Fabric

By Nick Jones

A young woman receives a package from an unknown address and opens it to discover that her knitting ability is more important than she could have ever imagined.

Illustrated by David Sarallo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365425295

Nick Jones

Nick Jones was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and now lives in the Cotswolds, England. In a previous life, he ran his own media company and was a 2nd Dan black belt in Karate. These days he can be found in his writing room, working on his latest mind-bending ideas, surrounded by notes and scribbling on a large white board. He loves movies, kindness, gin, and vinyl.

Book preview

Fabric

Fabric

Written by Nick Jones

Illustrated by David Sarallo

NJ-Nexus Publishing

2016

Copyright © 2016 by Nick Jones

Illustrations © 2016 by David Sarallo

Cover BY-NC-SA by Digital Gnosis

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN 978-1-365-42212-6

NJ-Nexus Publishing

Chicago, IL

Chapter 1

nce upon a time there was a girl. OK, so there have been many girls through the ages, but this story concerns a unique girl. She had an inkling of how unique she was, but it was more of an itch in her heart that she was afraid to scratch because maybe it would start to bleed everywhere, and that would really be a mess, and then her heart might stop beating, and it had to keep beating to live, but of course you already knew that, didn’t you?

What you probably didn’t know is that at the beginning of our story, this girl, Gwendolyn, is sitting in a subway car on her way to work. It was a morning she thought was like any other and believed would lead to a day like any other that would melt into a night like any other. Another turn around the morning dance of wake up, snooze, wake up, snooze and pull covers tighter, wake up, stand up, brush teeth, take a shower, dry, dress, leave, lock door, get on the train, sit down, in nearly the same order, and now she was almost at her stop. She didn’t even have to look. She could tell by the procession of who boarded when and sat where and how they breathed. It was always slightly different depending on how early she finally got out of bed, but today it was wheezing man with too much cologne, sniffling girl who wore bright colors and frowned all the time, and old man with the whistling nose sitting around her. The train car filled like a ravenous metal animal. Bodies pressed together in its belly with their gazes roving to scan advertisements for bankruptcy lawyers and psychological studies, silver poles, smartphones, dumbphones, or books, landing on anything at all except someone else’s eyes. It seemed to her that, on the train, everyone was made of wax. She felt it start to form on her sometimes and begin to harden, but her heart’s itch would turn it back to liquid and it would fall off of her.

The bell chimed and took her out of her mind or, rather, back into her mind. The doors slid open and four more passengers pushed their way into the car. An Indian woman reading a newspaper blew a bubble. It lingered. Gwen cringed as she waited for it to burst, but it kept hanging there. Waiting. She hid her anxiety by pretending to scratch her ears. No one noticed though because when they saw her move they looked away again.

After what seemed to be an eternity she reached her stop and squeezed through a throng of passengers, some freshly bathed and some that, unfortunately, were not. She held her breath and made it off the train just before the doors closed behind her. Gwen feared that one day she wouldn’t make it off the train. It would just keep going with more and more people boarding until the car bulged and scraped the top of the tunnel with arms and legs intertwined as it expanded bigger and bigger with a series of crunches. But alas, this morning she made it off with no problems worse than getting a nose full of one passenger’s maple syrup and coffee breath mixing with another’s mint toothpaste exhalations. She was a bit shorter than most of the passengers at this hour, so she got the brunt of it.

Gwen looked at the flashing bank sign just outside the train station that alternated between the weather and the hour, and noticed that she could almost make it on time to her desk. She could make it, that is, if people weren’t moving so slowly. She swore it was too early in the year for holiday shopping and too late for tourists, but it seemed everyone conspired to block her way. She dodged to her right and a flock of children scurried around her. A little girl pulled her brother’s hair while their parents looked to street signs to get their bearings. An old man’s cane tip slammed down on the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding her foot. She was more upset by the old man, but then felt bad for being upset at him. She quickened her pace and then slowed down, just in case anyone snickered or stared at her, until finally she arrived at the tall black building she worked in.

Her office building was ultra-secure. Sometimes she thought military scientists were performing top secret experiments on aliens, or there was a vault with gold and diamonds in it with how she had to sign in and out every time instead of them simply knowing who she was. On occasion she joked with the desk guard that she should just sign an X and be done with it, or sign every box for the week that she knew she was going to be there. The guard responded nearly every time with, Name, time, office location, or he merely grunted and pushed the clipboard at her.

This particular morning she signed in, swiped her ID card to start the elevator, and ran full speed down the hall until she came to her office suite’s glass door with a pyramid logo. Right behind the door stood her boss, a slender woman in a grey-black dress that was almost a size too large with too-polished black boots, clicking a pen in her hand.

Gwen pulled at the glass door and it wouldn’t budge. She then remembered to swipe her ID, and with a beep and a tiny green light on a sensor, she was in. She panted heavily when her boss, with a thin-lipped grin said, You know you’re four minutes late, right?

I’m sorry, Polly. It won’t happen again. I’ll try and get an earlier start, Gwen said, still struggling to catch her breath.

Her boss, actively at war with the scowl trying to form on her lips, said, I wish they would take my advice. Then no one would ever be late ever again.

I don’t know what else I could do other than leave earlier. Or maybe get a louder alarm or—

Polly interrupted. An inch. That’s what I’d take for every minute.

An inch?

An inch of, well, of, of…. She hesitated,