By Allison Wyss
There was once a witch who didn’t know how to sew, but she tried to anyway. She wanted to make a child–a daughter, to be precise. And she had all the materials necessary: a heart, a tuna fish sandwich, a bolt of common corduroy. How hard could it be, she thought. She pulled a needle from a cushion. Or maybe it was from a heart. She threaded it with a thin strip of starlight. And then she began.
One stitch then cross it. Two stitch then star it. Three stitch then wrap around. Around. Around.
The witch chanted as she sewed, but also she let her mind drift. She let it drift in the way of magic, knowing that when she reached the trance of daydream, the dreams would take hold and the daughter would live.
But as the witch’s mind wandered, as her fingers stitched (and bloodied a bit–she had no skill and also no thimble), and as her lips mumbled the spell, a spider was hard at work just above her.
The spider was spinning a web. The spider was re-spinning the web that the witch had knocked from the ceiling. The spider was re-spinning the web with vengeance because it been knocked, so cruelly, down.
The witch ought to have known better. The spider ought to have known better too. You ought to know better than to finish this tale. For it is grisly and nobody makes it out.
One stitch then cross it. Two stitch then star it. Three stitch then wrap around. Around. Around.
The spider dropped slowly down her long thread of web and dangled above the head of the witch, whose mind was elsewhere. Her mind was in a field of poppies. Her mind was in a spaceship, zooming through stars. Her mind was in a memory from childhood of her mother sewing a dress that she did not want to wear.
Her needle bit her finger more often than its mark. There was so much blood.
The spider sensed the blood and lowered further.
Around. Around. Around the stitching witch. Cross the witch. Star the witch. One stitch and start again.
The spider spun the web around the legs of the chair and the witch’s legs that fell between them. The spider spun the web over the lap of the witch and the scraps of daughter that lay there. The spider spun the web around the stitching fingers and up over the witch’s shoulders and all the way to the top of the witch’s pointed hat.
The blood seeped through but that was fine, the spider thought. It often did.
Inside the web, the witch still sewed and her daughter took shape, bright like a star and filled with the zoom of space and the red of poppies and the memory of a dress she’d never be made to wear. The daughter sat on her mother’s lap. And her witch-mother stayed inside her dreaming and her memories as the spider spun around and around and around.
Somehow inside that shroud, the whole universe fit. And the witch died and so did her newly sewn daughter, but neither of them stopped dreaming in that universe of stars and poppies and dresses they refused to wear.
The spider was glad to be on the outside of the shroud, still living. There was no sweet daughter on her lap or the zoom of space or the red of poppies. There was no dream in that cobwebbed room or place to make one. But there were surfaces to cover and bugs to eat and isn’t revenge better than happiness, anyway?
Allison Wyss is the author of the short story collection, Splendid Anatomies (Veliz Books), which was a finalist for the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Some of her ideas about the craft of fiction can be found in a monthly column she writes for the Loft Literary Center, where she also teaches classes. Find her at www.allisonwyss.com.
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