The woman at the bus stop offered Els a sewing machine in exchange for one night’s work. Els asked where the machine was.
“In my house,” the woman said.
“And where is your house?”
“Burned down.”
Els shifted her suitcase to her other hand.
She had missed the afternoon bus out of Hollow. There would be another in the morning. The timetable on the pole was new, which made the abandoned town around it harder to understand. The windows were empty. Grass stood shoulder-high behind the former post office.
“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” said the woman. “I’m dead as well.”
Her name was Pella. She held out her hand, and Els could see the timetable through it.
Els took three steps away. Pella stayed where she was.
“You don’t have to,” Pella said. “There’s a shelter at the crossroads. Roof still sound.”
That made Els stop. She had been sewing for people who thought everything should be free because it was only a little alteration. A ghost offering her the choice already ranked well among this week’s customers.
“What sort of machine?”
“Treadle. It was outside when the house burned. I’d lent it to a woman who thought sewing curtains would be easier than washing them.”
Pella led her to the old assembly hall. Inside, seven people stood around a quilt spread on trestles. Their hands glowed faintly in the dusk. On the stage stood the treadle machine, dusty but solid. Els turned its wheel. The needle moved, the belt held, and the wooden cabinet smelled of furniture polish.
“Someone will have to help me load it,” she said.
“The bus driver will,” Pella said. “He brings it out every year for the summer fair. It’s town property. The last living committee left a note that anyone who finished the quilt could have it.”
She showed Els the note, pinned inside the cabinet. It was signed by three people and dated nineteen years earlier. The machine was real; its owners had been real. Els could negotiate with that.
The quilt was another matter.
When she touched a yellow square, someone laughed beside her ear. A small man appeared above the trestles, running along a roof with a trouser leg full of bees. Els jerked her hand back. The man vanished.
“Seldom,” said a large ghost. “He took a honey jar up there.”
“To eat in peace,” said a thin ghost who looked very like the man on the roof.
“The bees disagreed.”
Els touched the square again. The little man slapped his leg, dropped the jar into a chimney, and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Someone laughed so hard that the vision shook.
She laughed too. The square warmed under her palm.
“Memories,” Pella said. “The people who were there sew them in. The quilt plays what we remember when someone living touches it.”
“Can you make them different?”
“We can tell them different. But the cloth won’t lie flat around what didn’t happen.”
Els examined the stitches. They were excellent, small and even. The fabric was made from the ghosts’ own remembered things: a shirt, an apron, a child’s outgrown dress. Pella demonstrated by drawing a pale thread from her sleeve. Where she pulled, the sleeve became shorter.
“Don’t use your own cloth,” she warned. “We tried a visitor’s handkerchief. The stitches went straight through and fell out.”
The trouble lay at the quilt’s center. A white square rose in a tight hump. Its neighbours stretched toward it, twisting the whole quilt.
“Wedding,” said Pella.
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
The other ghosts grew attentive in a way Els knew from fitting rooms. Someone had arrived at the interesting part.
Pella wanted the quilt finished for the fair. The living descendants came once a year, ate sandwiches in the shade, and told each other stories. They touched the completed squares and heard their grandparents laugh. This year there would be fewer visitors. Pella had seen the letter the bus driver brought.
Els set her case under the table. “Let’s see it.”
She placed her palm on the wedding square.
A bride stood beside a handsome young man. Els recognized Pella without needing to be told. The bride’s veil billowed upward. A goat, its mouth full of lace, backed beneath a table. The young man lunged for it, slipped on a fallen bun, and landed in the wedding cake.
The laughter was immense.
But Pella, in the vision, was silent. She looked furious. Her face stayed still while everyone around her rocked and clutched their ribs. The white fabric puckered beneath Els’s hand.
“Lovely occasion,” said the large ghost.
“I was there,” Pella said. “I know.”
Els asked who had sewn the square. Three ghosts raised their hands. The groom was not among them. Pella told her he was gone, not lingering like the others. She said this simply, without trying to explain where.
Els unpicked a corner. The memory broke into separate voices. One ghost remembered the cake falling. Another had supplied the goat. The third had sewn in Pella’s patient smile.
“But she wasn’t smiling,” Els said.
“She always said she took it well.”
Pella walked to the stage and stood beside the machine.
They could not flatten the square. Every attempt to stretch it pulled another seam crooked. Els tried easing the edge, then a wider border. The cloth pushed both away. At midnight she put down her needle.
“There’s something in here you’re telling instead of remembering.”
The thin ghost glanced at Pella. “We could take the wedding out.”
“You could,” Els said. “It’s your quilt.”
Pella turned. “Then they’d tell it themselves. I’d be gracious in every version.”
Els waited.
“I wasn’t gracious,” Pella said. “I pulled the tablecloth. I thought I could stop the goat. The cake went because I pulled it.”
The large ghost rubbed his translucent cheek. “Oh.”
“And I laughed,” she said. “Not at the cake. Afterward. He had icing in his ear and kept asking if it looked bad. He was so anxious about photographs. I couldn’t stop.”
“That’s not what happened in front of everyone.”
“No. We went behind the hall.”
Pella touched her sleeve. She pulled a white thread free, then another. Els made room for her at the trestle. The other ghosts stood aside.
She stitched slowly. Her needle entered the square just behind the table, where the picture had always stopped. Els held the edge flat while Pella worked. Around them, the hall grew cold.
At last Pella tied the thread off.
Els touched the square. The goat tugged; the bride pulled; the cake fell. Then the young couple stumbled out of sight behind the hall. The groom tipped his head to show his ear. Pella put a finger in the icing and began to laugh. She tried to stop twice. Each time he asked another anxious question and set her off again.
The square settled onto the table.
For a while nobody said anything. Then the large ghost touched his cheek again, as though checking for cake.
“We did make a very good story of it,” he said.
“You did,” Pella answered.
Els finished the seam at dawn. When the bus came, the driver fetched his trolley from the luggage compartment. He checked the note inside the machine and helped her wheel it out.
“You staying for the fair?” he asked.
She had a week’s work booked in the next town. She said no. Pella stood in the hall doorway, her sleeve much shorter now.
“They’ll have to wash their curtains,” Els told her.
Pella laughed. Els had already heard that laugh, and could imagine the anxious young man behind the hall answering it.
The driver folded the machine’s cabinet shut. Els took a seat near the luggage compartment. The town receded through the window, all empty glass and high grass, except that the assembly-hall door stood open for the people who would come later.
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