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Craft your own adventure

by Julie Le Blanc

While Marya was usually excellent at imagining the worst, opening a portal to another world while crocheting had never really crossed her mind.

She’d been determined to learn how to crochet once she discovered her muse, gorgeous Rebecca, loved Galway hurling. She still hadn’t gotten up the courage to talk to her (what would Marya say? What could she possibly offer?) Her next thought, then, was to somehow make something for Rebecca, a jumper maybe, even if the internet told her that was a bit ambitious…

While her cat Foxy settled into a square of sun in the kitchen, Marya had curled onto the couch, determined to get a solid ten rows done before lunch.

But it wasn’t turning out that way.

Marya stared at the dropped stitch and the small pucker in reality that had appeared behind it. She would have thought she was dreaming, except that she could feel the tiny shift in gravity and a small tug. She tried moving her crochet around, but the hole in space stayed where it was, in a rather awkward place, Marya thought. It hung two feet above the floor, about a foot in front of her couch.

It would make it difficult to drink her tea.

She tried reattaching the loop of maroon wool back onto her hook and picking up the dropped stitch again. But the whirlpool, or black hole, or gateway, or whatever it was stayed open as before, only an inch across.

She looked at the sleeve in her lap. Would she have to start the jumper over?

Marya left the crochet on the couch and stood up to get a better view. She peered at the hole with one eye, then the other. She took off her glasses and looked again, from above and below. But the little hole in the universe did not seem particularly bothered by her hovering, poking it, dropping a hairpin into it. It simply turned there, slowly, silently, and occasionally giving off flickering, violet light.

She thought about calling someone, but who do you call for an unexpected crafting disaster? Did you call NASA? The Guards? Her parents? Did you call Síle in the craft shop where you’d bought the wool, and ask her nicely if you could have a refund?

Marya considered ignoring it, but then Foxy appeared, all wide eyes and shifting shoulders. No, she swallowed. She would have to deal with this.

After picking up Foxy and placing him outside the closed door, she got out her sewing kit and looked for the right colour of thread. She took up one of her smaller needles and looped the thread through, and sat herself on the couch as before, and tried to grab a bit of the air around the hole.

On the fourth go, having lost the other three of her needles to whatever lay beyond, she managed to poke the needle through the rim of the portal and draw the thread across. After a little while, she found herself humming absently to herself — it was going surprisingly well – only to realize that her needle, as she stabbed it through the wider centre of the hole, was too short for her to be able to grab it on the other side. She tried to pull it back out, but the head had already passed into the gateway, and she was left with just a wispy curl of purple string, floating in mid-air.

She could hear Foxy scratching at the wood, stripping the paint.

Darn it.

Maybe she needed something thicker. She pulled out some leftover green yarn from her last project and threaded it through her lumpy plastic wool needle, and began darning the portal closed. She was able to get a bit of a handle on it this time, using her knotted sewing disaster as a starting place.

She let out a sigh and smiled. This was going to work.

Then the door banged, and she saw a burst of fur —

Whether it was the twitching wool in Marya’s hand or the floaty bit of purple string, Foxy leapt for the portal, claws sharp, yellow eyes wide. Marya turned but the feline streak was already mid-air — as she shouted his name, it was as though her whole view shifted into slow motion: she saw his claws spread wide, hooked for catching, his mouth open in cat’s bliss, the way his tail swished the moment his left paw connected with her stitching — Marya yanked him back —

It sounded like paper ripping in two.

They thumped onto the couch, Foxy a storm on her chest. She fought back the claws and the unmusical complaints, tossing him — as gently as one can toss a ball of furry knives — back beyond the door and locking it this time. When she turned, her mouth fell open.

What had been the tiniest hole had been torn into a long slit that reached the floor. The pull from the portal felt stronger, now, and her half-made sleeve was quickly sliding towards it before she twigged the danger. Her stomach flipped. She dove for it, knocking her elbow on the coffee table, and pulled everything away that she could, anything loose–

But something else caught her eye. On the other side, she noticed, lights danced and flickered like fish… but she couldn’t make out exactly what they were. If ‘they’ were anything.

She’d never stitch it up now, she thought. Would she get in trouble for this? She clutched her balls of yarn and aluminium needles to her chest, staring at the slit like it was something hungry.

The longer she watched it, though, the looser the knots in her stomach came to be, and the deeper her breathing. God, even if she didn’t know what it was, she had to admit it was beautiful. What was making those shadows and light?

She began to feel the first stirrings in her chest and she was beginning to wonder if she were wearing the right clothes, and surely it wasn’t a vacuum on the other side, or she would have been sucked in already —

Marya regarded the tear in the fabric of space that, between some dangerous crafting and her cat, she had brought into the world.

Her heart began to race. She tugged on her slippers and gently folded back the flap of reality in front of her couch. Something like music drifted over, and the smell of wildflowers.

Foxy had those automatic food and water dispensers, she found herself thinking, and I cleaned his litter this morning.

She slid one foot into the world beyond.

Sunshine from some other world tingled on her skin, and she found a warmth trickling up her toes and along her ankle, like a kiss.

What was she doing? Her fingers were buttoning her coat, then, and finding her hat. Throwing her crochet into her crafting bag with a bottle of water and a granola bar, she looked around the room one more time. She held her breath. Was she really doing this —

She suddenly smiled. If she had been able to open a door in her own house… who’s to say she couldn’t bring Rebecca through, too?

When Foxy finally broke through the door later, all wounded pride and frayed nerves, nothing much remained of where she’d gone — except for a single piece of wool zippered up in the air.

It was a cause for concern, to be sure. But Foxy was content, if no one else was. He knew Marya would come back.

She had her crochet with her, after all.

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When you’re older

by Sam Markham

When you come back through the thicket at the edge of your grandmother’s property, there’s something you’re forgetting. You are sixteen, up at the mountain cottage for a ‘vacation’ while your parents settle their divorce, and the sense of something lost is a tickle at the back of your mind through the rest of your visit. You try going back, a few times: wander through the false twilight of the woods, get grass stains on your khakis, and look sideways at the occasional crow cawing at you, thinking, what was it?

Three weeks later, when your father comes to pick you up in his new beamer, the tickle fades. In his new apartment in San Francisco you unpack your duffle bags into a clean white room straight out of an IKEA catalogue. You start at your new high school the next week. The school has a fencing club, and there’s something about the thought of a sword in your hand… you consider joining, but you really don’t have time around your studies. You’re trying to get into a good college, to make your dad proud.

You sign up for an SAT prep course instead. There’s a girl there with a buzz cut and pretty eyes, and when she kisses you out behind the Starbucks, your body explodes into fireworks.

You graduate from high school and go to college with the girl with the buzz cut. She studies mechanical engineering and you study literature. You think only once about that feeling of almost remembering—there’s something about one of your school texts, a collection of folk tales, that makes you want to take the girl with the buzz cut to those woods in the mountains.

And then your grandmother dies. She leaves the cabin to your mother, who sells it so she can buy a house in Canada with her new boyfriend the web developer. You and the girl with the buzz cut break up before graduation.

You get a job at a book publisher, and you keep thinking of using one of the marketing department’s coupons for a free swordplay lesson but never get around to it.

You meet another woman and get married and move to the suburbs and talk about adopting children for a few years but decide not to. You get divorced and adopt a little brown cat and name her Nemayne and when she dies, arthritic and skinny, you move out to the country.

You get a house with a garden.

You think: you want to be where there are trees, again.

In the country, you start writing your own book of fairy stories. You find a fencing club in the nearest town with a beginner’s class and you practice until your legs burn and your hands bleed. You ignore the questions about if you’re someone’s mother, and think, idly, about the certainty you feel that you were never meant to be.

You turn fifty-five that year, and once again start to think there is something you were forgetting. You wonder if it’s just your age. You place in a fencing tournament and adopt another cat, an elderly one from a shelter, and think, fuck that.

On your sixtieth birthday, three weeks after the elderly cat dies, the mountain lion is waiting for you in the garden, and it all comes back to you in a rush.

How once, when you were young, you met a lion in the woods, and she asked if you would come with her—she needed someone quick, and strong, and in a hurry.

How once, you spent half a year in the mountains where animals spoke, and the rain told secrets, and at the end, you fought an evil—a small one, but no less important for that. You’d charged into the shadows, the murder of screaming crows, with sword in hand, the lion’s warm flank at your side. After, she’d licked the blood off you, and the rasp of her tongue felt like it was going to take off skin, too, but you’d never been so warm.

You’d combed out her fur with the brush from your backpack, the only thing you’d had on you, and asked, when I leave, I can come back, right?

The fur on Nemayne’s muzzle is whitened from age now, like your hair, and she stands when she sees you.

Are you ready to come home? she asks.

Fuck, yes, you say. And then, Do you still have my sword?