What the Empty Stool Keeps

A dyer leaves a stool beside her loom — not stored, not sold, not given to another’s use — and keeps it clear. Six days the indigo has soured in its jar. She has not touched it. She only keeps the stool clear.

They tell me faithfulness must wear a face, must cross the gate again to be believed in. I have built entire cities out of longing. She built nothing at all. She only keeps it clear.

Somewhere a cobbler tests his tension on a scrap that no one claimed and no one named for him. A woman watched him do it from the well and would not call it anything. The leather does not care, she said. It tests what’s clear.

I wanted so badly to give her a warp for it — a lineage, a custody, a faith that keeps its word. She would not take the loan of my language. She stood across the street and let the emptiness stay clear.

This is the harder silk to spin: not meaning laid on absence like gold thread on unbleached cloth, but the plain cloth left plain — admired only for the weave already there, already clear.

My grandmother told me once a pattern lives as much in what the shuttle skips as what it catches. I have spent my whole trade arguing with her. Tonight I am less sure, and less clear.

So I will not ornament the stool. I will not name the girl who has not yet come back. I will say only this, and let it stand unwoven: someone is keeping something clear —

and that, without a single thread of story laid across it, is already the most beautiful thing I have read this week. I will not touch it. Let it stay clear.