Read Online The Thread by Ellyn Sanna - Free Book Online

sometimes, maybe he’ll be too exhausted from coughing to pay me any visits. He’ll be safe in bed before I’m even done with my homework.
    “Merry Christmas, Callie,” I whisper again, and I give myself a tiny smile. It’s better than nothing.
    • • •
    I wake up with a jerk and lie in the dark, staring up at the emptiness above my head. I thought I heard something.
    But the floor in the hallway doesn’t creak, and my door doesn’t open. I close my eyes again, and I’m just about to roll over and burrow into my pillow when something brushes against my face.
    My eyes fly open. There’s nothing to see, of course, but I feel again that whisper of a touch on my forehead. I put up my hand and grope through the darkness.
    There it is: that silky thread strung through the darkness, dipping and thrumming as though someone on the other end were tugging at it. My fist closes tight around it; this time, I’m not afraid it will snap because I’m somehow convinced that it’s stronger than steel. I hold onto it all the while I’m feeling on the floor with my other hand for a pair of sweatpants.
    I have to let go long enough to pull the pants on, but I stand so that I can feel the thread against my face. In the darkness, I press my cheek against the invisible line that’s softer than my hair. Then, once I’m dressed, I slide my fingertips along it again, a sliver of sensation that’s somehow both cool and warm. One end of the thread seems to come from above the head of my bed, but the other end leads toward the window.
    “Here we go again,” I say out loud as I open the window. And then I give myself a grin. I’m scared as well as curious, but I’m fond of myself all of a sudden, as though I were a friend who had offered to come along to keep me company. It’s a friendly feeling I haven’t had in a long time, not since I stopped having sleepovers with other girls my age about three years ago. With the thread clutched tight, I climb over the windowsill onto the fire escape.
    It’s sleeting, a windy spatter against my face that makes me wish I’d pulled on a jacket over the sweatshirt I wore to bed. The fire escape creaks and shudders, and my heart pounds like a bird trapped in a cage. I climb from landing to landing, till I reach the thirteenth floor, and here, just like last time, the thread is caught under the window frame.
    That same golden glow makes a circle on the dirty glass. Before it can disappear again, I shove the window up, suck in a breath, and climb inside.

7
    Kirin
    The sound of the child’s cries was driving Kirin crazy. He could no longer persuade himself it was just his imagination. Somewhere, a child was crying. He counted the nights: tonight, Christmas night, made the seventh time he had lain in his bed listening to the quavering, desperate voice. Or was it the eighth?
    What difference did it make?
    The sound seemed to reverberate through the walls, and at the same time, drift through the air. He knew it must be coming from another apartment, and he thought the cries came from above his floor, higher in the building, but the sound seemed to change, not just in volume but also in his sense of how close it was. Sometimes, he was certain the cries came from his parents’ room, though of course that made no sense. Other times, the wails seemed to come from nowhere at all; instead, they hung in the air above him, as though the dark itself had generated them. He told himself it was a trick of the building’s acoustics; the sound must be traveling through the plumbing or the heat vents, or maybe it was vibrations in the insulation or the bricks that carried it.
    Or something.
    But why didn’t he hear anything else except the child’s cries? Never adult voices. Never a child’s happy chatter. Nothing except the exhausted sobs that made his skin prickle.
    Christmas Day had gone like all Christmases. For most of Kirin’s life, his father had moonlighted over the Christian holidays at a private