It’s all on you now. It’s unraveling. We’ve torn it. How many stitches to make the world new?
Knit a deep green yarn: a symphony of whale-song, of tiny tendrilled tales unheard. Knit an ice-white net for the bear’s last stand; a paw-hold, a claw-hold for the last melting floe-hold. Add a row in herring-bone for sea-silver gone.
Send garter stitch snaking across gasping sand; quench ochre with moss stitch, viridian, cool.
Stripe it in dusk and stripe it in gold, honeycomb hem it for the faltering bees, then jersey-stitch it warm in saffron and rose, make the Fair Isles fair again over the sea.
Knit it carmine-red for the hands of ancestors, whispering wisdom from dank cave walls; let it breathe their stories ten thousand years more. And when the sun grows blood-orange and scorches the sky, shawl it in amethyst and pale moony mauve; crochet milk- clouds as the skein takes fire. Check the tension, make it right with slow purls of calm.
There’ll be flaws in that glorious intarsia, dear knitter: gapes like the memories of spent volcanoes. Make them linen-stitched crypts for ivory, plundered. Head-stone them with ammonites, secrets coiled close.
Knit it all in shimmering strands of yearning. If the yarn’s running out, knitter, please don’t cast off. Weave in a gull’s cry, a strand of your hair, then grasp the last thread in your teeth, make a knot. Back-loop it into the pattern, forever.
With love.
Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she can sometimes see mountains. Her fiction appears in numerous journals including Flash Frontier, Crow & Cross Keys, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Club Plum, Identity Theory, Flash Boulevard, and Best Microfiction 2024. It has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.