Free Homespun by Layla M. Wier

out his
    fingers, still stiff from the day’s work, the blisters stinging.
    Lightly he traced a fingertip around the left ring finger, shuddered, and let his hand drop.
    He’d spent his whole life trying not to be encumbered.
    Blazing his own path. Doing things his way. Kerry Ruehling, KayRay, guerilla artist, tattooed and pierced and 100%
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    fucking queer. He’d done everything he’d been told not to do by his parents and by society. He’d gone out there and become who he was going to be, no matter what anyone said about it. He was proud of that. Being shunned by mainstream society meant he was doing something right.
    And now, here he was at forty-two, and somehow the chains had settled on him anyway—chains of family and responsibility and pain.
    Many miles away, his father was dying. Might be dead already. Owen, Kerry thought, would drop everything and go.
    Because family was everything to Fortescues.
    His family had never been like theirs. He wasn’t a Fortescue. But somehow, Kerry had absorbed them, or been absorbed by them.
    I came up here to get away from everything. Running away, not running to. But I ended up making both of you part of me anyway.
    He picked up one of the damp swatches of pink-
    spattered wool, smoothed it with his fingers, and then tucked it into his pocket. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was something to remember the farm by, if he didn’t come back.
    Maybe it was a promise that he would come back. All he knew was it felt right. He rearranged the other tufts of wool so the missing one didn’t leave a hole.
    Then he retrieved his backpack, closed the door quietly behind him, and walked down to the road in the dark. There wouldn’t be many cars going by at this hour, but there had to be something eventually. And if not, he could just walk until the sun came up. He’d done it before.

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    OWEN was a stress spinner. He always had been, ever since he and Nancy had bought their first sheep and he found himself unexpectedly hooked. Laura was more into the dyeing and fabric-arts side of things, but Owen liked the physical activity of drawing the fibers from a mass of raw wool into a tidy, useful length of yarn.
    The farm’s yarn and unspun wool inventory had started out in a big antique dresser, but had quickly outgrown it and was now sorted into plastic Walmart bins, stacked to the ceiling against the living-room wall. Each was neatly labeled with the year, type of wool, dye information, and anything else that Owen and Laura thought might be pertinent. Laura kept a running tally of the number of skeins in each of the yarn bins as she sold them off.
    But the actual amount of yarn and wool in the house far outstripped the storage space. Kerry had jokingly observed that you couldn’t turn around anywhere on the Fortescue place without tripping over yarn, and Owen thought he might be right, whether it was a half-finished skein, or a wad of wool with one end partly twisted into a piece of crude single-ply yarn, or any of numerous unfinished knitting, weaving and crochet projects. Most of these were Laura’s, since she was the fiber-crafter of the family, but some were Owen’s as well. Yarn, dyes, and hanks of fiber lived on shelves, in closets, on the coffee table and the living-room chairs and sometimes even the floor.
    Tonight, Owen delved into one of the drawers in the old dresser. They might have long since abandoned it in favor of more up-to-date and organized storage systems, but the drawers still contained a hodgepodge of old yarns and fibers, some of it going back twenty years and more. Mashed skeins of yarn in plastic Ziploc bags. Wads of wool with dead flies in Homespun | Layla M. Wier
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    it, crammed into corners. Faded colors and long-abandoned dye lots, all waiting to be rediscovered.
    Owen dug out handfuls of old wool and heaped it next to the spinning wheel. There would be no commercial value in this yarn, made from mismatched