Free The Thread by Ellyn Sanna Page A

thread slides between her gnarled fingers as it feeds onto the wheel from a pointed distaff that’s hazy with swirls of golden fiber.
    “Who are you?” I’m still holding tight to the thread that vibrates within my hand. The thread seems to tug at my hand, as though it’s urging me closer to the old woman. As my eyes grow more accustomed to the light, though, I’m aware again of my own wet clothes, my hair hanging in strings around my face.
    For the first time, I pull back on the thread, unwilling to go any closer. My legs are suddenly weak; they shake, buckle, and I drop on my knees onto the wooden floor. “Who are you?” I ask again, louder this time, squinting up through the light to see the woman’s face.
    It’s lined and worn; when she smiles, her wrinkles pucker and deepen, and her eyes look out at me from between the folds, as dark and shiny as blackberries. “I have many names, child. For now, you can call me Grandmother.”
    I sit back on my heels and try to make sense of what’s happening. “Am I asleep?”
    She cocks her head at me, and her eyes catch the light. For a moment, they’re silver instead of black. “Do you think you’re asleep?”
    I consider this for a moment. In some ways, this definitely feels like a dream, a scene my brain has conjured from one of my daydreams: a fairy godmother spinning gold in the shadows of an old castle; an enchantress casting a spell with a shining wheel that turns round and round in the darkness. And yet the floor feels hard under my knees, and the shut-up musty smell of the thirteenth floor fills my nostrils. My sweatpants and sweatshirt are damp against my skin, and my hair drips little dark circles onto the dusty floor.
    “I don’t know,” I say finally. “I don’t think so.”
    “It doesn’t really matter, you know.” When she looks at me, her smile is so kind that my eyes fill with tears, and I duck my head, embarrassed. “Dreams can be just as real as the rest of life—and sometimes, life can be just as unreal as dreams. What’s real is always simply this.” She nods her chin at the wheel that never stops its spinning.
    “What is it?”
    “Hmm, well . . .” Her face creases into countless laughter lines, so many smile-shaped wrinkles that she must have spent the last hundred years or so laughing. “It has many names, just as I do.”
    She moves her hand up and down along the thread that feeds from the wheel. As I watch, I can’t really tell if the thread is spinning out from the wheel to spread in loops of gold through the air above her head—or if the action is reversed, and the spinning wheel is actually pulling the thread in from the air, winding the golden strand tight around its central axis.
    The old woman is still smiling. “The Greeks called it the Rhombus, the magic wheel,” she says. “Long ago, that was, of course, by your time. They said it could bind hearts together.” She pinches the shining strand tighter between her fingers, and I feel the tug of the thread within my own hand. “People have told stories about me and my wheel for century upon century. The stories turned into fairy tales and legend, with only threads of truth still woven through them. It doesn’t matter. My spinning wheel never stops turning, and the thread is always there. It never breaks.”
    I open my fingers and look at the wisp of light that’s caught inside my fist. I try to follow its line through the winding coils that twine around the woman’s head, but the lines intersect too many times for me to untangle them with my eyes. It’s hard to believe those swirls of light are a single line rather than many strands, and yet I see only one steady thread spinning from the turning wheel.
    “What is it?” I whisper.
    “It is the thread we spin to tie me to my Beloved.”
    This explains absolutely nothing, of course. I hear an ugly whisper inside my head— crazy old bag —but it’s a small, faraway voice that can’t compete with the spangled