deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: Leaving a needle in a barren field called the Seamstress. She would st

deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: Leaving a needle in a barren field called the Seamstress. She would stay until the work you requested was done. I.Lely stomped out of the yard and let the gate slam shut behind him. His brother had of course yelled at him again to just learn how to sew, or at least wait for more clothes that needed mending so that more work might be gotten out of the Seamstress, but what was he to do with the massive rent in his trousers that the goat had made? Walk around til then with half his ass cheek showing? He was carrying his work trousers draped over one arm at the moment, could put his fist through the hole and splay out his fingers like some pale anemone unfolding from a cleft. What a miser his brother was, Lely thought. All for the price of a needle, which he had needed to discreetly pinch from their sewing-kit! Yes, yes, it was true, one needle could repair many pairs of pants - a lifetime’s worth, quite possibly, if one learned how to sew - but did that account for the cost of thread, and for the labor? Might as well bake your own bread, then, and cobble your own shoes, and dip your own candlewicks into wax! What a paltry cost a needle was, for a convenience such as this! Lely came to the barren field. The people who complained about it were much like his brother, he thought. What a waste it was, they cried, that a field should be left barren! And all for what, to put the tailor out of business? So lustily productive, all of them, such efficient-minded folk! But that ignored that the ground was thin, and not good for planting, and in any case it was simpler to maintain a barren field than a tailor’s shop, and so what had they been complaining about to begin with? He let out a breath and regained his composure, and threaded out the needle from the trouser fabric where he had stuck it. He bent and carefully planted the needle into the ground, point first, so that its eye stuck out and winked brightly up to the sky. Lely stepped back, idly letting his trouser legs sway from his arm, waiting. Soon enough, a shadow fell across the field, and Lely looked up to the sound of wings descending. The Seamstress dropped down from the sky, folding her wings away like a carpetbag snapping shut, her greedy head darting down to pluck the needle from the soil. She looked up at Lely, the needle dangling from between her teeth, tilting her head this way and that to study him with her fixed black eyes. “Yes, just a quick patch job, thank you,” said Lely, holding out his trousers. “Nothing much. I need this sewn up if I’m to work tomorrow.” He held the trousers out to her as she extended one stilt-like leg, balancing perfectly on the other as she crooked it over itself like a towel rack, and Lely draped his trousers across the bar and backed away. Now this was how it was meant to be, Lely thought as he watched her work. From her feathers she drew out a length of thread, hooking it through the needle with a twist of her teeth and tongue, From there her head bobbed up and down in rapid motions, the needle flashing back and forth as she closed the tear in neat even stitches, her long thin toes bent backwards to hold the fabric in place. It was nothing, half a minute and she was done, flinging his trousers back at him so quickly that he almost failed to catch them, her wings bursting out again into flight as she fell up into the sky and out of sight. Just good, quality work, thought Lely, as he ran his finger over the neat line of stitches that made an almost invisible seam. He swung his arms as he walked back home, his good mood restored. His pants were repaired finer than he could have ever hoped to have done on his own, and the Seamstress would go on to add another needle to her bristling silver nest, and everyone was the better off for it. What a stodgy fool his brother was, he thought. What was there to be gained, really, by doing everything by yourself? II.Martin Grueller looked out at his barren field and sighed. There was nothing to it. Nothing more that could be done. He toyed with the needle in his hands as he talked to himself, pressing the point into his calloused fingertips so that it stuck there, the shiny steel extending painlessly from his flesh as if the whole digit itself had been made numb. It was the way of the world, he told himself. What other recourse did the poor have, and if they were not meant to have this recourse then why should the Seamstress exist? He looked over to his neighbor’s fertile fields, the ground flush with green leaves, and the potatoes growing hearty beneath the soil. The lights from his neighbor’s house glowed cozily in the dusk. No doubt they were having dinner, him and his family. The Van der Bergs had a winsome little girl, not more than six. Grueller dug the needle point deeper into his skin, closed his eyes. He looked up again at his empty field, and felt the withered earth of it in his stomach. They could have avoided this so easily, he told himself, all by not leaving him a barren field. He stood up and walked in trembling footsteps to the center of his field. He crouched and dug his thumb into the dry earth, twisting it to make a hole for planting, and then dropped the needle in. Grueller folded the soil back in over the hole, his hands trembling, and then stood to back away. Her pointed fingertips sprouted first from the soil, and then her hands then wrists then spindly silvery arms and then the rest of her, the Seamstress clawing deeper into the soil to dig herself out of it, rising with the mechanical climb of thresher blades, her stilt-like limbs splayed out from the barren earth like needles from a callus. She regarded Grueller, clicking at him peckishly with her scissor blade mandibles, head jerking from side to side as if suspended by a thread. Grueller felt his throat clench up, steeled himself. “Seamstress,” he managed to say. “I have called you here to -” He swallowed. “To make my fields fertile.” She laughed then and threw her head back, a terrible sound like a box of loose knives. “Is that my work, Martin Grueller?” she cried out mockingly. “Is that my work to be done until it is complete?” He opened his mouth. “I - Yes.” The Seamstress laughed again, then crouched low and scuttled off in a flurry of motion. Where she trod, her silver limbs punched into the soil, tore it up again aerated, stitched it into neat furrows and rows. She ran like a madwoman across his field, pinching the dirt together into tight seams, and then she leapt the fence and crossed into the Van der Bergs’ fields. Over and around she went, the green of the Van der Bergs’ potato plants threading into Grueller’s soil, their fields stitched to his until they were a single patchwork thing, her forelimbs going snip-snip-snip and cutting to pieces and stitching back together, her pattern leading her implacably to the house with the cozy glowing lights. “That’s enough!” Grueller cried, finding his voice. “That’s enough! It’s more than enough!” But the work was not done, and the Seamstress did not stop. Grueller closed his eyes. The screams rose around him until they became intolerable, and the world was filled with a tornado of snipping blades and needles plunging down again, again, again, stitching flesh to flesh and property to property, and then Grueller was swept up himself and heard his own screams escaping his throat, until the tear was stitched up neatly and he was pinned firmly into place so that everything came to a halt.Grueller opened his eyes. The Seamstress was gone. Her work was done. He was standing on his porch - the porch of the Van der Bergs’ house - looking out at his fields full of potatoes, that seemed to stretch out forever, as far as eye could see, the horizon a perfect seam between the earth and sky. Grueller turned around, and looked at the Van der Bergs’ door, the lights still glowing through the windows but with an uneasy silence behind it, and with a trembling hand reached for the doorknob, paused for a moment, turned it, and with half-closed eyes went back into his home. III. Aakkerman hovered the pointed tip of his pen above the empty page, and then sighed and let his pen drop. He pushed back his chair, pacing the narrow garret that he rented, lay down on the thin mattress of his bed and refused to look at the desk in the adjacent corner, hoping that some idea might be dislodged now that he had removed himself from his work. It did no good. The oil lamp painted the room a jaundiced yellow, the wind whistled tunelessly through the cracks and the gloom seeped in through the window high up by the rafters. His editor would be expecting his manuscript by morning, and all his efforts lay in crumpled sheets of paper strewn around the floor. The story refused to coalesce into a whole. He had managed to produce a handful of snippets, some semblance of a theme - the needle, the barren field, the Seamstress, something to do with economics and the nature of work, perhaps - but there was no thread he had found that could tie them all together. He sat up again and looked defeatedly back at his desk. The Seamstress was seated at it, staring at him. Aakkerman started. Her face was the same pallid color as the paper, her eyes wide and enormous, her gray hair pulled back into a bun with streaks of inky black penned through it. She wore a black feathered shawl and had pointed quill fingers, and her teeth when she smiled were shot through with glints of steel. Aakkerman darted his eyes around for any clue to her existence, and saw a snaking black trail leading from her dress towards the blank piece of paper he had left on the desk, the pen’s point still resting on it. Aakkerman frowned. “A needle, that? And an empty sheet, a barren field?” He shook his head. “This seems to me to be contorting the symbolism beyond all reason.”    The Seamstress simply regarded him patiently, much like a governess would a sulking child, with firm authority and an awaiting duty. Aakkerman groaned and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, grimacing, spots swimming in his vision. “Fine, then! You are my muse. I accept it. I make the deal, or pay the price, or however it is this works. I need between 2,000 and 2,500 words, of publishable quality, yes? Get to it, then. Get to work.” The Seamstress stood, moving with an efficient grace as she bent to snatch up the various papers Aakkerman had strewn across the floor, with great care smoothing them out on his desk, lifting them up to peer at them and rearranging them together. Aakkerman watched with grudging interest as her long pointed nails tapped rapidly against the paper, snatching up clean sheets from his ream and quickly filling them with narrow marks like chicken scratch, that quickly filled in to become letters, and then words. The violent hailstorm of her fingernails filled the narrow room, echoing off the ceiling. Finally she gathered all the pages together and stood, presenting to him the finished manuscript with a faintly mocking bow. Aakkerman took it despite his wariness, quick to flip through the pages. Yes, this part seemed familiar, and that. It was the pieces of his story, snipped apart and put together in a more pleasing order, but here was the idiot with the torn pants again, and here was the poor farmer, and … “Hold on!” Aakkerman cried, filled with a growing indignation. “You’ve done nothing! These are just the pieces I’ve already wrote, bluntly stitched together! You’ve numbered them, and put them in order - so what? There’s still no theme connecting them, nothing but a set of recurring symbols that mean something different every time -” He looked up from the manuscript to glare at the Seamstress directly, to see only his empty desk and sparsely-furnished room. “Where -?” He swiveled his head around, looked upward, to see the Seamstress perched soundlessly on the rafters, already opening the window for her escape. “You can’t do this!” he cried up at her, shaking the sheaf of papers in his hand. “It’s one of the fundamental parts of your nature! You must stay until the work is done!” He thought he saw the glint of her grin again, and then she was crouched through and into the darkness and the window clattered shut. Aakkerman was left alone in the garret. He let his hands hang at his sides in disbelief, and then sat back down heavily on his bed, wordless. The Seamstress’ manuscript was still clutched in his fist. He stared down at it, unfolded it again, flipped through it once more. No, there was no theme or cohesion to it at all, but still … The stories were still competent, yes? And the repeated motifs might lure people in, might they not? They might feel the instinctive urge to search out a connection between the stories, now that they were all stitched together, and with a reader inquisitive and inventive enough, God willing, they might even find one. Aakkerman took his time to read through the manuscript again, considering it with a more forgiving eye. It was entertaining enough, the individual parts of it, even though they did not particularly fit together, and people might read it willingly and even be entertained. It might suffice, might it not? Before he could question himself any further, he stood and stuffed the manuscript into a thick yellow envelope and clattered downstairs to ask his landlady to mail it off to his editor. As he came back up he sighed and slumped on his chair and stared dejectedly at his writing desk and all the blank sheets of paper staring back at him. Aakkerman shook his head and blew out the lamp and in the darkness crawled into his narrow bed and went to sleep. -- source link

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