The Stitch Witch
Stitchy had a big heart. She knew that for a fact.
Stitchy was a witch. She was, to be particular, the Witch of Stitches, but the Stitch Witch had a nicer sound to it, she thought. Most of her sisters didn’t call her that, though. They didn’t really call her much of anything, because they didn’t speak to her very often, and when they did, they usually just called her names and words that weren’t very nice. Stitchy didn’t like those words and names, but she also didn’t not like being called them, since even someone was calling her names, they were still talking to her.
Stitchy also loved her sisters. They didn’t love her that much. Some of them - they didn’t love her any at all. That was okay. Stitchy knew she was difficult to like, and even harder to love. If she wasn’t herself, she thought she wouldn’t want much to do with her, either. She knew she was weird with her mismatched button eyes, one pink, one blue, and her hair wasn’t hair, but just a bunch of thick red yarn. Her skin was pale and clammy and covered in motley patches of different bits of fabric with different patterns and different textures that didn’t always look the best next to each other. She used to think the patches looked pretty in their own special way, but everyone else made sure that she knew they didn’t. They all told her they weren’t nice to look at. They really didn’t like the way way the thread looped through her flesh and the skin puckered around the holes where the fabric patched to it. They didn’t like looking at them. They didn’t like looking at her.
But Stitchy had a lot of sisters. More than she could count, and more than she could ever even meet. Only one of them made her feel like she wasn’t so bad. Even then, Striga wasn’t exactly nice to her. Striga wasn’t really nice to anyone, but when Stitchy came to her house, she didn’t tell her to go away or that she was ugly. She just told her to be quiet and not bother her, which was fine with Stitchy, since she didn’t talk much to begin with. When she talked, she usually said the wrong things and people got mad, and even if she did talk, they usually didn’t listen, either. Stitchy was happy just to sit in Striga’s study and watch her read, or write, and, sometimes, she’d even get to play with some of her owls if they were working. The owls liked to pull at the threads on Stitchy’s patches and bite at her hair, and, when she caught mice with her threads and fed the birds, they’d always nip a little at her fingers. She didn’t mind. She pulled at her own stitches, sometimes. She’d pull at them until they hurt. She’d tug at them until they bled and the sides of her patches came up at the edges and showed the sticky red meat underneath.
And the owls were cute birds. Since they seemed to like her, she liked them even more.
Stitchy liked almost everyone. She wished more people liked her, but it was okay if they didn’t. If the other witches didn’t love her, or like her, that was alright, too. She loved them all enough to make up for it. Stitchy had a big heart. She knew that for a fact.
She’d sewn it into her chest herself.
Of course.
Of course the third store Jeremy checked wouldn’t have what he was looking for. Because why would it? That would be too easy. It would be too easy if he needed purple yarn, too, but no. Of course not. It had to be grape yarn. Because, apparently, grape was now a particular shade of purple that was not the same purple as every other bundle of purple yarn that the store had in spades. Every store had purple yarn in excess. There was enough purple yarn to make a sweater for every person in Canada, and probably a couple American states, to boot.
But there was no grape yarn. Not so much as a single string of it. And the worst part was that there had been grape yarn. Every store he’d visited had a place for it on the shelf. They just didn’t have any in stock. Which meant that, somewhere, there was, indeed, grape yarn.
Just not in the entirety of Guelph. If Jeremy had to guess, based on the way his luck was turning out, there probably wasn’t any grape yarn left in all of Ontario.
Alexa wasn’t going to be happy about that. She’d requested the color by name, and made it abundantly clear that it was necessary. No - her current project called for grape yarn, and no other shade of violet or indigo or even just plain, regular yarn of any other variety would simply not suffice.
Because of course not.
Under other circumstances, Jeremy wouldn’t have even bothered checking for the stupid and elusive grape yarn beyond the first store. He might have even just gotten a bundle of bog standard purple yarn and told Alexa that, if she really needed that particular bit of panache that, apparently, only the exact shade of grape could provide, she was more than welcome to comb through every craft supplies store in Southern Ontario until she found it.
But, given the fact that she was still laid out from what had to be the nastiest strain of flu that Jeremy had ever bore witness to, she was in no shape to leave the bed, let alone the apartment. And, ipso facto, Jeremy, as her loving, caring, supportive, and ever-so-kind boyfriend, was obliged to find it for her, so she had something to occupy her time in between violent coughing fits and filling one of those big, orange Home Depot buckets with vomit.
With a groan of both defeat and discomfort, Jeremy pushed off his knees and stood up. For a moment, he stood there, staring up at the ceiling, what with all of its exposed, white-painted network of pipes, vents, and those big, industrial lamps beaming down on him, listening to the quiet strains of some bland, inoffensive Top Forty garbage he didn’t know and didn’t want to know playing from unseen, distant speaker overhead. He pulled back the sleeve of his coat and checked the watch strapped to his watch. It was getting late. If he rushed, he could probably get to another store and find that they, too, were out of grape-colored yarn. He wasn’t even sure where there was another big-box retailer that sold craft supplies, but there had to be another within the distance of a short drive.
Jeremy pulled open the flap of his coat and fished his phone out of the interior pocket. Just as he unlocked the screen, preparing to do a quick search for nearby stores that probably didn’t have what he was looking for, a tap on the shoulder seized his attention. He sighed; it was probably one of the beleaguered employee, overworked and underpaid, telling him that he needed to make any final purchases and get his ass out of the store so they could finally go home.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m just - I’m on my way out, I p-”
The words caught in his throat as he turned to find the person behind him was not wearing the signature red vest that all of the employees at this store wore. His first thought was - what was she wearing? The young woman standing in front of him might not have been an employee, but everything about her told him that she had to be a regular visitor to the craft-centric store. The garment draped over her shoulders couldn’t rightly be called a jacket or a coat by any conventional definition. It looked more like an expansive collection of mismatched, incongruous patches and swathes of disparate fabric that had been cobbled together into something roughly resembling an overcoat that was as colorful as it was garish and completely too large for the person wearing it. Either side of the flaps came down so low that they nearly dragged along the floor. The sleeves obscured the hands underneath. It was unfastened, too, revealing that the woman was wearing what looked like two blouses - one black, one white - that had been cut down the middle and a half of each sewn together. Her skirt looked as if it had been fashioned from the carpet of a bowling alley or an arcade, decorated with a pattern of bright, neon squiggles and shapes all mashed together senselessly on a black background. Underneath that, he could see even her sock were mismatched. One was striped with black and white. The other was red with black polka dots. The only matching articles of clothing she had were her shoes, which were a pair of heavy black boots with thick rubber soles that added an extra two inches to her height.
Jeremy’s eyes ran up from her boots, back up her body, and to a puzzling face. Her skin was pale, where it wasn’t stained with port-wine blotches of varying intensity, size, and even color. There was a large, shapeless splash of red on one cheek. A light pink splotch, on the bottom right corner of her chin. The one that seemed to be making an attempt to swallow her left eye was a pronounced, almost aggressive wine-dark purple. Her hair was bright red. Not red like a redhead, but red red. Like a fire truck or cherry candy. Tied into a thick, single braid draped over one shoulder. And, to top it all off, there was a bucket hat atop her head - presumably hand-made, like her coat, fashioned out of a motley mix of colorful sundry patches.
For as striking as her choice in fashion was, her face was anything but. The face beneath the shadow cast by the brim of her hat was plain. Not unpleasant, but unremarkable. In less eye-catching clothing - and without the mosaic of technicolor birth-marks - she wasn’t someone who’d catch his eye in a crowd. He noticed, too, that her eyes had a strange quality to them.
One was blue. One was an unnatural pink, suggesting she’d put a contact in just one for reasons that were as uncertain and obscure as why she’d chosen to go out dressed in something that looked like the world’s ugliest quilt that someone had repurposed as a coat.
He thought he noticed a sort of opalescence to them - like they were a thin image laid over something else. Like a thin film of gasoline reflecting with dull, kaleidoscopic colors atop a grimy rain puddle on the street.
He figured it was just the lenses of her glasses - an unflatteringly large number with thin rims shaped in circles that sat awkwardly on her freckled nose.
She was, in a word, bizarre. Eccentric seemed like a nicer word, but bizarre was the first that popped into Jeremy’s head. She was so unusual, so out of place, so alien in a way that exceeded her choice in apparel that he didn’t notice that she was smiling. Smiling with thin, almost colorless lips that were framed by almost imperceptibly pale mess of silver scar tissue.
He didn’t notice that she was holding something out for him to take, either. Not until she extended her hand a bit further, prompting him to look. She was wearing a pair of fingerless gloves so frayed and tattered that he would have thought she was homeless, if every nail on every finger hadn’t been carefully painted a different neon color. He almost overlooked the fact that she had a bundle of purple yarn in her hand.
The label was white, bearing the words, THIS YARN IS AWESOME!1 in bold, cartoonish blue print. But it wasn’t those words that caught Jeremy’s eye; it was the word Grape printed beneath them.
Jeremy blinked.
His eyes drifted back to those of the strange young woman. Her smile took a slightly apologetic bend. She seemed suddenly overcome with the sense that she was bothering him rather than helping him. She tilted her head at a slight angle and arched her brows, much darker than her bright hair, as if to say, This is what you were looking for, wasn’t it?
Wordlessly, hesitantly, Jeremy raised his own hand. It hovered above the yarn, but didn’t settle on it for a moment. He half-expected her to yank it away when he tried to take it. Yet, when he moved to pull it from her hand, her fingers remained still, and she let her arm slowly fall back to her side.
Jeremy studied the yarn. It was exactly what he’d been looking for. He looked back up the young woman. To his surprise, she was still there, and hadn’t disappeared as inexplicably as she’d appeared. His eyes continued to dart between the yarn and the girl, fully expecting her at any moment to vanish without a trace the moment he wasn’t looking at her.
She never did.
His lips worked soundlessly as he stared at the yarn.
“How… how did you know I was looking for this?”
The young woman’s hands began to move in a flurry of gestures that Jeremy recognized as sign language. And that was about all he knew. What she was trying to communicate, that was beyond him. He was under the impression that, at times, some deaf people would mouth the words to get their point across to people who didn’t understand sign language. She must not have been one of them - her lips remained pressed in a smile as her hands moved.
Jeremy chuckled. He wasn’t amused - just uncomfortable. He shook his head and, slowly, deliberately, spoke, making sure to enunciate the words so, hopefully, she could read his lips. “I - I’m sorry. I don’t - I don’t know sign language.”
He moved his hands in his own vague, meaningless gestures for reasons even he wasn’t aware of.
The girl seemed to understand. She nodded. She gestured more, but, if the shrugging she punctuated her signing with indicated anything, it seemed that she was saying, It was a lucky guess.
She flashed Jeremy a thumbs up with both hands and a broad, toothless smile, and walked away, disappearing around the corner of another aisle.
In a daze, he took the yarn to the counter. The barcode scanned just like any other would. He paid for it, took it in a plastic bag, and went out into his car. He sat there for a while, ruminating. Thinking. Studying the image of the odd young woman that he’d impressed into his mind’s eye.
As he drove back to the apartment, he told himself that she was a regular at the store. She had the yarn rack memorized and knew that he’d been staring at the space where the grape-colored yarn typically was. Maybe she had the last bundle. Maybe she knew where more was hidden. He told himself that was the case. It had to be. It was the only logical explanation he could devise.
But, that night, as he laid on the couch while Alexa slept in the bed, satisfied that she had her precious grape-colored yarn to work with the next day, he found himself thinking about angels for the first time since he was a child, for reasons he wasn’t comfortable admitting. Not even to himself.
“You’ve been fussing with humans again, haven’t you?”
The Witch of Stitches made no sign and made no sound to imply that she had. But, she didn’t imply the contrary, either. She sat there on a wooden stool, one as ill-fittingly small for her body as her patchwork coat was far too large for her sleight frame, and stroked nervously on a braid made from red yarn with leather palms and stitched fingers.
Striga frowned from beneath the wide, sagging brim of her hat. She pushed wrought-iron frame of her glasses back up the curved bridge of her freckled nose and turned back to the waxy and weathered yellow pages of the book she’d been studying. With a nail, long, sharp, and black like the talon of a carnivorous bird, she traced the last line of faded text she’d been reading.
“You’re wasting your time,” she said absently.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw her odd sister’s hands drift away from her yarn hair.
I was helping, she said with her hands.
Striga’s finger paused beneath the middle of a word. “And what would prompt you to do that?”
I just wanted to, the Witch of Stitches replied wordlessly.
“Yes, but why?” asked Striga. “What have any of them done for you to deserve your help?”
The Witch of Stitches’ hands remained still for a moment. Her button eyes betrayed no emotions, nor did her lips, threaded shut with coarse black bindings pulled taut and tight through the soft tissue of her lips.
They didn’t do anything for me. But it made me feel good to help.
Striga sighed through her nose. The others always said that the Witch of Stitches had cotton stuffing in her head instead of brains. It wasn’t true - at least, so far as Striga knew - but her sister acted in such a way that only ever seemed to prove otherwise.
“It didn’t make you feel good,” said Striga. “It made you feel useful. There’s a difference.”
I don’t understand.
Striga, for the second time in as many minutes, found herself unable to read. Perhaps it was her fault; she’d instigated the conversation. But, she also didn’t expect her sister to be so uncharacteristically gesticulative. Or dense.
“I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you,” said Striga. “But something that’s useful isn’t doing anything good when it’s used. It’s only doing what it’s supposed to do. No one is appreciative of - um. Er…” She glanced around her desk before her eyes settled on one of the candles on her desk. It couldn’t rightly be called a candle at this point, so much as a smoldering, charred wick and a puddle of half-melted wax pooled in a small metal dish. She took the dish and held it up for her sister to see.
“A candle isn’t good because it provides light. That’s just what it’s supposed to do. It serves a specific function and, when it doesn’t, it isn’t any more bad when it stops than it was good when it did so. It just does, or it does not. I don’t appreciate a candle because of what it does for me. I don’t respect it. I certainly don’t fear it. It just does what it does, which isn’t good, nor is it bad. It simply does. And when it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do anymore, I don’t thank it for having done it. Do you know what I do?”
With a single breath, what paltry flame still laboriously clinging to existence at the end of the wick disappeared, replaced by a thin, curling wisp of smoke. Then, Striga pulled out a dented metal bin from beneath her desk and, quietly, unceremoniously, dumped the spent and useless wax inside.
“I hope you understand what I’m saying.”
The Witch of Stitches nodded. Striga didn’t get the sense that she truly grasped what she was trying to communicate, but couldn’t bring herself to fret over it anymore than she already had. It wasn’t her place to. She wasn’t her sister’s keeper, and if her sister insisted on making herself useful to a breed of creatures as debased as humans, that was her own prerogative to follow.
She’d said her piece. Again, she pushed her heavy glasses back up, hunched over her desk, and scanned the page, looking for the last line she’d read. Thin, mousy brows furrowed over large, dark, and observant eyes.
She’d lost her spot again.
This was actually the first of them, before the idea took shape properly, which is why it’s markedly different from the others. But the puzzle pieces are still being laid out. Perhaps you can see the bigger picture forming.
Oh, and this is for
;)
The Yakubian Cinematic Universe will have Funko Pops once Funko acquiesces to my demands.
Based on the very real yarn brand, I LOVE THIS YARN!
Stitchy seems sweet and I feel sorry for her. I am intrigued by her story and looking forward to reading more about her.
I don't like this one as much as the uh Little Bomber Jacket stories, but you said it's a rough draft. It'll be interesting to see how you bring them together.