The thread is loose, the thread is loose. And there’s no tying it up. Or maybe there is. Melodious Elodie could take her half-fingered glove, the injured one whose woolen gut is cut and streaming, to the hospital.
In the back of the Ripping Yarns knitting shop/classroom/bookstore sits an old woman. Her face is crinkled near the eyes and you can tell by her still-shapely lips that she’s had many lovers over the years. Elodie suspects even now that Señora Sueños is still in the game.
“Is that your real name?” Elodie hands over the midnight blue unraveling hand warmer. A trail of winter sky tumbles out.
Señora nods and indicates that Elodie should sit. She does and immediately drags towards her a knitting magazine lying in the middle of the large table.
Green ripply scarves like seaweed. Pale pink angora wrist warmers. Mitten caps folded over half-hand gloves. Just plain stretchy gloves. More scarves, droopy hats, crocheted berets, flowing vests, snug shrugs. Elodie flips through them all while Madame Dreams does her magic with small gauge needles.
Señora humphs, “This is not so bad. See here? You must have snagged it on something.”
Elodie remembers, like a close-up in a movie. An illuminated round circle in which her gloved hand is seen zipping up the coat of her fine young man. “I’m caught,” she recalls herself saying to Roger, laughing and lilting, as she was snagged by the pinky finger’s midnight blue thread.
She unzipped Roger’s coat just enough to free the naughty thread and to reveal the hickey on his neck, right above the collar bone where her mouth had not been lately.
In that cinematic circle, she saw the end. She did not say a word, but sent Roger out into the cold, promising to see him that evening.
It is four thirteen and the sun is getting ready to split. It’s shuffling its papers, cleaning out the paper clips, shredding the pile of doomed pages into diamond-cut confetti. The sun is making personal calls and checking out Facebook and is deciding what projects cannot possibly be done by five. The sun is prioritizing projects for tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Elodie looks up to see Señora Sueños clipping off a minute bit of midnight blue. How did she have anything left over? Elodie makes a fuss and thanks her in English and Spanish for this ordinary milagro. A glove restored.
And leaving Ripping Yarns, blessing Señora with a tip on top of her repair fee, Elodie walks out into the problem of Roger. Over and Out. She knows she will not meet him at the café for dinner. She will not return his calls. She will just let him go. A glove restored, she could believe in, rolling her fingers in their now complete warmth. But love restored? Elodie thought that other woman’s mark on Roger’s body had cut her loose. The unraveled thread had snapped her free.
