A Mother's Warning Stitch

The scent of simmering lavender and something vaguely metallic – a scent Antoinette had come to associate with her mother’s more… intense knitting sessions – hung heavy in the air. Antoinette’s Mother sat hunched over her needles, a veritable gargoyle of yarn. The scarf she was creating was no longer a cheerful cascade of primary colors. It was a tempest of charcoal grey, bruised purple, and a disturbing, blood-red thread that pulsed with a life of its own. The pattern was a tangled mess of knots and dropped stitches, resembling nothing so much as a battlefield map after a particularly nasty skirmish.

Antoinette wrung her hands, the silk of her hastily donned dressing gown rustling like a trapped bird. “Mother,” she began, her voice a breathy whisper, “it’s… it’s quite a piece.”