The Seamstress

The Seamstress

The bite didn’t hurt. Not then.

It happened in the fluorescent purgatory of my apartment building’s laundry room, 2:17 AM, chasing the last load of perpetually damp socks. I’d heard the skittering – not rats, too light, too wrong – near the ancient, groaning dryer. Turning, I saw it.

It wasn’t big. A creature the size of a large cat, but built like a collapsed accordion made of living shadow. Its form shifted, refusing to hold still, a negative space that somehow was. No eyes, just two deeper pits that drank the light. It moved in stutter-steps, like a film reel skipping, leaving afterimages that didn’t fade for a second. Its limbs were too many, folding and unfolding in impossible geometries. And it had no reflection in the long, smudged mirror above the sinks. Not even a blur.

Fear locked my joints. It didn’t snarl. It didn’t leap. It simply… unzipped the air between us. Not a sound, but a sudden, silent tear in reality, like fabric parting. Before I could scream, it was there, cool and dry as static against my wrist. Two needle-sharp points, impossibly cold, pricked my skin. Not punctures, but stitches. Two neat, bloodless holes sealed instantly with a faint, frosty shimmer.

Then it was gone. Not through the door, not under a machine. It simply zipped the air behind it and vanished, leaving only the smell of ozone and forgotten attics.

I washed my wrist. No mark. Just a persistent chill where the stitches had been. I went home, convinced sleep deprivation and cheap coffee had finally cooked my brain.

The changes started subtly the next morning. I reached for my coffee mug – ceramic, chipped handle – and my fingers… slipped through it. Not through the liquid, but through the solid ceramic itself, like dipping a hand into thick water. I yanked back, heart hammering, but the mug sat whole, steaming innocently. I tried again. Deliberate thought. Focus. My index finger pressed against the mug’s side, and for a fraction of a second, the reality of the mug yielded. My finger sank in an inch, feeling the gritty texture of unformed clay deep within, smelling sun-baked earth. Then it snapped back, solid.

This wasn’t ghosting. This was… seam-picking.

I discovered I could see the seams. Not just in objects, but in everything. The air hummed with fine, hair-thin lines of shimmering potential – the “stitch-marks” holding reality together. A dropped pen? Its trajectory was traced by a glowing seam of possibility. A crack in the sidewalk? It pulsed with the frayed thread of instability. The human face? A complex, shifting tapestry of emotional seams – anger a jagged red thread, sadness a slow-dripping blue one.

My ability wasn’t flight or strength. It was unraveling. I could gently tug on these seams. Not destroy, necessarily, but edit.

Stuck in traffic? I’d focus on the seam of stasis binding the gridlock ahead. A subtle nudge – not breaking it, just loosening a single knot – and magically, the car ahead would suddenly reverse, creating a gap. Lost my keys? I’d trace the frayed seam of their forgotten location, tugging the thread of my memory just enough to recall they were in the freezer (why? Don’t ask). I mended a friend’s torn wedding photo by weaving the frayed paper seam back together with a thought, the tear vanishing as if it never existed.

It was miraculous. And terrifying.

Because with every tiny edit, every seam I touched, I lost something. Not physical things. Memories.

The first time I mended the photo, the scent of my grandmother’s lavender soap – a scent I’d carried since childhood – vanished from my mind, utterly gone. Like a page ripped from a book. Another time, untangling a complex knot in a fishing net (a reflexive act of seam-picking), I forgot how to ride a bicycle. The mechanics felt alien, terrifying.

The bite was a needle. The creature was a tailor. And I was the fabric, being subtly, irrevocably altered. Each use of its gift was a trade: a moment of impossible control for a piece of myself, unraveled and lost to the void.

Last night, I saw it again. Or rather, a ripple in the air, a stutter-step in the shadows outside my window. It wasn’t hostile. It watched. Like a weaver checking on a half-finished tapestry.

I’m sitting here now, staring at my hands. They look ordinary. But I see the delicate, glowing seams tracing the bones, the pulsing threads of my own existence. My coffee mug sits before me, its ceramic surface crisscrossed with a million potential fractures.

Do I reach for it? My hand itches to feel the weave beneath the surface. To know it, to maybe reshape it. But the price… What will vanish next? The taste of rain? The sound of my own laugh? The memory of my mother’s face?

The creature didn’t curse me. It sutured me to something… else. A dimension of pure structure and potential. I’m not a superhero. I’m a living needle. A seamstress of reality, stitching and unstitching with every trembling thought, paid for in the currency of my own soul’s fabric.

And the chilling truth? I’m starting to like the feeling of the threads beneath my mental fingertips. The unraveling is getting easier. And I can’t remember what I’m afraid of losing anymore.

The mug wobbles. Just slightly. A seam I brushed without meaning to. I reach out. Not to drink. To feel the unraveling. The cost be damned. What’s left of me wants to know how deep the tapestry goes.