Darned
Viola stretched out her aching fingers. They were stiff and sore, but there was still so much work to do tonight. She sighed and looked around Chimera. It was long after the supernatural body repair shop’s close, but the place was full, with more people coming in all the time.
The zombie touched the leg Viola had just attached. “I can’t believe you had a shin in stock for someone my height. I’ve always had to have custom replacements.” He shook his head in amazement as he flexed his leg. “And the anchoring spell you used! I don’t think my original leg felt this strongly set. This is the first time I haven’t felt like one hard shake would make it fall off again.”
Viola stood up and stretched her back. “We aim to please.” She handed him her card and told him to call her if he had any questions or concerns with his replacement before sending him on his way. “And be careful out there.”
He nodded, his eyes going wide. “Yeah, it’s chaos.”
And had been for a while. It’d all just come to a boiling point tonight.
Since the magical community revealed itself to the humans, tensions between the two had been rough. Some days, Viola wondered how wise it’d been to step out of the shadows. How did the magical community expect humans to react to the knowledge that their every myth and legend, every nightmare and scary story, was true and wanted to be their neighbor, their children’s teacher, their doctor, or their coworker?
But the magical community had little choice in the matter. It was that or try to hide in an ever-shrinking world. All the secret places and tricks that used to shield them didn’t work as well, as humans spread further and further across the globe, bringing technology, like flashlights and mobile phones with cameras and GPS, that made the dark and unknown a lot less scary and the corners of the world all too easy to uncover and record. How could you hide from that?
But being open had its challenges too.
A month ago, her neighborhood, Little Purgatory, where a lot of the undead and chimeric beings in the area lived, had become a hotbed of controversy as several humans-first groups began marching through their streets. Apex, the largest and loudest of all the groups, had held rallies with people wielding literal torches and pitchforks. They’d had signs and hurled chants, calling the residents monsters and telling them to go back to hell where they belonged.
Viola, as a frankenstein, had avoided going out as much as possible. It hadn’t felt safe. Not with them there. She’d spent weeks driving the long way into work or going to the grocery store the next town over to steer clear of them. It’d filled her with angry shame to know that they’d so easily taken her home from her.
Eventually, enough had been enough. A week ago, members of her community — vampires, zombies, ghosts, and frankensteins — had taken back their streets, counter protesting, carrying their own signs. Rights are not just for humans! Life means more than a pulse! Let us Rest In Peace!
For days and nights, the two groups had shouted at each other from across the police-enforced barrier. It hadn’t made Viola feel safer but, as she’d watched on the news or heard her people chanting through her windows, she’d felt less alone. It’d given her a little spark of hope.
Until tonight.
Viola had been washing up after dinner when her boss frantically called her, begging her to come back to work. After a month of conflict, the inevitable had happened. Accounts were mixed at best, but whether a zombie shoved a human first or a human threw the first punch at a vampire, a fight had broken out and, with so many lit torches, several nearby buildings were set on fire. There were multiple accounts of Apex people with bats and paintball guns, not to mention cops with weapons that could fire things far more damaging than paint.
And, while several folks — both magical and human — were being taken to local hospitals, not all their community members could be helped by conventional medicine. So Chimera, which specialized in supernatural part replacement and body repair, had been turned into an undead triage hospital.
Viola had been working for two hours now and she’d already attached three eyes, two legs, and an arm and stitched and stapled dozens of dermal tears.
She turned to face the crowd. “Who’s next?”
Her eyes stopped on a woman huddled in the corner of the store. She had one arm wrapped around her tucked-up legs and her long hair draped like a curtain over her body. The parts Viola could see were covered in paint and looked completely human. “Can I help you?”
She shook her head, that dark hair shifting to almost reveal… something. Viola couldn’t tell what it was — the color or texture of her skin or the shape and structure of her face — but something about her was distinctly strange. Non-human. “I can wait.” Her voice was soft but firm. “There are others who need help more than me.”
Viola leaned in closer, only to have the other woman shrink away. “Are you sure?”
The woman nodded. So Viola shrugged and moved on to the next person. She spent the next three hours searching through Chimera’s quickly dwindling inventory of limbs, digits, and eyes, trying to make the best matches she could for those who needed them.
It was nearly two in the morning when she looked up from the finger replacement she was finishing to see her last coworker wave goodbye. Once done, she gave the fellow frankenstein customer her card and sent the woman on her way.
Viola yawned and stretched, a little amazed by the quiet of the store after so much commotion. It’d been a hectic night, full of rage and anguish. She’d been able to keep her own emotions at bay by focusing on her work but, now that the store was empty, she felt it all threaten to overwhelm her.
She was exhausted in every sense of the word. Grateful that her boss, as thanks for coming in tonight, was giving her the next two days off. She needed them. She sluggishly made her way to the front of the store to close up. As she turned the lock, she stared out the glass doors and worried about the world beyond them. She worried about walking to her car tonight after she left work. She worried about living alone in a neighborhood that was still burning. She worried about living in a world that seemed to have no place left in it for people like her.
She turned at a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. She let out a gasp when she saw the woman from before, still sitting in the corner, looking like she was trying to make herself as small as possible. “You scared me.”
The woman paused before looking up through the thick mass of hair. “I’m sorry.”
Viola, not sure what to do, stayed where she was. The woman looked terrified. Viola looked at herself, covered in various spell ingredients, blood, paint, and who knew what else. She was a mess. And that didn’t even take her already patched-together frankenstein body into account.
This woman looked human or at least not part of the undead community. Tonight must have been quite a shock and the last thing Viola wanted to do was frighten her more. So, even though her aching body begged to lie down in her soft bed, she crouched to sit on the tiled floor, putting herself more on the woman’s level. “Are you hurt?”
The woman paused before shaking her head.
Viola pursed her lips. “That’s good, because we’re not a hospital. I’m no doctor. I’m not even really a healer.” She shrugged and smiled. “I’m a fixer. I put people back together again, but I can’t do that with everyone.”
The woman dipped her head in resigned disappointment. “You can’t fix me.”
Viola scooched closer. “Maybe we can get you to someone who can—”
“No one can.” Her voice sounded harsh and bitterly defeated. She looked up, letting her hair part.
Even in the shadows, Viola could see the damage. The woman’s face had a gash from her left eyebrow to the left corner of her lip. The space where her left eye had been was just a torn mess. Which was horrific enough. But what had Viola truly shocked was that, all along the tear, the woman’s brown skin merged and mingled with white muslin. Viola could see the places where the fabric had ripped, frayed, or where paint had stained it. Viola had never seen anything like that. “What are you?”
The woman shook her head, shielding herself again. “A broken doll.”
Viola’s brows furrowed. “A doll?” She frowned. “Like a cursed doll?” She’d had some dolls come in for restitching or repair, but they’d all looked like whatever they were made of, walking, talking cloth or clay or wood.
The woman shrugged. “We prefer idol doll. Cursed dolls are beings that have been cursed, either a doll that has been possessed by a spirit or a person who has been turned into a doll. Even curse dolls, or poppets, are different; at least they have the power to place hexes on others.” She shook her head. “I’m a doll brought to life, created just to exist.” She tilted her head and said sardonically, “To look pretty.”
Viola nodded. “Like Pygmalion.”
She pursed her lips. “Galatea, actually.”
Viola gave her a sympathetic smirk. “Yeah, well, everyone remembers the creator more than the creation,” the frankenstein said knowingly. “But the good news is,” she said as she held out her hand to the woman, “I can fix you.”
The woman looked up, wonder twinkling in her right eye. “You can?”
Viola held out her hand hesitantly, not wanting her to get too excited. “I can stitch you back up again.”
“But I won’t look like I did before?” The woman sounded cautious, like she was both afraid to hope and just as scared to let go of hope.
Viola sighed and shook her hand encouragingly at the woman. “What’s your name?”
She took Viola’s outstretched hand and let her pull her up. “Nadia.”
Viola smiled. “That’s pretty.” The woman blushed. It was strange to see the pink stop right at the muslin. Viola looked Nadia up and down. Paint splattered in neon all along her left side. Impact tearage, from what looked like rubber bullets, sunk in places from the loss of sand now seeping out all around her. But the worst damage seemed to be her left arm that dangled lifelessly from a huge rip at her elbow, leaving it more cloth than sand. Self-consciously, Nadia gathered her hair to cover as much of herself as possible.
Viola sighed. “Your magic makes you look human unless your fabric tears, right?”
Nadia nodded. “I was told to be careful never to damage it.”
Viola figured it was something like that. “I don’t know what will happen when we get you sewn up, but it’s better than bleeding sand, right?”
Nadia nodded, but her lip wobbled and her right eye began to water.
Not sure what to say, Viola led Nadia to their thread section, where she tried to find a match among all their browns to Nadia’s walnut-shaded skin. She also dug in the stuffing drawers, past silica beads and cotton batting, to find a jar of sand. “Do you know if there’s a spell required to give life to the sand? To make it meld with the rest of your body?”
Nadia shrugged, looking both panicked and ashamed. “I’ve never ripped before. And I never asked.” She frowned. “I should have.” She shrugged sheepishly. “But, most of the time, I don’t really think about magic.”
Why would she? Viola cut a length of the walnut thread and readied her needle. Looking at their two right arms next to each other, the contrast was so stark.
Viola’s right arm was made up of three separate limbs, the shoulder to elbow being from one, her forearm being from another, and her wrist and hand from yet another. Each part was a slightly different shade of greenish beige, depending on the original skin tone of the donor limb and the way it reacted to the anchoring spell. She preferred surgical steel staples for any attachment that didn’t require a lot of mobility and strong industrial black thread for everything else. She was a woman of function. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to look nice; everyone had their vanity. But she liked the simplicity and bluntness of her look. She was undead and nothing she could do would make her appear not so, so why not lean into it?
But Nadia had lived her whole life looking human. Likely living like a human. Magic may have made her, but it wasn’t something she likely lived with everyday. It wasn’t the first thing people saw when they looked at her while, for Viola, it was often the first and only thing most humans saw.
Well, a benefit of being so deeply tied to the magical community was that you learned a lot about magic. “How about we try a basic fusing spell and throw in a dash of animation magic, just to be safe?”
Nadia nodded and shrugged. “Sure.”
After quickly casting the relatively simple if fairly reliable spells, Viola leaned over Nadia’s arm, carefully folding over the edge of the fabric. She started to slip stitch the rip shut, only to frown. While, with every stitch, more of Nadia’s skin returned to its normal color and texture, a thin hem around the seam stayed cloth, making the brown thread that was supposed to be hidden in the seam stark against the white.
She looked up at Nadia, who stared down at her arm with a pained expression. Viola could read the realization in her eye. Viola could and would stitch her up again, but Nadia would never look the same again.
Viola wanted to apologize. She wished she knew some kind of spell or had some kind of magic thread that could fix this. But she didn’t.
Instead, the best she could do was to undo her stitches and start over with white thread, so at least the repair looked as seamless as possible. She could hear Nadia sniffle as the woman held back tears. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”
Nadia shook her head and touched her right hand to her nose. “No, it’s not you. You’re very gentle. It’s just..” She sniffed. “It’s been a long day.”
Yeah. Viola glanced at the rip cutting across Nadia’s face and tried not to wince. It was the fix she was most worried about. Because, while the white cloth seams were glaring against Nadia’s warm brown skin, she could always hide them with long sleeves and pants. As long as she was careful, she could still move around the world the way she had before.
But, looking at it now, there would be no hiding when it came to her face. Viola looked at the right side of Nadia’s face, particularly her deep, brown eye. “What is your eye made of? Glass?”
“A button.”
Viola sighed. “The magic?” Nadia nodded. Yeah, Viola was afraid of that. If her magic could make a button look and act like a flesh eye, it was stronger than any magic she knew. Maybe the button was enchanted? “I don’t suppose you have it?”
Nadia shook her head. “A rubber bullet hit my face and I was too shocked to see where the button had gone.”
Viola pursed her lips together. Yeah, she figured that. “Well, we can try another button or one of the glass eyes we have in stock, but it won’t be like it was before.” As she’d said, Viola was a fixer, not a healer.
Nadia shook her head sadly. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.” She shrugged and a tear fell down her right cheek. “Not anymore.” A shudder shook her. “I’m ruined already.”
Viola didn’t know what to say to that. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
Nadia nodded. “Sure.”
Viola poured sand into the wound, watching the limp cloth regain its shape and vigor, before closing the seam completely. She had Nadia move her arm a bit to test the limb, pretty pleased with the results. “What were you doing at the protest tonight?”
Nadia frowned as Viola moved on to a smaller tear in the doll’s shoulder. “What do you mean?”
Viola shrugged. “If your magic only stays intact so long as your skin does, weren’t you worried about tonight?” That something like this could happen.
Nadia bit her lip. “The protests had been peaceful before tonight.” She tilted her head one way then the other. “Heated? Yeah, okay. Impassioned, to be sure. But ultimately peaceful.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened tonight. We were just chanting when people started shoving through the crowd, shouting that shots were being fired.” She shut her eye. “I mean, throughout the day, you could hear sounds of people starting fights, but they’d always be broken up by someone, one of us, one of them, the cops.” She stared as Viola wove thread into the cloth around the various tears in her skin, darning the holes. “It all seemed under control, right up until it wasn’t.”
Viola pursed her lips together. Even from a distance, she’d felt the tensions building. It’d felt like a simmering in her soul. She couldn’t have said, before tonight, for sure what moment it was all going to boil over, but she’d known it was only a matter of time. It was why she’d stayed away. She’d seen this kind of thing happen before, in other cities, with other people.
Even on smaller scales, she’d experienced this strain. She’d grown up with humans telling her to go home, go to hell, even though she’d been born here. In school, she’d often been one of few magical students in class, and usually the only undead one. She remembered drowning herself in scented lotions and perfumes for years, all because in the fourth grade Becky Bensen and her friends hadn’t wanted to be reading partners because they’d said she smelled like death.
She worked in a repair shop, where clients sometimes came in with awful stories about being harassed or targeted. A guy had come in last week after a work accident caused his arm to fall off. He knew that his coworkers were just kidding around, but they’d played keep-away with his arm for the rest of the day, hiding it all over the warehouse. Viola knew all about that, where, as the undead person, you just had to grin and bear it, while the people around you who you’d thought were friends treated your body like a joke or a part of some game. It was so often humiliating and, for a lack of a better word, dehumanizing.
And that was around people who knew you. Who saw you as you and not just part of the monster mob of nightmares shambling around their world.
Unlike Apex.
Not that Viola needed to tell Nadia that. No one knew better than Nadia right now how dangerous gatherings like that could be. So Viola just moved on, stitching up another large hole on her knee. “Did you go there with anyone?”
Nadia shrugged. “I don’t really go out much. And I don’t really have many magical friends and most of them try to stay out of politics.”
Yet she hadn’t. “So what brought you out?”
Nadia’s face stiffened. “Have you heard what they’re saying? What they’re doing? Apex can’t just come here and tell us where we can and can’t live. That we don’t deserve basic rights and common decency. That the world would be better off if we were gone. They think they can scare us into non-existence. Bully us back into the shadows. No one can. It’s not right.”
Viola smiled sardonically. “Yeah, but when they say that, they’re not talking about magical people like you.” She pointed to herself. “They’re talking about those of us that scare them. The ones who are just too different to fit neatly into their human world.”
Nadia touched her face. “I wonder how well I fit in their world now.” She frowned. “And, whether I pass as human or not, they were talking about me too.” She scoffed harshly. “If anything, you should hear the things some people say, when they think magical people aren’t in the room.” Nadia shivered. “Passing isn’t the pass you think it is.” She shook her head. “lt’s part of why, when things went wild tonight, I ended up getting jostled a lot between the two groups. The magical protesters thought I was a human and Apex assumed I was the enemy. I ended up getting trampled. And the more I got trampled…”
“The more you got torn up.” Viola hadn’t thought about that.
She nodded. “By then, whatever anyone might have thought of me before they knew what I am didn’t matter anymore.” She shook her head and touched the now darned white cloth peeking through her skin. “If it ever really mattered in the first place.” Her jaw tensed. “How could it, if all it took was a single tear to strip my humanity away?”
Viola knotted her thread. It’d taken a bit of doing, but she’d sewn all the tears and holes. Except for the one on Nadia’s face. Viola worried her lip. “Do you want to take a look at our buttons and eyes?”
Nadia took a deep breath. “I can never go back, can I?”
Viola bit her lip. She wished she could tell Nadia that she could. That there was some way to fix what had been broken. But she couldn’t. So she shook her head. “We can see what we have. Make the best match.” But buttons didn’t look like eyes and, even their glass options… Most of them were made to work with clay and flesh. She wasn’t even sure they had options for fabric.
Nadia wiped her eye and stared out the store window into the now quiet night. “I was never human. I was never one of them.” Her voice was quiet, as if she were saying it more to herself than to Viola. “Now, everyone can see it.” She took a deep breath and met Viola’s eyes with her own hard, determined gaze. “Just stitch it up.”
Viola hesitated. “Are you sure?” The other options weren’t great, but Viola didn’t want Nadia to regret her decision.
Nadia sat up straighter, brushing her hair back. “I’m stained. Scarred.” Broken. Nadia didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. “All my life, I’ve been a doll that was expected to look pretty and that’s it.” She looked at Viola with a sad sort of resolve in her eye. “I suppose it’s time to figure out what I am — who I am — outside that.” She nodded. “Stitch it up.”
Viola frowned, but did as she was asked. Leaning in close to seal up the seams, she understood what Nadia was saying. She did. To grow up not only looking human, but beautiful — to be treated and afforded the dignity as such — only to have it all taken from you in a single night… Viola couldn’t imagine it. Any of it.
Biting her lip, Viola used the sand to even out the fullness of Nadia’s face before sewing up the seam. Viola had looked the way she looked all her life. Sure, through the years, she’d changed body parts. Most of her body wasn’t her original body anymore. But she’d always looked like a frankenstein. She had never — would never — be this world’s idea of beautiful.
She looked at her finished work, still frowning. A white streak, like a bolt of lightning, cut across Nadia’s face. But it was a little easier to imagine what she’d looked like before tonight. By all indications, yes, Nadia had been beautiful.
Viola caught a glimpse of her own face in the window’s reflection. Similar seams, connecting patchworks of skin together, marred her green-tinted face. Stained. Scarred.
Broken.
Viola set down her needle and gripped her hands, hating that they were suddenly feeling shaky.
“Am I done?” Nadia asked, resolute resignation in her voice. “Can I see?”
Viola stared at the thick black thread ribboning over her hands, through her skin, knowing it wove all over her body, holding her together. She always thought it made her look strong. Badass. Unbreakable. Maybe she wasn’t — would never be — the world’s definition of pretty, but she liked to think that she was someone’s idea of beautiful, even if it was just her own.
With that thought in mind, she looked up at Nadia. “We’re not done yet.” She opened drawers and dug around, pulling out all kinds of odds and ends.
“What do you mean?” Nadia’s gaze narrowed on the mess Viola was dumping onto the work table.
Viola sifted through it all, holding it against Nadia’s skin and either placing it in neat piles or tossing it back into the drawers. “Good news,” she said with a triumphant smile, “most paintball paint washes off, so you shouldn’t have to worry about much discoloring, even on the parts of your skin that’s white muslin. And for everything else...” She waved at her piles.
“I don’t understand.” Nadia looked nervous.
Viola was too. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, but she knew she wanted to try. “We don’t look like them. We can’t be pretty like them. But we can still be beautiful.” She looked Nadia in the eye. “Do you trust me?”
Nadia still seemed wary, but she nodded. “Yes.”
Good. Viola took a deep breath and got to work. Grabbing fishing line and pearls, she used a couching stitch to secure gleaming strands that wrapped and draped over Nadia’s left arm, right along the line of the rip. Viola beaded pearl clusters over each darned hole, until the woman’s entire arm looked like that of some sea goddess. For her leg, Viola found brown embroidery floss and satin stitched over the white seams before adding roots and branches to the ends to make it look like a large tree growing up her leg.
She wiped her tired eyes as she looked at her work. “What do you think?”
Nadia twisted her limbs to look at them. “Wow.” Her expression was shocked, but pleasantly so. “Wow.”
“Do you like it?”
Nadia touched her leg for a moment, running her fingers over the branches vining up her thigh. “It’s beautiful. It almost looks like a tattoo.” She frowned as her fingers touched the edge of stitching, where floss met flesh. “But isn’t this like hiding? Pretending that nothing has changed? What’s the point of covering this up,” she asked, gesturing to her face, “when no amount of pretty stitching can cover up the truth?”
Viola took Nadia’s left hand, twisting it this way and that so the light caught on the pearls beaded into her skin. “It’s not hiding. It’s about finding your own sense of beauty. One that doesn’t define you, but that you get to define.” She grabbed black and crimson floss and scooted her chair closer before reaching up to cup Nadia’s face. She smiled when the woman tipped her head toward her trustingly. As she began to stem stitch her design, she said, “You went out there today, risked everything, to stand with your people and tell the world who you really are. Which is braver than most people, magical or not. These scars are a part of that.” She smiled as the lines began to bloom into an outline of a flower that covered the left side of Nadia’s face from her temple to the corner of her lip. “They are proof that you stood up for yourself and those like you.” She switched thread to fill in the petals with crimson. “They shouldn’t make you feel broken. They shouldn’t be a source of shame or a sign of ruin.” She added flourishes of gold and silver, making the embroidered flower look elegant and regal. “They should be a point of pride.”
It took a while to finish it. The sun was peeking up over the horizon before Viola finally leaned back and stretched out her hands. “There.” She yawned and grinned. “Now we’re done.”
“Thank you.” Nadia beamed, her shoulders relaxed while still sitting tall. She looked the most at ease she’d been all night, even though Viola knew they were both exhausted.
Viola raised an eyebrow as she felt a blush creep up her neck. “Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t even seen it.” Though it looked amazing to her. The lines of the flower flowed with the scar as well as the shape of Nadia’s face. It was eye-catching, to be sure, surreal and a bit abstract, but it fit Nadia. Beautiful and bold and more than just some pretty thing to look at. Nadia was someone whose face told stories worth telling. Viola was just glad to be part of that.
Nadia’s smile widened. “I will,” she said with a shrug. “But this is the first time I’ve felt beautiful without needing a mirror.” She took Viola’s hand and squeezed. “Thank you.”
Viola nodded, looking at their stitched hands intertwined. “You’re welcome.”
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