The Seamstress

Psychological Feast!

Three Courses
Three Questions
One Delicious Prompt

Can We Trust the Narrator?

Can The Threat in the Story be Explained by Science?

What is the Deeper Truth Your Character is Hiding or Running From?

Bradley Ramsey

Elara’s shop smelled faintly of steam, chalk dust, and the old, cloth smell of garments waiting to be stitched. She didn’t trust machines; the secrets of the cloth could only be coaxed out slowly, by hand. A beautiful young woman had just left rather quickly, depositing a large, oddly stiff bundle on the cutting table. It was fine silk and chiffon, cream-coloured, meant to be for a christening gown, but Elara instantly recognised the weight and cut of a dismantled wedding dress.

She unfolded the material gently. It felt cool under her fingertips, but the instant her palm pressed flat against the seam, the light of the afternoon dimmed to a golden haze. Elara didn’t move. She held her breath and allowed the vision to take hold.

The material was screaming joy. She saw a garden bathed in summer light, a woman laughing - the original owner - her eyes bright and her skirt swaying. The moment was overwhelming, powerful, and utterly delightful. Elara catalogued the memory: A beautiful, honest beginning.

Her scope was to transform this bundle into something stunning. A new christening gown. The young woman gave her the description she would like. The christening was in summer. In her mother’s garden. She had six weeks to finish the christening robe. Her time was cut fine.

She picked up the drawing given…

The joy shattered.

The golden garden light dimmed suddenly and was replaced instantaneously by the stale, heavy darkness of a bedroom, hours after the wedding ceremony. Elara saw the woman, still wearing the cream silk, the skirt now bunched awkwardly around her waist. Her hands, previously clutching a bouquet, were now pressed desperately against her mouth.

The vision whirled as the angle changed, forcing Elara to see through the woman’s panicked eyes. A man stood silhouetted by the faint streetlamp filtering through the window - not the laughing groom from the garden, but a different man, his face shadowed and hard.

He shoved something small and metallic into the woman’s hand. The silk of the dress registered the tremor of her hand as she accepted the object.

“You will tell him it was a fall,” the shadowy man hissed coldly. “You will tell him he was drunk. And you will keep this thing quiet, or this dress will be your shroud.”

The woman trembled violently, the expensive silk absorbing her fear. She didn’t speak. She only nodded once, a small, irreversible agreement to a monstrous lie. The vision cut off quickly, leaving Elara gasping in the silence of her shop.

Elara dropped the drawing onto the cutout table. She stood, her legs wobbling uncontrollably. The feeling of weakness was so strong and powerful, as if she had literally been shoved onto the chair. Her heart throbbed rapidly, and her hands were shaking. She needed a cup of tea to get her nerves under control.

Slowly, she walked into her kitchenette. She put the kettle on and waited her thoughts wild.

The doorbell chimed harshly. She walked on weak legs to the front of her shop.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Blackthorn. How may I be of service today?” she approached the stern gentleman.

“Elara, good day. I have come to fetch my jacket you repaired.”

“Just a moment, let me go and fetch it.” Elara walked to her cupboard in the corner of the shop. Just as she touched the jacket, the memory she saw when she stitched the broken seam flooded her mind again.

Joe Blackthorn was standing menacingly over a cowering man, a bat in his hand. The man’s head was bleeding, and he was holding his hand up as if to say no more. Mr Blackthorn bent down and whispered something cold to the man... the memory abruptly ended.

She removed the jacket from the hanger slowly, just to calm herself down. These memories will be the end of her. Walking back to the front, she gathered herself and placed the jacket onto the service desk.

“As you can see, I was able to stitch the split, leaving no evidence of the tear. That will be fifteen pounds.” She wrapped the jacket in fine tissue paper and put it inside a brown paper bag and handed it to Mr Blackthorn.

Mr Blackthorn paid her, picked up his parcel, and left quickly. Elara went to the door and flipped the sign to closed. She never did this, but today she desperately needed that cuppa.

Elara waited impatiently until the kettle came to a boil, the whistling sound a thin comfort against the screaming silence left by the visions. She poured, measuring the tea leaves with the same care she applied to a hemline, her hands still trembling slightly. She carried the mug back to the cutting table and sank heavily into her chair.

The cream silk of the dismantled wedding dress lay spread before her, soft and innocent under the shop light, but to Elara, it was visibly tainted.

Her immediate, moral dilemma was a sharp, cutting contradiction; she was being asked to craft a symbol of pure, new life - a wedding dress for the christening of a child - out of a garment that was a once destructive deceit. To rework the fabric was to seal the original lie into the foundation of a new life, condemning the unsuspecting young child to start her life on rotten emotional ground. The cloth felt like a curse she was being paid to communicate.

If she refused the job, she protected the infant, but she would be unable to articulate why without sounding mad, losing a valuable client, and exposing her secret. If she accepted, she would be complicit.

A wave of nausea rose up. She lifted her cup, but instead of drinking, and pressed the hot cup hard against the back of her wrist, holding the heat there until the pain became a pinprick of focus, hoping to burn away the ghostly vision.

She slowly reached out and pinched a small, discarded scrap of the cream silk between her thumb and forefinger. She tore it once, cleanly, hearing the sharp rip over the muffled sound of her own heartbeat. It was an act of tiny, futile violence against the deception the cloth contained.

“A christening gown,” she whispered hoarsely to the quiet room, the idea itself a mockery. “A lie stitched in silk.”

The wave of nausea subsided, replaced by a cold, hard resolve. Elara could not destroy the fabric outright - that was theft, and the memory would still cling to her. She could not stitch the christening robe knowing the lie it contained. Her choice was simple, she would warn the innocent without speaking a word.

She finished her tea, the hot liquid grounding her. She pushed aside the main bulk of the silk and retrieved a hidden, sealed box from the highest shelf. Inside, nestled on satin, lay a reel of thread so fine it was almost invisible; Thread of Truth, dyed black with iron oxide, reserved only for covering the deepest scars in old garments.

Elara meticulously began preparing the silk for cutting, yet she focused her hands on the unseen back hem of the dismantled dress. She threaded her needle with the Thread of Truth and began to stitch, not a seam, but a deliberate, minute pattern into the reverse side of the cloth. It was a complex series of knots and symbols, known only to those who dealt in hidden meanings - a cryptic warning of betrayal and impending sorrow. It was an insurance policy, a message that would never be visible when worn, but could be felt when the fabric was held just so.

The lie was now stitched in, but so was the warning.

The young woman returned six weeks later, radiant and expectant. She chatted easily about her summer plans while Elara silently presented the beautiful chrisening robe. Elara said nothing about the tiny, symbolic stitches; she simply handed the creamy silk piece to the client.

The woman held the fabric up to the light, admiring the quality. Her smile slowly faltered. Her fingers brushed directly over the area where the secret knots lay hidden. She didn’t see the black thread, but the pressure of the symbolic lie seemed to transfer. She frowned. The fabric, so cool moments before, felt suddenly heavy and cold in her hands.

“Elara,” the client said slowly, gently putting down the silk. “I... I think I’ve changed my mind. My grandmother has an heirloom christening robe. It’s very old, and I feel I really should use that, for tradition’s sake.” She gathered the silk up quickly, stuffing it back into the left over fabric. “I’m so sorry for the late change. I’ll pay you for your time, of course.”

Elara simply nodded once, a small, almost elusive curve to her mouth. The warning had been felt, not read. The innocent child was safe from that specific curse. The client paid and left like she had been burned, the bundle of tainted silk vanishing from the shop.

As the young woman vanished through the shop door, the silence returned, thick and dark. Elara felt a strange, cold stirring near the cutting table. There, in front of her, lay the little scrap of cream material she had deliberately torn when she started to cut the pattern for the christening robe. She reached out and picked it up to throw away.

The instant the scrap brushed her fingertips, she felt a sharp, searing sting. The vivid, suffocating image from the wedding night arose into her mind, not ending where it had before, but continuing relentlessly. The story had not finished.

The vision re-formed inside the stale, dark bedroom. The woman, still in the bunched silk, was alone now, the shadowy man gone. She was fumbling desperately for the light switch, her face streaming with tears. Elara saw the woman cross the room frantically to a small, dark wooden chest - a memory box. The woman threw it open and shoved the metallic object the man had given her - a flash drive, deep beneath a pile of letters. The sheer terror of the moment wept into the silk.

Then, the vision rushed forward, skipping years. The woman was older; her face etched with the weight of the untold lie. She was wearing different clothes now, but her eyes held the same haunted panic. She wasn’t running from the lie anymore; she was living with it.

Elara saw the woman standing in a sunlit garden - the very same garden where the wedding joy had sung from fabric. But the woman wasn’t laughing now. She was whispering urgently into a phone, her voice raw with fear. She was talking about her husband, the groom from the honest memory, and her frantic words coiled around the scrap of silk like a viper: “He suspects... he suspects everything. I need to get the child out.”

The vision rushed to an end. Elara dropped the tiny scrap of fabric as if it were a burning coal.

She stumbled backward, knocking her teacup to the floor where it shattered on the rug. The cold sweat that broke across her forehead wasn’t from Joe Blackthorn’s violence, but from this new, creeping realisation.

The curse was not in the item; the curse was the lie itself. The material wasn’t just a recording device; it was a conductor. The young client hadn’t been saved by choosing the heirloom gown; she had simply been denied the warning. The core lie was still embedded in the mother’s life, and it was now actively destroying the new, unsuspecting family.

Elara, the Seamstress of Memory, understood with a chilling finality what the curse truly was: The threads of past actions cannot be cut; they only thread themselves into the future. She was the only one in the world who knew the truth, and the burden of that memory - the entire, horrific saga - now clung permanently to her own weary soul.

Another interesting storyline. I truly hoped that you enjoyed this short story.