This story is by Raina Skotting and was part of our 2023 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
It’s like this:
There’s a building—a regular, boring, concrete, square, nondescript, anonymous building. You know the type—three floors are offices for some unknown agency, several more are industrial storage spaces for who-knows-what, the street level is parceled out into a couple corner stores, a discount clothing shop, and several unmarked gray metal doors that are always locked.
In this building, the third floor is a big, open space. No walls, no cubicles, just a vast expanse punctuated with occasional columns, like a parking garage except with cheap drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, and cheap plastic carpet. Not that anyone ever sees the carpet, because crowded over it from end to end (and climbing up the walls, and crumpled into corners, and stacked against the windows, and covering pretty much the entire third floor, in fact) is a tumbled mess of fabric. Not the cheap shiny stuff that makes up the unitards down on the street—this is a tapestry, ornately detailed, finely woven, every single thread carefully selected and made to fit. Here on the third floor it is jumbled and heaped like a garish still life of the ocean, folded, lumped, and crammed through nine tenths of the space, leaving only the small last bit for—who else?—the weavers.
They are old, these sisters. The three. They’ve been at it for a long time.
Here sit Clotho, weaving away, and Lachesis, measuring and measuring, sorting and stretching, and Atropos, snip, snip, snipping, cutting to size.
They keep to their work with a sort of stubborn efficiency, never rushing, never slacking. Just hunched over their threads, frowning as they go. They are not precious about spooling out a new thread, or cutting what needs to be cut. What are life and death to them? Their only task is to create the masterpiece of eternity.
“What are you doing there?” Lachesis asks, jabbing her chin toward where Clotho has sewn a tassel onto a backdrop of horizontal stripes. In India, a woman gives birth to triplets.
Clotho shrugs.
“I think it adds a nice element.”
Lachesis frowns.
“It’s not in the pattern.”
Clotho shrugs again.
“Well I like it.”
“Well I don’t.”
Clotho shrugs a third time.
“Atropos?” Lachesis says, turning to the silent one.
A pause. Atropos looks from one to the other, and finally reaches over with her scissors and snips off the tassel. A house collapses into a sinkhole in California.
Clotho sighs. She keeps weaving.
This bickering has started happening more and more over the past millennium. Where they used to be a honed trio, three limbs of a single artistic vision, more and more these days they disagree on the shape of the world. They are individualizing in their old age.
Clotho is bored of the traditional motifs and tries to incorporate new colors and shapes. Lachesis believes in the power of tradition. And Atropos, whose job is normally just to keep edges tidy, keeps sewing in random beads and ribbons when the others aren’t looking.
It gets tense sometimes. There have been days there has been more arguing than weaving. There have been days Clotho has threatened to step away from the loom entirely.
“It’s the way of things,” Lachesis always says in an insufferably patronizing croak. “It is the task we were given.”
“Yeah, by who?” says Clotho.
And nobody has an answer for that, but Clotho always sits back at the loom anyway.
Today, just as tensions are about to grow high, there is a knock at the door. The sisters look up in tandem to see a man hovering awkwardly near the doorway. They are surprised, mildly, but they know why he has come.
Throughout the ages many people have tried to find the workshop of the Fates, to plead their case. Most have failed, although every thousand years or so somebody makes it to the right door. It’s impressive, but ultimately futile. These women couldn’t care less about the worries that plague a human life. They are small, and fleeting, and the important thing is simply to keep weaving.
And besides, it’s all so predictable. Fourteen times in the past ten thousand years somebody has come to bargain with the sisters and on thirteen of those occasions it was a man complaining that a woman he loved had died. (The fourteenth was a woman complaining that a dog she loved had died, and the sisters were so enamored of the novelty of the situation that they almost brought it back.)
This man looks more like a lost animal than a hero. He doesn’t look ready for anything. He doesn’t even look like he came here on purpose.
Still, after long moment, he manages to shudder his tale to a start, a long, rambling bore about some lost love or other, the usual stuff. The sisters eye each other for a few seconds. Atropos pulls out the man’s thread of life, ready to simply snip it off and let them get back to work. That’s what they usually do. But Clotho motions at her to pause, and (much to Lachesis’ indignation) she does.
Clotho leans back and looks at the man. Her face, like those of her sisters, is so wrinkled she must be made of two skins trying to fit into the space of one.
Eventually he peters out, voice trailing off as he realizes he is getting nothing in the way of either affirmation or denial. He stares at the sisters in a sort of defiant terror, wanting to be brave, totally unprepared for what might or might not happen next.
Eventually Clotho shrugs.
“Well, why not?” she says.
Lachesis and Atropos look at her.
“Why not what?” asks Lachesis.
“Why not let him try it? They think they want to be masters of their fate, why not give them a shot at it?”
Lachesis looks as though she can’t stand the flavor of her own mouth. Atropos, noticing the distraction, pulls a needle out of her pocket and quickly sews a line of jagged green stitches through the edge of the tapestry. A glacier calves into the sea.
“It is not his task,” Lachesis eventually spits.
“So?”
“It is our task.”
“And?” Clotho counters. “What’s in it for us, huh? What do I get out of all this weaving? I’m tired.”
“Tired? You’re TIRED?” Lachesis shrieks.
She has never experienced such incredulity. But Clotho isn’t even looking at her. She is simply staring at the man, still standing in the room with a posture of incredible unsureness. Clotho pushes away from the loom and stands.
“Yeah. I’m tired. And, in fact, I quit.”
Lachesis leaps to her feet, centuries of age suddenly dropping off her.
“You can’t do that,” she barks.
“Oh yeah? Says who?”
Clotho is already walking toward the man, trailing a line of thread behind her. She tosses the shuttle at him.
“Have at it. Knock yourself out.”
Clotho walks out the door and disappears around the corner. Lachesis rushes to look after her, but she will not leave the room. She screams down the hall but cannot see where Clotho has gone. Somewhere in the distance she hears the echo of a heavy metal door opening and closing. She waits. Clotho does not reappear.
In this pause, the man carefully approaches and sits at Clotho’s place at the loom. Atropos is still holding the thread of his life, but she only stares at him in fascinated silence, waiting to see what he will do. He touches the threads, feels the colors that make the world.
Lachesis finally turns back from the door to see him sitting there.
“Atropos!” shrikes Lachesis. “What are you doing? Cut him!”
Atropos raises up the man’s life thread and looks at it. She moves like honey. She reaches out with her scissors. In a long slice, she cuts the tapestry from the loom.
“It is finished,” Atropos says, the only words Lachesis has ever heard her speak. “I will deliver it to the collector now.”
The constraints of time and space mean little to the Fates, so it is no difficulty for her to bundle up the world tapestry, however many thousands of years of it, into a neat parcel. She tucks it under her arm and she walks out the door, not bothering to look back.
Lachesis has collapsed to her knees on the floor, silent.
In the sudden stillness the man reaches out, and with a knowing that seems to come from within the loom itself, he strings the warp anew. He begins the tapestry. A world spins into motion. He keeps weaving. He is already forgetting how he came to be here. This is the way of things. This is the task he has been given. He weaves, and weaves, and weaves.
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