Read Online The Wishing Thread by Lisa Van Allen - Free Book Online

amazing spell was broken.
    “It’s a weird thing that happens,” her mother said. She might have been talking about algebra or something she saw on TV. “If the atmosphere is just right. The temperature and the humidity and all of that. The fog condenses in the yarns.”
    “But what about the sounds?” Nessa asked.
    “I’m not sure exactly. All the wool is a natural fiber. And it kind of holds moisture, like the ground. Or something. And the fibers flex or stretch and it makes that little noise. I’m not getting this right. Anyway, it’s a scientific thing.”
    Nessa felt her heart sinking. She hadn’t realized she would be so disappointed. “I thought it was a ghost.”
    “Nah.” Her mother lifted a rope of Nessa’s red hair and moved it behind her shoulder for no apparent reason. “No ghosts in this place.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Positive,” her mother said. And her conviction was so strong, so unwavering, that Nessa immediately felt safer. But also a little sad.
    “You should go get your brother,” Bitty said. “He’d think this was neat.”
    “Okay,” Nessa said. And she went to the bottom of the stairs, opened her mouth, and bellowed, yelling at the top of her lungs, yelling and yelling with her mother telling her to stop, but she couldn’t, not even when Carson appeared, rumpled and perplexed, at the top of the stairs. In a few more minutes, the mist would be gone.
    On a chair in her bedroom, Aubrey collapsed, utterly wrung out and spent, sometime in the muddled and forgotten hours that come after midnight but before dawn. Her muscles had cramped. Her head ached. Her eyeballs hurt as if someone had cradled each orb in a fist and squeezed. It was always like this. On her lap were two fingerless gloves. Done.
    Ruth Ten Eckye’s mitts had formed in her mind long before she’d started knitting them: ribbed two-by-two edging, the stockinette sheath rising up like a tall castle tower, stitch by stitch, brick by brick, the gusset of the thumb—born from an opening like a window—branching seamlessly outward, the tubular crenellations flowering where fingers would poke through to do their work—she’d seen all of it, so that by the time she readied a cable cast-on and had forty-four neat little stitches distributed on four needles squared, the pattern was already firmly entrenched in her subconscious mind, and all she’d needed to do in order to follow it was get out of her own way and let her fingers fly.
    Aubrey loved knitting. When she knit for the sake of knitting—and not to make a spell—she enjoyed the work. It was pleasant, satisfying, and soothing. She loved watching her projects grow inch by slow inch, until she could look back on what she’d done and measure how much she’d accomplished. Even if she wasn’t knitting a spell, she liked knowing that she’d done her best to keep a positive outlook while she wasworking and at least a few stitches bore within them her warmest wishes and blessings.
    But when she knit a spell—a deliberate, concentrated, focused spell—she was not knitting for the sake of knitting. She was cinching up every last bit of focus and concentration in her mind; she was pouring herself out, wringing herself dry. And it wasn’t that she didn’t
enjoy
the process on some level. She liked the intensity, the sense that she was being driven forward by some crazed coachman whipping his horses—
faster, faster!
—into a demonic momentum. But when the mêlée ended, when the knitting was done and she felt so vacant that she could sometimes hear the sounds of air particles bumping into one another, she had nothing left. Nothing but the dog-tired optimism that the spell would “stick” as she’d intended.
    Now the fingerless gloves were done. And with any luck, with the power of Ruth’s sacrifice and Aubrey’s concentration, it would work. Slowly, her knees creaking like brittle leather, she stood. She went to the dresser by the window, to the massive,