Free The Thread by Ellyn Sanna Page B

light that fills my eyes. “We . . . ?” I look around, searching the shadows. “Are there more of you here?”
    “Just me. Just you. Do you see anyone else?”
    “No.” I hesitate, trying to sort through her words. “But what did you mean—we spin the thread?”
    “I meant you and I, of course. Isn’t that what you have there in your hand?”
    “But—” This doesn’t feel like a dream, and yet her words make no more sense than something from Alice in Wonderland . And Alice’s story was a dream, wasn’t it? “I didn’t have anything to do with making the thread,” I say. “I found it. In my bedroom. All I did was follow it. Here. To you.”
    She gives me her smile again. “Yes, that’s the way it works. The thread ties us all together, me to my Beloved, my Beloved to you, you to me.”
    “But—” I look down, away from her face with its puzzling smile and its terrible tenderness. She’s wearing some sort of long gown or robe, and its deep blue fabric billows around the spinning wheel, trails onto the dirty floor. If I reached out, I could touch its folds, but I’m afraid. I gulp, suck in a breath, look back up at her face. “Who is your Beloved?”
    “Why, you are, child.” A single tear trickles out of one dark eye and follows the smiling creases of her face, then drips onto her robe. “I know you didn’t know you were. But you are. You have always been. Always and always.”
    My heart gives a funny leap inside my ribcage, terror or joy or something else, I can’t tell. She’s a homeless person hiding out here, my brain whispers to me. But I ask what I’m longing to ask: “Do you know me?”
    I want her to know me. I want her to love me. Fairy tales. Feeble. Foolish. Fucked-up fantasies. “How do you know me?”
    Her smile widens into a toothless grin. “You’re quite alliterative, my dear. And I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.”
    And now there’s nothing else to say. She read my mind? And . . . oh shit, I’ve sat through enough sermons to know she’s quoting the Bible, the Book of Jeremiah, to be precise, or is it the Psalms? She’s saying she formed me in my mother’s womb? Come on now. Like she was God? Either I’m asleep and dreaming, or she’s a crazy old lady who wandered in off the streets.
    “There are actually several other possibilities,” she says. “You could be hallucinating. That would make you the crazy one, by your definition, or at least imbalanced in some way. This vision you’re having could be caused by a fever or an illness. A brain tumor maybe. Even a severe vitamin deficiency could do it. Or I could be pulling your leg. I might be leading you on, playing an elaborate joke on you. I could be lying to you. Maybe I’m just bored. Maybe,” she leans closer to my face, her dark eyes gleaming, “maybe I’m evil .”
    I hear the echo of my own thoughts in her last words. That’s exactly what I was thinking about myself earlier today after Mom talked to the homeless guy. Maybe I’m evil. I shake my head. Another coincidence. But I don’t understand . . . well, anything. I don’t understand one single thing about what’s happening. Is she trying to prove to me that she can read my mind? Or is she really just something from my own brain, someone I’ve created in a dream, a mish-mash of all the day’s bits and pieces, the way dreams so often are?
    She touches the side of my face with a knobby finger. “Which explanation do you like best, Callie? Which would fit most easily inside that busy brain of yours? Because I can work with anything, you know.”
    Her touch on my skin tingles, a warm little buzz that reminds me of the way the thread feels inside my fist, as though my cells are somehow dancing in response. I try to find something to say, but instead, I realize I’ve slumped forward, my head hovering above her knees.
    I don’t think she’s evil.
    Her free hand, the one that’s not holding the thread as it unwinds from the