoulder to
illuminate the work.
Tiara nodded and began to work the first of the illustrated crochet squares, and if she had been fast before,
she was lightning now. The yarn seemed to leap out of her bag, running through her fingers like the string of
a kite that had been playing before, and had just decided to catch the real wind and soar away. The halos
multiplied around her as she formed the first picture. There was a whole cloud of them in the kitchen by the
time she finished.
She went back to knitting, feeling an ache in her fingers now. They weren't used to these movements, or to
the memories that surged up as she knitted faster and faster. For years, she had only thought of her mother
at the end of her life, a woman crazy with incurable disease, desperate to keep the darkness away. Now she
remembered a younger woman who had knitted her sweaters, danced at parties, turned their living room into
a campsite when Raeshon came over for a sleepover. The light from the fairy halos shifted through blues and
greens, golden and crimson like eldritch firelight as the memories danced through her head.
She was in her own time zone. Her fingers flew faster than human skill could have made them move. The clock
on the kitchen wall ticked away the hours of Raeshon's shift, and every hour saw another three or four
swatches join the others on the floor. The tree grew in arabesques, branches supporting crocheted frames
here and there. The square of kente cloth, finished now, nestled between the roots of the tree. In the lower
branches, a black square held a broken chain. Higher up, the symbols shifted from the things they had come
from to the life Aunt Laverne had made herself: an ABC square for the teaching job she loved; an abstracted
picture of her and Uncle Quinn, long gone now; a bold, extravagantly curlicued R for her daughter.
Tiara was aching from her heart to her fingertips.
When all the squares were there, she grabbed a darning needle, feeling pain burning her hands as she
began to stitch them all together. She had spent all her tears an hour ago, and still wanted to cry. Her body
trembled with the need.
And it was done. She looked up for the first time, feeling her neck crack. The lights winked at her and faded
away one by one, leaving her alone in the kitchen. She looked at the clock. It was three o'clock.
She had started at around eight o'clock. Could she really have made a blanket in seven hours? It seemed
impossible. But the sky was still dark, and Raeshon hadn't come home yet, so it had to be true.
She carried the blanket into the bedroom, where Aunt Laverne was leaning back against a bunch of pillows.
Her eyes were closed, but she blinked and looked up at Tiara after a moment. The light in them was fading
away. She seemed to have been waiting for Tiara alone.
“I made you something,” Tiara said.
The old woman's eyes flashed. “Didn't I tell you not to do that?” she demanded.
“It isn't that kind of thing, Auntie. Don't worry, I was listening. I understand. This is, well, different.”
“Let me see.”
Tiara lifted the blanket for her to see. Aunt Laverne gasped and peered at it to see the details. She looked at
the crocheted squares one by one, seeming to understand Tiara's intent exactly.
“What's that one?” she asked, pointing at a square with a cluster of puffed ovals in the lightest cream color.
“Those are sugar cookies, Auntie.” Tiara's voice cracked.
Aunt Laverne mm-hmmed at her and continued to examine the blanket, lifting a skeletal arm to run her fingers
over the fabric.
“It's so soft,” she whispered. “What kind of yarn is this?”
“It's destiny.”
“Is that right?” After a minute, she nodded again and said, “thank you, Ti. You watch over Raeshon for me.”
Tiara felt a tear run down her chin.
“Auntie, I don't want to do this.”
“That's why you're going to be so good at it.” Aunt Laverne's voice was barely more than a whisper.
The sparkle in her eyes faded away.
Tiara waited another minute, then bent to kiss her on the forehead. Then she pulled the blanket over Aunt
Laverne, but stayed to watch over her.
A soft, rose pink halo rose out through the blanket and circled around Tiara twice before it exploded into a
cloud of minute sparkles that hung in the air for a few more seconds, then faded away.
Tiara went back to the kitchen to wait for Raeshon. She put the kettle on, picked up her mother's needles and
started to knit.
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