Happy spring, people!
As I’m learning to knit, I feel like I’m also learning some life lessons. At some point, I’ll put my thoughts together into their own blog post, but for today, please accept a continuation from last blog hop’s short story. And, as always, scroll to the bottom for more links to free stories from around the world!
Knot Safe
Of course I couldn’t find a decent parking space— the yarn shop here was hedged in by restaurants and nicknack shops, all vying for tourist attention, and all with too few parking spaces, so I’d ended up three blocks away.
The only reasons I risked the ally were, one— daylight, and two— old lady with yarn bag didn’t seem like a huge incentive for a mugger.
Sure, old lady was a bit presumptuous, but I certainly wasn’t twenty anymore, and having tended toward strong instead of willowy my entire life, I didn’t look like a typical victim. Add on top of that, the years of martial arts and other training, and I felt fairly safe.
And— after walking head up, confident and glaring, it wasn’t criminals who stopped me dead, but ghosts.
*
White fog shrouded the pile of blankets, clothes, and rags, doing nothing to obscure the scent of homelessness. The fog itself didn’t make sense— an odd knot almost hunched over as if somehow consuming the person beneath it, but when I squinted, the whitish stuff resolved into three different pale, transparent shapes.
Ghosts. Ones that used to be human and now turned to me with too-large mouths filled with too many sharklike teeth.
Okay.
I had practiced my knitting, though I hadn’t really practiced knitting ghosts since my visit with Jonesie. Could I walk on past these three? They weren’t hurting me or mine and I hadn’t been asked for help…
The person in the blankets moaned.
Did that count?
The haunts swooped down and their victim moaned again. I decided that was enough. Protect and Serve may have been a tarnished motto I’d retired from, but it was still part of me.
Cautiously, I drew out my long needles and edged a step closer, breathing slowly through my mouth. One of the spectors— clad in black rags like an extra from Christmas Story— ripped its jagged teeth away from its victim and turned toward me.
I swooped with my knitting needles and started a cable cast on. My “yarn” let me get three stitches in before it realized what I was doing. It tugged, then screamed.
The sound of it pierced through me— high-pitched, like a whistle, the sound stabbed through my eyes to the base of my skull. My hands tightened on the needles and for a moment, I couldn’t move.
But pain and I are old friends, so I gritted my teeth and knitted another stitch.
The other two ghosts turned away from their victim and fastened empty gazes on me.
I swallowed hard. I’d never added new yarn to a project, but— in theory— it ought to be like changing colors but also knitting with double-pointed needles… right?
Clutching my original two needles and four stitches in one hand— still a precarious start to the “project” at best— with my other hand, I fished out another knitting needle from my bag and tried to pretend it didn’t bother me that it was a different size from the first two.
Swoop. Swoop. Knit, knit, knit.
More screaming, in different pitches, and I kinda wondered if my brain would explode, but the three ghosts were all secured into my cast on. They felt like three different yarn weights, one double-wash wool, one cotton, one silk, in worsted, chunky, and fingering.
Sweating now, I turned my work and pearl-stitched across.
The longer I worked, the more the ghost-washcloth came together, and the fainter their screams. Still working carefully because overconfident usually ended with me frogging my work and starting over and I really, really didn’t think I could start this over, I knitted a row, pearled a row, then paused.
Not much “yarn” left now. Not much screaming, either.
“Bind off,” someone whispered in my ear.
I jerked, nearly losing the whole thing.
Recovered, whipped around.
No one.
Great— now I was hearing things. But whatever schizophrenic moment that had been, it sounded like a good idea. Maybe that was what I had missed during my first ghost foray.
Knit two, pull the first loop over the second and off the needles. Knit one, pull the first loop off.
The last stitch of my ghostly washcloth came off the needles, leaving me with a tiny tail of “yarn” I quickly tucked into the work. Then I held my breath and waited.
Silence.
*
After my ears stopped ringing from ghost screams— though was it really my ears, if no one else heard them?— and my lungs started to burn, I tentatively took a breath and started to believe I’d actually done it.
The alley echoed emptily around me, until a mumbled, “Quiet, so quiet,” came from the person on the ground.
With a tiny sigh for my planned yarn purchase, I extracted some money from my wallet and pressed it into their hand. “Get something to eat,” I said softly, then turned back the way I’d come.
I’d had enough knitting for one day.
Blog Hop Story Links:
II’m not Late. Really, I’m not! by Katharina Gerlach
Priceless Treasure by James Clapp
Ridesharing by Gina Fabio
and my apologies - I missed one! Before Sunrise by Angelica Medlin
