The Tangled Skein
Two weeks into my retirement and I was already going crazy.
Running and weights every morning kept me to some sort of routine, though afternoons usually found me staring into a tea mug and wondering if today was the day I would fill it with booze and start the bender that would end my life.
So far, every day, I’d resisted the temptation.
But wisps of white caught the edges of my vision day and night, and I was starting to think alcohol was the viable option.
“Pity that store is closed,” I mumbled to myself as I limped to a halt on the sidewalk. I’d already run this morning, but after lunch, sheer desperation had thrust me out of the house for yet another walk around the block, and now the knee was bothering me, having gone from sharp, stabby pains to numb and back again. If the shop was open, I could go in and distract myself from another long afternoon.
Birds sang and spring flowers bloomed and a bit of white fabric whooshed by the edge of my peripheral—
I spun.
Nothing.
“Stupid brain,” I grumbled. “Stupid store hours. Should be open. Owner should hire me to work the hours they’re not.” I glared at the store as if I could make it open by force of will.
Nestled between a piano bar— also closed— and a hair salon— open but currently unnecessary— the store I was glaring at boasted a sign reading The Tangled Skein and glints of colorful yarn peeked through the dark windows as if staring back at me.
“I could make something with yarn,” I told it. “I could. Might be nice to hold something physical in my hands and know I’d made it myself…”
As if my determination had forced it, an Open sign flickered on.
Yes!
As if drawn by magic, my feet carried me across the generous parking lot to the door. It opened easily under my hand and a bell jingled cheerfully.
“Good afternoon, welcome in!” a voice called from somewhere deeper in.
A rainbow of colors everywhere and light streaming in from the windows, cathedral-like. Instead of dust and death and incense, tea and sugar cookies and a faint vinegar.
My fingers touched— soft, scratchy, squishy, skinny and medium sized and thick yarns, and some with flecks and some with sparkles and some solid and others mixed—
A flash of white again and I turned, but it was an ancient Caucasian woman, about five-foot-two and rounded, with the kind of ropy forearm muscles that shouted I used to be strong! and silver, straight, chin-length hair, holding a bundle a white, cloud-like yarn and smiling at me. “Hello, hello,” she said softly. Her gaze latched onto mine as if she was weighing my soul.
I smiled brightly to hide darkness and bone-deep exhaustion.
“You’ve not been in before.”
“No.” I gestured helplessly. “I don’t know anything about this. But I’d like to learn.”
She smiled broadly and handed me the cloud. “Yarn is good for banishing ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. She sounded a bit— “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Don’t you?” Her eyes flicked over my shoulder.
I twisted to make sure no one had come up behind me.
“Come on back and have a seat and I’ll teach you,” she said easily.
As much as I tried, I couldn’t keep my tone from shading toward sardonic. “About ghosts?”
Over her shoulder, she said, “About knitting. Or crochet. Whichever you prefer.”
*
The owner of the store, Hattie, taught me the simplest crochet stitch and explained that she couldn’t hire me because the store was closing. She was simply too old to keep running it.
And offered to sell it to me— the yarn, the building, the name.
The ghosts.
Persistent hints and a sly smile, but for an instant, she looked like a ghost, faintly transparent and glowing.
I focused on my practice square, felt the smooth wood of the hook under my fingers, the softness of the yarn. Smelled the faint vinegar Hattie confirmed a local dyer used to set dye, tasted a sliver of iron and fear in my mouth. Maybe I was going crazy.
But Hattie took the practice square from me, said, “Feel this,” and with flying fingers, finish the edge. She knotted the last stitch, slid the leftover yarn into a needle and wove it through the knots, and, I almost heard a sigh. Then I felt inexplicably warmer.
“What—?”
“One of your ghosts, dear,” she said challengingly. “You’re holding onto them tightly. But I took that one and sent it on to its rest.”
*
“You can feel them, a bit, already,” she told me as I gaped. “You can buy the store and take my place.”
“As a ghostbuster?”
Hattie’s lips press together. “Nothing like those silly movies. We don’t trap ghosts. We are the heroes who help them pass on—”
“What, like a chosen one?”
Hattie snorted and her eyes gleamed. “Bullshit.”
I gaped at her, but this Hattie felt more real than the saccharine-sweet one.
“Bullshit,” she repeated acerbically. “No such thing as a chosen one or special bloodlines or any of that garbage. Nothing chooses you. You choose. Choose to take on this shop, choose to help people, choose to banish—”
“Ghosts,” I finished.
She chuckled under her breath. “At least the nasty ones, yes.”
“With yarn.”
“Yes. I’ll teach you.”
Protect and serve, just in a different way than before.
“Oh, why not. I need a retirement gig.” Still didn’t believe in ghosts, but I’d buy her store and learn to knit and crochet both, and see how long she held on to her delusions. I held out my hand to shake.
She slapped a pen into it, shoved papers across the table. “Sign,” she demanded.
The contract I skimmed— under her gimlet eye— seemed fairly straightforward, so I signed.
When I raised my head, ghosts filled the store.
