Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick…

by Derek Alan Jones

He cherished the warmth from the fireplace as it washed over his face and brought the air inside the cabin to a temperature he would have cursed only a few months prior. The soft flannel of his armchair wrapped itself around him, perfectly formed to the shape of him over decades of his nestling. As the voices on the radio sang of swallows and of Capistrano, the tick-tick-ticking of knitting needles kept an almost perfect rhythm, and when he looked at the woman who held those needles, she flashed him the same half smile she’d given him for over forty years. He struggled then to decide whether he should let himself fall asleep or hold onto this moment for just a while longer. The evening was so pleasant, and things in the cabin were good, so he landed on the latter, comfortable in the knowledge that sleep would be there when he wanted it. He took a long, slow, sip of the tea that she had placed on the table beside him, and it did very much the same work inside of him that the fire had done from without. He sank into the music as the needles ticked alongside it.

Tick, tick, tick, tick…

“When did you start knitting?” he asked when it occurred to him that in all the years he’d known her, he couldn’t recall having seen her with needles or with yarn.

“I’ve always knitted,” she answered, never looking up from her work. As he watched her hands move with such certainty, he decided it must have been true. It was, after all, very late, and he was very sleepy, and he found little difficulty in believing that he’d been mistaken.

“Drink your tea, dear.”

He did as he was told, and it seemed a good suggestion, as the subtle hint of cinnamon filled his mouth and his mind.

He considered, only briefly, standing up from his seat to place a log on the fire, but the chair was so very comfortable, and the fire was still burning steadily, and he wasn’t entirely sure that his legs would move if he told them to. Instead, he took another sip of his tea, and he let himself drift deeper into the quiet glamour of the evening – into the warmth of the fire, and the pleasantness of the company, and the elegance of the song still coming from the radio.

The song, he thought, must have been a very long one, as he was now aware that it had been going for quite some time. He had known the tune since childhood but didn’t recall such staggering length. No matter, he thought. It was a very pretty song. He must have misremembered.

Tick, tick, tick, tick…

“What are you making?” he asked her then, as much in an attempt to keep himself awake as out of any curiosity.

“I’ll show you when it’s finished,” she told him. “Something special. Just for you. Have you finished your tea?”

He took another long, slow sip, until the cup was empty, and then he placed it on the table and folded his hands on his stomach. Sleep was doing its very best now to overtake the man, but he was resolute, and he resisted it for the most part. His hands, however, didn’t appear to share in this resolution. They seemed to have let sleep in, refusing to respond to even the most basic of commands. The man didn’t mind this all that much. His position was comfortable, and there was no work he needed to do, so he would be completely content to stay like this until sleep won him over.

Tick, tick, tick, tick…

He must have dozed for a moment or two. When he opened his eyes again, the thing the woman was knitting had almost doubled in size. He opened his mouth to ask her if it was nearly finished, but the words he would have used refused to form on his lips. She looked over at him then, and she shot him that same half smile.

“Almost done,” she said, and she laid it down beside her. “But you have to try it on.”

She removed the blanket that had covered her lap, and as she crossed the room to him, he noticed the spinnerets on her thorax that had produced the threads. She began to slip the sack that she’d knitted with those threads over the man.

He was almost entirely certain that she’d never had spinnerets, or even anything that he might have classified as a thorax. But the fire was still so warm, and that song was still so pretty, and the sack that was now being knitted closed at his feet was even softer and fit him even better than the flannel of his old chair.

Maybe he’d been mistaken. Maybe the spinnerets had been there all along. He was, after all, very, very sleepy.