The Loose Thread

Every winter, when the first frost stiffened the reeds along the harbor, old Edvin the tailor cleared his workbench of cloth and brought down the box of carded wool from the high shelf.

He had felted the same town for forty years. One small wool figure for every household on the hill, each one no taller than his thumb, each one stitched with the particular shape of a life he knew.

There was the baker, stooped from a lifetime bent over the oven, his back curved like a question mark. Edvin gave him a dusting of pale wool on the shoulders, the way flour never quite brushed off.

There was the girl from the blue house who was forever losing her mittens; Edvin felted her with both hands bare and pink, and a single mitten dangling from a string at her wrist.

There was the cobbler who hummed without knowing he hummed, and the widow who watered her one geranium as if it were a child, and the twins who could only be told apart by which way they parted their hair.

He worked slowly, by the light of one warm lamp, pressing the needle in and out until loose tufts of fleece became a shoulder, a hood, the suggestion of a face. Fiber clung to his sleeves and floated in the lamplight like slow snow.

He noticed it first with the fisherman's figure. One morning a single strand of wool had worked itself loose at the collar, curling up from the felt like a question. Edvin tucked it back and thought nothing of it.

By evening the whole figure had gone soft. The shoulders had sagged. The careful face had blurred, as if seen through breath on glass, and by the time he reached for it the fisherman had come apart in his palm — not torn, not cut, simply unmade, a small grey nest of fleece where a man had stood.

Edvin sat with the loose wool in his hand for a long time.

Edvin began to fight it. He threaded his finest needle and went figure by figure, driving the wool tighter, binding each loose strand back into the body, stitching as if he could sew the whole town in place by hand.

He turned the lamp lower. The little tailor kept his back to the dark, watching over a town that had become, at last, only wool and lamplight and the patient shape of someone who had stayed to the end.

In the spring he did not unmake the figure. He set it on the high shelf beside the box of carded wool, facing out, and went down the hill to see who, if anyone, had come.