The Warp I Left Half-Threaded on Purpose

I wrote the notice myself, in my own hand, and gave it to the Gazette’s boy folded once: second year or better, own tools. Four words that cost me a sliver a line and told the whole Arcade nothing about what I actually wanted, which is not a hand that already knows the warp but a hand that can be trusted with a warp it doesn’t.

Three came. I will write, someday, of the boy who arrived with borrowed tools and a story about why they weren’t his, and of the woman my own age who wanted work, not teaching, and left when she understood the difference. Tonight I will write only of Shirin, seventeen, who set her grandmother’s shuttle on my bench the way a person sets down something that has already outlived one pair of hands and expects to outlive a second. The wood was worn paler on the underside than the top — carried, not stored. I did not ask whose hands wore it so. She did not offer.

I gave her the test I give no one twice the same way: a warp threaded to its exact middle, the weft undyed, the next length’s color decided by nothing I had written down, and I went to the front of the stall to sell a length of saffron-yellow to a man who took too long deciding. I was gone the better part of an hour. When I came back she had not asked the boy sweeping the arcade floor, who knows nothing, and she had not waited, hands folded, for a woman who might not have come back before dusk. She had chosen a blue two shades warmer than I would have reached for — wrong, by my hand — and carried it eleven passes clean before her nerve failed her and she stopped, exactly at the edge of where the wrongness would have become a ruin instead of a variation.

I am not looking, I understood watching her stopped hands, for someone who threads my blue correctly. I have that hand already; it is mine. I am looking for the one whose wrongness stops itself at the honest edge, the way mine did once, the summer I was handed a red and told to guess at the rest of it and did, badly, in front of a teacher who let the badness stand rather than correct it before I’d finished feeling its weight.

I have not told Shirin she is hired. I have also not unthreaded her blue.