Crewel

Amie is a baby and I cling to her, but the tighter I hold her, the more she disappears. I can’t protect her. I see her rewoven, now a young girl with wispy blonde braids. I wave to her, and she stares through me. I am the one who’s gone. I’m the ghost.

A large white cake the size of a loom rests on a simple table and under it my father melts into a pool of sticky black liquid that oozes closer and closer to my bare feet. He calls for help, but I’m too scared of getting my shoes dirty, so I watch as he fades into nothing.

And in the background of the dreams, Jost stands frozen. Only the blink of his eyes shows that he’s awake and watching, waiting for me to help him. But when I step toward him, I see her, more beautiful than me – laughing and pregnant – holding his hand, and I look away. When I turn, he shifts into Erik, whose free arms stretch out to me, beckoning for me to come to him.

I erase and rebuild the world in my sleep, and in the morning I try to remember how to rebuild myself. Every day I wonder how I can go back to the loom. Can I keep weaving now that I know? I can’t erase Jost’s story. I had nothing to do with it, but that doesn’t change anything. I’m still a Spinster.

Jost comes daily to salve my hands with renewal cream, and they heal quickly, but no stylists come. A week has passed and even Enora is absent, and I wonder if I’ve gotten her in trouble, too. Food continues to arrive at meal hours. I stay in my nightdress, lounging by the fire, and living for the minutes when Jost comes to check on me. Today he brings lunch, and we eat together. The conversation sounds light, but only because we’re speaking in code. Some of our stories we can share openly, but the things I really want to know can’t be spoken out loud where surveillance might pick up our words. We can only spend so much time in the bathroom – where the sound of running water hides our voices – without raising alarm, but despite my attempts to steer all conversation toward his plans, he seems more interested in me.

‘It wasn’t a real fight.’ I laugh as I continue a story about my neighbour Beth. ‘She was bullying Amie, and I was tired of it. So I sort of knocked her over.’

‘But you loved your kid sister, right?’ Jost presses. ‘It sounds like you two got into trouble a lot.’

‘Amie followed the rules better than I did, so when I did anything that could get us in trouble, she freaked out,’ I say. ‘When I fought with Beth she worried that I’d be taken away for deviance counselling.’

‘But you weren’t,’ he says.

‘I wasn’t, but Beth was.’ I had forgotten that until now. It was one of those memories that stuck in your head although you tried to push it back and ignore it. Beth had gone away when we were twelve, and when she came back, she was different. Just as unfriendly, but not with me – with everyone.

‘My big brother was only ten months older than me,’ he says, calling back to the conversation. ‘My mom called us hooligans.’

I smile at that, but then my eyes widen as I do the math. ‘Ten months?’

His grin gets a little more crooked. ‘Not a lot to do in a poor fishing village.’

I know more about babies and stuff than most girls my age. Well, I guess the other girls in Romen would have started marriage-preparation courses now. That’s where they tell you about sex. Of course, my parents told me about the birds and the bees in excruciating and embarrassing detail years ago. Another one of their best-laid plans to make sure I understood my world. But sitting here with a guy who makes me tingle all over, in the Coventry where the ‘privileges of marriage’, as my mom called them, were way off-limits, that info was pretty useless. And then there was the fact that he had first-hand experience that I would never have. It was definitely time for a change in conversation.

‘So you were a hunter?’ I ask, returning back to our code and carelessly scooping rice into my mouth: my bandaged hands still proving a nuisance to fine motor skills – and forks.

Jost nods, serious again. ‘I was interested in large game. The kind that feeds a lot of people and brings in money.’

‘What kinds of animals constitute large game?’ I keep my voice casual. No companel would detect anything unusual – or even interesting – this way.

‘Bears and cougars, mostly.’

‘You can eat bears and cougars?’ I screw up my face in mock disgust.

‘Ad, you can eat anything if you’re hungry enough.’ Jost grins over a chicken leg.

The conversation falters, and we lapse into silence as we eat. Hunger is not an issue to discuss, even in code. It borders on treason, because the Guild claims there is no hunger. I lived on the borders of a large metro with my family and both my parents were assigned work, so although our meal rations were never exciting, we didn’t want. Jost, however, worked hard for his food and many in his small village went without, save for the kindness of the fishermen, but even that was limited to what was left after they had delivered their quotas to the Guild.

But of course Jost never hunted a day in his life. He worked fifteen-hour days to feed his family and a handful of neighbours, but at sea. I know this because during the brief distractions we can call up, we’ve established a few code words. It’s been trial and error, with more than a few misunderstandings, but we’re getting better at the double talk. The bears are ministry officials and cougars are Spinsters. Jost is looking for who is responsible for the attacks on the women of Saxun. What he’s planning to do when he finds out, we haven’t figured out a code for, and I’m not sure I care to know.