Deleted Scene: Stormy story night

2500 words, 9 minute read.

Val must have noticed I was nervous about Hazel going out into the storm. He got up and went to the icebox, where he retrieved a carton of strawberry sorbet and two spoons.

“Why don’t we go sit in the living room and eat this instead? Without the power on, it’ll melt. We can clean up the table later,” he said.

I followed him to the couch, but I also said, “Don’t we need a third spoon?” as if that would ensure Hazel’s safe return. Having a spoon ready a charm against disaster.

“Oh, Haze and I can share one, it’ll be romantic, with all this candlelight,” Val reassured me.

“Blech,” I said, sticking my tongue out as if I were gagging, and he laughed.

Our own cat, Speckles, showed up to beg for ice cream, even though it was the kind without dairy. E was a weird cat. I let em lick a bit off my finger, the rough feeling of eir tongue weird but satisfying. E wouldn’t bite me like that dog did. The owner should have had it on a leash, it was a reactive dog, not every dog was like that, but still I resolved that I would dislike dogs forever and love cats instead. The newly healed scar on my wrist as proof.

Sometimes, I was learning, things could go wrong. They could hurt. Other people or animals could hurt you, even if you didn’t do anything to deserve it. Parents and other adults were not infallible, contrary to popular playground belief.

Val and I sat on the couch, taking turns holding the sorbet carton until our fingers froze. Eventually he got up to get the fire going in the hearth. The flames drove the shadows to the very corners of the room, but my mind was still shadowed by the fact that Hazel hadn’t come back yet.

There was only one spoon of sorbet left when the side door suddenly slammed open, the wind howling across it like the world’s lowest, spookiest flute. Val stumbled to his feet and ran, betraying the fact that I wasn’t the only one growing worried; I followed close behind him.

Hazel and Terry practically fell into the hallway, soaking wet despite their rain gear. A small, equally wet shape bounded from Hazel’s arms and ran to hide in the closet, yowling: one of Terry’s many cats. The small black one called Lentil. Terry, who was the oldest human being I knew (in retrospect not terribly ancient, perhaps late seventies), calmly took off eir headscarf and accepted a hastily grabbed kitchen towel from Val while Hazel used all eir strength to shut the door to the outside.

The howling sound cut off, and I dropped my hands from my ears. I hadn’t even realized I was covering them. Warm relief spread through my chest, even as I threw my arms around Hazel in a tight hug, cold rainwater soaking into my clothes.

“Sorry if we worried you, Junie, Lentil was out in the storm and we had to find em,” Hazel explained, hugging me back. “All three of us are fine. Although I don’t think Speckles will like having a new friend in the house.”

“I’m sure they’ll get along for the time being,” Terry said. E turned to me with a beatific Grandren smile. “The others are safely upstairs in my bedroom, huddled together in a pile. I wish I didn’t have to leave them, but your Ren is very persuasive. E told me you all needed my company to weather the storm, and so here I am.”

While my parents talked quietly between themselves about Parent Things, I helped Terry dry off and dragged our old, crumbling armchair closer to the fire.

“Thank you, dear. How are you holding up in this dreadful storm?” e asked me as I fixed em a glass of water with lemon.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I hope the power comes back soon.”

“When I was your age, we didn’t have electricity in our house,” Terry said. “Oh, we had gas lamps, but it wasn’t the same. Every night was as dark as this one. Darker, I’d say. The past definitely used to be darker.”

I settled down on the rug beside the hearth and watched Lentil and Speckles negotiate their new, temporary living arrangement. There was a lot of slinking around and bobbing of heads, sideways glances and skittering behind furniture. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were people still alive who remembered a time before electricity. That must have been eons ago.

“What did you do with no TV and no radio not a lot of light to read by?” I asked. “How did you keep food from going bad? What about music? Were there no record players? Or trains or typewriters?”

Terry chuckled. E was the squat sort of Grandren, wider than e was tall, with wrinkled brown skin and gray-streaked hair kept in a braid. E always seemed to be wrapped in some kind of shawl, no matter how warm it was outside. I recognized the one e was wearing now as something my parents had woven for em, made from special ‘wool’ from a native Casporan dog of all things, apparently a dying tradition. Terry had started crying when they gave it to em.

“We told each other stories,” Terry said, answering only one of my many questions. “True stories, made up stories, myths and legends, stories that were supposedly true but really were just someone telling tall tales. Embellished and embroidered, if you will.”

My parents reappeared from the vicinity of the weaving room, where the looms and all of their working supplies were kept. They both had fiber and drop spindles in their hands; Hazel preferred a top whorl while Val preferred a bottom one, when they weren’t using their spinning wheels.

“It was like that when we were growing up, too,” Hazel said. “There were a lot of nights we had to keep the lights and the radio off because of the war, so we’d whisper to each other in the dark.”

“You poor things,” Terry said, warbly voice full of compassion.

“Val and I met because both of our families were spinning and weaving cloth for the army,” Hazel continued, as the two of them took their seats on the couch. “If you want strong thread and a strong weave that refuses to break or burn, you have to tell it stories and sing songs while you’re making it. That was our specialty, a magic handed down from our ancestors, who made ship sails.”

This was the first time I’d heard of how my parents met, or that there’d been a war on when they were kids. And here I was, afraid of a little wind and rain. Sure, I’d heard bad things about the current tension and arms race between Kolarrus and Gildea and their allies, but that was far, far away. Being afraid of a little wind and water suddenly seemed a bit silly compared to being afraid of bullets and bombs.

I watched the drop spindles as they fell and rose and spun, perfectly balanced as my parents drew fluffy white lengths of fiber into yarn. It certainly looked magical. I’d tried my hand at spinning once or twice and what came of it was a chunky, clunky mess. They made it look effortless, as if they were secretly giant spiders wearing human suits, like in that one comic I read once. I’d had nightmares for a week.

“So, who wants to go first?” Val said.

“Go first at what?” I replied.

“Telling a story. C’mon, the yarn needs someone to—you know, spin a yarn,” he said, laughing at his own joke. Recently he’d been learning how to make puns in Casporan as well as in Fenian, and he was—I thought—a little too proud of it. I rolled my eyes, not knowing that I would end up inheriting the same sense of linguistic humor as an adult.

“As your guest, I am obliged to start us off,” said Terry with a soft smile. “Let’s see what I can remember.”

Terry thought to emself quietly for long enough that I wondered if e’d dozed off, with the way eir head was lolled against eir chest. But then e sat up straight, brown eyes sparkling, and started telling a story about an eleven year old who skipped school to go swimming in the creek, and ended up being kidnapped by faeries. At the time I thought it was entirely fictional, but in retrospect it’s clear that the protagonist was young Terry emself. Exactly how much of the story was true and how much was ‘embroidered,’ as e put it, remains a mystery.

As good as the story was, I did not have the best attention span, especially when it came to listening. I could hyperfixate on a book for hours at a time, so enmeshed with the world that I lost touch will all reality, but listening was much harder to do. I could hear every other sound in the room and outside of it: the crackle and snap of the fire, the cats as they skulked around, the pounding rain and whistling wind, the tick-tock of the clock in the corner, the rustling of branches, the shuffling of bodies on the couch. The ghost that liked to walk around the hallway upstairs, making the floorboards creak.

It was hard to concentrate on any one thing for long. What did catch my attention was the spindles. There was something soothing about the perfectly balanced way they spun, suspended from a delicate hanging thread. I got up and wedged myself between my parents, watching their hands intently.

Hazel noticed and, after catching the spindle with eir feet, drew it up and handed it to me with an encouraging look. We didn’t speak, because Terry was in a good flow now and any interruption might be fatal to the tale, but I understood when I took it and Hazel continued to mime to me the way that I should use it.

It took a few attempts, including losing my grip several times as the fiber between my fingers failed to twist properly and broke away from the spindle, but by the end of Terry’s story, I had spun my very first few inches of yarn. There was something soothing about it, the repetitive motion and the motion of the spindle. I could feel the power of it flowing up through my fingertips as simple, breakable tufts of wool became one strong length.

I continued spinning as Hazel took a turn as our storyteller, weaving for us the story of meeting Val in the factory where their families gathered to create for the war effort. They were the two youngest there, aside from Val’s baby cousin, and even they were put to work gathering scraps and rags and other stray materials, anything that could be dismantled and remade.

Having something to do with my hands made it easier to listen. I almost forgot about the spindle in my hands, steadily churning out lumpy yarn, while Hazel explained that there was a shortage of everything in Fenia at the time due to military blockades and disrupted trade routes around the world. They grew their own vegetables in the back yard not because they liked to, as we did, but because they had no other choice. They went to bed hungry and hounded by the drone of airplanes overhead—they learned to tell the difference between the engines of the Royal Fenian Air Force and that of the enemy within a few seconds of listening.

If it was the enemy, they had to hide.

Eventually it ended, Hazel said, officially, that is. They were still rebuilding some parts of the country when we left ten years later.

How did you stay in touch all those years? I asked. You and Val?

Oh, letters, the very occasional, very expensive phone call, and later, clandestine meetings by train, Hazel said, grinning. Val’s parents didn’t approve of me. I didn’t exactly follow the gendered rules of society. Neither did Val, really. They thought I was controlling him. I was wearing the pants, as they would say.

I frowned in confusion. What does that mean?

Hazel and Val both cracked up laughing. I exchanged glances with Terry, who shrugged, not understanding the joke either.

Once Hazel had gotten eir giggles under control (e always had a distinctive laugh, high and bubbly with a snort or two mixed in), e held out a hand, gesturing at my now very-full drop spindle.

It’s good that you don’t understand, e said, that’s what I was hoping for, raising you here. You can wear whatever you like and look how you want and be yourself without restriction. Can I see what you’ve made?

I handed over the spindle. When had it gotten so full? Hazel unwound it, inspecting the yarn, and even though it was thick in some places and thin in others, nothing like the perfect balls and spools my parents spun, I felt… good. Satisfied. Fulfilled. The same way I did after completing a drawing or writing a short story.

A fantastic first effort, Hazel said, and Val nodded. E passed it to Terry to inspect, and Terry agreed. If you want, Junie, we can do this again. I can teach you techniques and magic. But only if you like it.

I’d be happy to do it, too, Val added with a soft smile.

My parents were always adamant that I wasn’t required to follow in their footsteps when it came to craft and career. Just because their were spinners and weavers didn’t mean I had to be one, even though it was something that had been passed down for generations through the family, and to break away from it would be breaking that chain. To be honest, I’d never thought much about it before. The work they did was just something always around me, so normal that it faded into the background noise of life.

It was the magic of it, of sitting around the fire while the storm raged outside, telling stories of times and places which to me might as well been science fiction, that drew me in. The feeling of life and energy flowing through my fingertips into the yarn, and the power of the twist flowing back up into me. The magic of making, of having an end product that I could touch and see and even transform further with weaving or knitting.

Yeah, that sounds swell, I said. Can I do some more right now?