Lona lit a candle, not daring to turn on the lights, but fearful also of the sweet scent of candlesmoke. She decided to risk it. It would be worth it.
She crept, barefoot and wraithlike in her pink robe, through the kitchen, the tile floor cold and gritty under her toes. The candle's flame wavered in her hand. She paused for it to regain strength and then moved on. Her left hand reached up, exploring the suddenly unfamiliar territory of the doorjamb—rough, wooden. The dark pressed in around her body. She found it hard to draw breath. Fantasies dispelled years ago returned with a vengeance and brought all their friends.
Monsters, she thought, and the idea didn't seem so fantastic in this palpable dark, her guilt already crushing her throat but making her heart feel larger, faster, desperate. She was excited, she realized. Thrilled.
Don't forget terrified.
The shop seemed like another world in this dark, the moon locked away from this hallowed interior by the thick, dusty curtains. It persevered, however, in oozing through the crack where the curtains were not shut quite tight. Lona reached for the elusive strip of silver glow and widened it. The fabric felt terribly heavy under her fingertips. Was the scratch of curtainhooks loud enough to wake her mother? It seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Her own heartbeat was pounding, her breath coming shallowly. She moved slowly, as a cat will, toward her own sewing table.
Lona didn't dare look at anything but her goal. Stay focused—move slowly—
Her hand closed over the reassuringly familiar shape of a spool, her needle stuck through the paper on the top, still threaded. Thank God. Now don't drop it.
Attention focused to a tiny point—to the end of a needle, glimmering in the moonlight, threaded with black that disappears into the thick, dripping shadow. Her fingers pale as a fish, rising into the slash of moon-white, sinking back with the thread between. She couldn't see it; she could barely feel it.
The coat was before her, broad-backed and tall—taller than her father, taller than any man she'd ever met-- stretching away above and below her line of sight like the cloak of a god. She crept toward it on feet terribly cold, and the moonlight over her shoulder made it seem to breathe. It wasn't on the beast, she told herself. It was long dead.
Why, then, did it make her pulse so close to her ears, her heart tight, as if it were a living threat? Her hand stretched toward it—she had never wanted anything so badly as to touch this coat in this moment. The need shrank her throat and made her spine want to curl on itself. She could have wept. She thought, in abstract and primal gestures, of caressing it, holding it, wrapping herself in its folds. She feared it. She needed to touch it. The spicy smell of leather sank into the air around her.
Lona sank to her knees before the coat, her fingertips lifting its hem as a peasant would to a king in some distant myth. The moon blazed behind her. She was below its staring white face now—she could look up into its beam, silvering the chest of the coat, illuminating the innocuous dressmaker's mannequin inside. For a beat of her heart the mannequin was ensouled. She glanced up and caught it between breaths. There was no motion excepting in her mind. Her eyes burned. Her lips moved, but no words were formed on them. The needle, pinched between her cold fingers, dipped into the seam like a sigh.
Robette slept deeply in the slumber of the just and hardworking, and did not wake when the moon crept across her face, tattling.
This, thought Lona, and her mental voice was sudden enough to make her jump as if someone had spoken aloud, this is what I've been waiting for—
Her hands moved across the surface, touching lightly as snowflakes, lightly enough to feel the texture of the leather without pressing into it. The heat of her hands reflected and gave the illusion of life. Was she the gently-moving hands or the leather, breathing sleepily under these delicate touches? Her own hands on her sides—cool fingertips tickling—which was she? With enough concentration, if she didn't blink, colors appeared in the deep, starless ocean before her. Blues and orange, green flickering into existence—the needle dipped and rose like a dolphin barely breaking the glassy top of the sea. Her hand guided it without thought and sight. When it pricked her finger, just beside the nail, her head jerked back as if on a string. A drop of blood welled in the dark. Her rhythm was unbroken. Her hair hung around her face like a curtain, and her blind eyes roamed before and behind her pale hands like a pack of the unspeakable.
She sat back, her knees grinding into the dusty shop floor, and the moon had lost interest to move off into the corner. How long had she been kneeling here, working her needle through the slick leather in the perfect blackness? Her candle was burnt down to a tired stump beside her ankles. She hadn't even moved it close enough to help her see. But the seam—it was perfect. Lona didn't need a light to tell her that. Her own fingers were enough.
Her bed welcomed her with cool, faintly rustling sheets, the sound of rain falling on roofs many, many stories up.