Nightmare Fuel 2019, Day the First - At the Loom

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written here.

Greetings, again, I'll try to not neglect this space.

It's October, and for the better part of the past decade that's meant Andrea Trask's annual "Nightmare Fuel" project, in which anyone moved to do so writes little horror stories based on a daily image prompt. I like this as a bit of a daily writing exercise, but sometimes fade out if my pieces start feeling too much alike.

So it begins, for this year. Enjoy, and thanks for listening.

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The day after her death you tore your clothes, as was the custom. The cry of rent fabric echoed your own in a way that dulled the pain, dimmed it if even for a moment. You fell onto the bed where she took her last breath, your hands falling to the heavy woven blanket. Your tore and pulled and unraveled until your hands ached, until the threads cut into soft fingers unused to this violence, as her absence cut into the soft parts of your heart.

You tore and tore and tore.

A month after her death you gathered up the tangled threads, straightened them, unknotted them. Wound them onto spools. Untangling them tangled something deep in your gut as the touch worried against the raw callouses on your fingers.

You wound, wound, and stored.

A month after her death you purchased a loom, you learned to weave. You bought yarns of different colors, different thickness, different feel. Natural, artificial. You watched instructional videos, you learned of warp and weft and counts and other arcane secrets.

You practiced.

A year after her death your hands were calloused, strong, no longer smooth and soft like your heart. You wove blankets and tapestries and throw-rugs. You wove geometric patterns, you wove landscapes, you wove tromp l’oeil effects designed to look like windows. You’d hang them on a bare wall, imagine them real windows. Imagine her standing outside, just out of your view. If the loom were wider you’d be able to see her. You took some pieces to local craft fairs, you opened a little online store. Mostly you wove.

You wove and you dreamed.

Ten years after her death you’d mastered the tromp l’oeil, the window to nowhere. Windows into cloudscapes and pastoral landscapes and heavens and dark underworlds, but no matter how wide you wove she’d always be just out of sight, just unreachable. Your home became full of them, walls hung with dizzying patchworks of faux windows and archways.

You wove, and you searched.

Twenty years after her death, you took those long-forgotten threads from the closet. The ones that had been her blanket. You unspooled the long-faded yarn, slowly, reverently. Died it in blacks and browns, the color of the earth to which she’d returned.

And you wove.

Your final piece, a simple throw-rug. Too narrow, because there was only but so much thread from that old blanket. In the warp and weave a shape formed – a simple wooden staircase, downward.

You wove your way to the underworld, an Orpheus of the loom, descending on the stairs of your art to again meet her.