The Thistle-Child's Lesson

Folklore

First the stitch, then the bind. The Thistle-Man weaves with a needle of pine. He finds the gap in the nursery door, and leaves a bundle upon the floor. I remember the first touch of the mother. Her hands were warm, which is a sensation I cannot produce. She picked me up from the rug, smelling the scent of dried meadow-grass and old rain, but she did not recoil. She called me by a name that belonged to someone else. I learned to breathe by watching the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest. I learned to smile by feeling the tension of the twine pulling the corners of my mouth upward. The imitation was a careful science. I spent the first few weeks recording the specific tilt of a head during a question, the exact volume of a giggle, and the way a child's foot drags slightly on the hardwood. I was a perfect mirror made of chaff and linen. I sat at the table. I held the wooden spoon. I stared into the fire with eyes made of polished obsidian beads. The dryness arrived in the second month. It began as a tightness in my joints, a stiffness that made my movements jerky and mechanical. Then came the fraying. A small tear opened at the crook of my elbow, revealing the yellowed straw beneath. During the midday meal, I felt a sudden, warm slip of material from my wrist. I looked down to see a small heap of sawdust on the white tablecloth. It looked like pale sand, silent and sterile. I began to leak in other places. A pinch of sawdust from the ear during a lullaby. A trickle of dried grass from the hem of my trousers. I spent my nights stitching myself back together with stolen thread, but the straw inside me was collapsing. I was becoming hollower, more porous. My voice, once a precise echo, began to sound like wind rushing through a dead cornfield. The wind changed in October. It brought a sound from the Black-Thistle wood: a high, rhythmic screaming. It was not the sound of the wind or the cry of a bird. It was the sound of lungs that still held air, a desperate, muffled wailing that vibrated in my own empty chest. I knew that sound. It was the original. He was tied with the same pine needles the Thistle-Man used to bind my ribs. I stood by the window and watched the briars sway. I felt a loose thread hanging from my jaw. I reached up and pulled it, and a handful of gray chaff fell onto the floor. I am not a boy; I am a lesson in subtraction. As I dissolve into dust, the screaming in the woods grows louder, and I realize the Thistle-Man is already weaving a new bundle for the house next door.