On the first day of his unraveling, Marie discovers the smallest thread on her husband’s shoulder. He is leaned over the kitchen sink, hands working at the grime gathered along the base of their favorite skillet, one hand adding more soap and the other more torsion, the window before him spread open to a sunny afternoon at the edge of fall.
The thread curls away from her, thin as silk. She can only see it when the sunlight catches the fiber just so. She stands behind him as he scrubs, her fingers poised to pinch it free. It is a feather or a twist of fabric or perhaps a fallen spiderweb, one that pulled loose from the eaves of their house and drifted into their lives on a wind of its own.
“What is this?” she says. At last she holds the fiber between her fingers but it seems to grow longer as she holds it. She tugs a little and feels the thread grow an inch, two, three.
“What is what?” he says. The grime won’t lift. He works the sponge in ever-smaller circles.
What she holds between her fingers is a foot long. She should stop pulling but there seems to be no end to it. Marie turns the thread just so in the light, tugging a little more to confirm her suspicions. She knows exactly what sort of thread it is.
“Nothing,” she says. She lifts the collar of his shirt and tucks two feet of thread into it. “Your tag was out. That’s all.”
***
That night he takes his shirt off before bed and stands with his back to her, one hand scratching at the midsection of his spine. Even from here she can see the thread has grown to at least three feet long. Each time he reaches his hand backward to scratch his spine the thread bounces and curls, stretching longer inch by inch.
“My skin is so dry,” he says. He digs his nails into the flesh of his back, leaving long, red paths behind. “I’ve never been so dry.”
“Here,” Marie says. She shakes a bottle of lotion at him. “Come.”
He sits before her on the bed, the thread tucked beneath him, perhaps grown even longer with the weight of him. She squeezes lotion onto her palms and spreads it over his back, pushing circles into his skin. He relaxes into the pressure of her fingers, but as she rubs him more threads spring out from under her palms—this one thick as hair, the next straight and even, the third glossy and wet. She pulls her hands away. It is unclear which threads belong to his unraveling and which are his natural hair.
“What is it?” he says. “Everything itches.”
He twists his shoulders like a snake writhing in its old skin. The beginnings of new threads emerge. This time she puts her palms against the threads, pushes them back into place on his skin, holds them as one might hold together something glued.
“It’s nothing,” she says. She lifts her palm and beneath it twenty new threads pop free. “You’re fine.”
***
On the second day of his unraveling she comes upon him in the backyard, a handful of threads gathered in his hands. The thicker threads dangle like yarn from his fingers. He has the hose curled at his feet. Water pools over his tennis shoes.
“It’s not what you think,” Marie says, although things are happening faster than she might expect. She turns off the spigot and comes to him, the hose water too cold on her feet, almost heavy in the setting hours of evening. “You’re still fine,” she says. “Everything is fine.”
“What’s happening?” he says. Threads push out from the collar of his shirt, from beneath his sleeves. Marie takes one of the thicker strands between her thumb and forefinger and together they watch as she pulls apart a section of his bicep.
“Oh god,” he says. He is actually green. “What have I become?”
“I’m going to pull another one, okay?”
He nods. She takes a slender thread from his wrist, pulling gently as it unwraps itself over the base of his hand, his palm, each of his fingers. He is swallowing too fast. He is a man under water for too long. She is losing him.
“I can wrap it back on,” she says. It is important to gather threads such that they don’t tangle. They are so much more difficult to repair when they are tangled. “Everything can be wrapped back on.”
“No!” he says. He snatches the unspooled threads from her hands and holds them and the thicker yarn-like strands to his chest.
“You have to calm down,” Marie says. New threads appear under his eyes, along his lips. “You’ll make it happen faster.”
He shakes his head. Threads come loose like wild hairs around him.
“You have to stop,” she says.
She reaches for his shoulders to hold him still, but fibers slip through her fingers. He pulls away, gathering his loose ends in his tattered hands. His arms are turning to spaghetti, he can see that now, and the effect brings him to a silent seething.
“Where are you going?” Marie says.
“Inside,” he says. “To the couch.”
As he turns toward the house, the biggest thread yet shakes loose from the nape of his neck and drags over the patio behind him.
***
On the third day of his unraveling, he cannot rise from the couch. Marie showers, dries her hair, dresses for work—on her way out the door, she stops and stands before him. His hands have unraveled into silk-like threads gathered in his lap, as if he has taken up knitting.
“You feel sorry for yourself,” she says. Already she is running late. When she is angry with him she has a habit of leaning in, of leading with her teeth, he would say.
“I need to call in sick,” he says. Yesterday’s silent seething has faded. He can no longer hold his threads to his chest.
“Okay,” she says. She finds herself wanting to toss his phone into his lap, to tell him to do it himself. His hands are indistinguishable tangles on his thighs.
“Would you call her for me?”
“What do you want me to say?” Marie lets herself look at her watch, lets him see her look at her watch. She’s being unkind and she knows it. Unsympathetic. She ought to remember how difficult this can be. “That you’re coming undone?”
“I’m sick,” he says. Someone will need to feed him. Take him to the bathroom. “I’m not myself.”
“Of course you’re not,” Marie says. His phone sits next to him and she takes it up. “No one is when this happens.”
***
On the fourth and final day of his unraveling, Marie wakes to find him weeping beside her. He is a tangle of threads beneath the covers, some thick and wiry, others soft and tender, silken, translucent. There is no part of him she recognizes.
Marie feels through the mess of him to find two wet spots—his eyes, she imagines, here are the tears.
“How did this happen?” he says, or she believes he says this, or maybe this is what she wishes he would say.
Marie gathers him into her arms and in the grey light of dawn she gently pulls apart the knots, the snares, separating light from dark, thick from thin, silk from yarn, rolling each fiber into tight balls on the bedroom floor. When she finds his heart, the fibers coarse and heavy and warm, she holds them to her own and feels sorry that she didn’t tell him. She ought to have told him.
Later she will knit him back together. He deserves this, at least. But for now, she strips off her nightshirt—raw and wet with the glue that had once held him together—and stands before the mirror. She has her own repairs to make: threads are loose around her belly, there is a spot worn thin between her breasts. Marie threads a needle, stitches back together what must be made whole again.
Natalie Teal McAllister is a fiction writer based in Kansas City. Her short fiction appears in Best Microfiction 2020, Glimmer Train, Passages North, No Tokens, Pleiades, Pigeon Pages, CRAFT, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. Natalie spends her writing hours engulfed in several novels and assorted strange stories. Twitter: @NatalieOnWire Instagram: Natalie_ms_jackson
Photo by coofdy on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA