You don’t believe me. Oh, no, you needn’t apologize. You needn’t protest. I wouldn’t believe me, either, if it weren’t for this wooden box on my dresser, and the matter of my own missing soul.

Which box, you ask? I do have quite a collection, don’t I? I’ve always enjoyed boxes. This one’s a puzzle box, you see? But that’s not the one you’re interested in. This is the one. It doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s rather ragged, really. Handmade, of course, though it wouldn’t have to be. Almost any object will do, or so I’ve been told.

Open it? Yes, if you’d like. The soul can’t escape. It’s bound to the wood, I think, or maybe to the painting on the lid. I’m not sure how it works. I didn’t bind it myself, you know.

Well, that is an interesting question. I really have no idea. I’m sure most people would say the devil was involved, but I don’t know that I believe in the devil, even now.

All I can tell you is that on a Friday morning not long ago, I found the most extraordinary doll. She was made of porcelain, very old, in a pink satin dress, and the skirt was a dusting-brush. I don’t collect dolls, of course. I collect boxes. But she called to me. She called to me in a way that I recognize now as suspicious. I didn’t recognize it then, though, and so I purchased her, or perhaps she was given to me. I thought I paid for her, but no money changed hands. I brought her home, and placed her here, on the dresser, just where I keep the soul-box now. I even used her to dust the boxes sometimes. I was doing that the day I dropped her. Oh, she didn’t break, but when she fell to the floor I felt… Something. I felt…

Well, yes. That’s it exactly. I felt as though I’d fallen. The room spun around me and for a moment, I thought I was looking up at myself from a vantage on the floor.

I can’t say I was very surprised when she disappeared a few days later. I thought at first someone had broken in, but a burglar would have taken more than my little porcelain doll. That space on the dresser was empty for months, and I drifted through my days in a fog. Nothing reached me, nothing touched me. I found myself sleeping a great deal, unable to enjoy the simplest pleasures. I hardly tasted my food. And then, on a desperate visit to the same shop where I purchased my doll, I found the box. It called to me, just as she had, and I understood.

Oh, no, sir. I couldn’t tell you where the store is now. I wouldn’t if I could.

The puzzle box? If you like. Would you like to see how it opens? No? Let me just wrap it up for you, then.

Have a nice day, sir.

–

Notes: This piece was written in response to Chuck Wendig’s weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. I mulled over the prompt for a full week, decided to skip it, then had the idea to select a random item from either eBay or Etsy and write about whatever I found. As it turned out, I used one object from each site.

First, at eBay, I found this:

And then, at Etsy, I found this:

And then all I needed was some way to bring them together.

The rest of the stories for this week’s Challenge are linked here. I’m off to read them all.

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I picked up crocheting first. It was something I could get results from while I struggled to learn to knit.

(Note to anyone reading this who’d like to learn to knit – if you’re not going to get someone who already knits to teach you (I didn’t, and I kinda wish I had), I would not recommend trying to learn from the Susan Bates Learn Knitting! book. At least not if your brain works anything like mine does. I would, however, highly recommend visiting Knitting Help, the knitting section at Dummies.com, and TECHKnitting(TM), all of which have excellent videos and/or diagrams to help you visualize what you should be doing.)

Anyway, my crochet instruction book (from an I Taught Myself to Crochet kit) had much clearer instructions (though I was so confused by being told that all I had to do to make an increase was make two stitches in a single stitch that I spent far too much time on Google trying to figure out exactly how that worked), including instructions on using the stitch markers included in the kit. They’re tiny split rings, and you thread them onto the yarn.

That’s worth repeating.

They’re threaded onto the yarn, and they stay there til you take them off.

Flash forward a few weeks, and I’m working on NovySan’s Doctor Who scarf, which does like to develop extra stitches. (Fewer and fewer as I get better at this, but still.) So, I’m counting stitches to make sure I still have 60, and Novy’s daughter (who started knitting long before I did) says, “Do you have any colored rubber bands? You can just put one every five or ten stitches and then you know exactly how many stitches you have.”

“Oh, I’ve got stitch markers,” I say. “But it’s such a pain to move them up when you add rows, and this thing’s so long, it’s just easier to do it this way.”

We were, I now know, talking at cross-purposes. Because when you knit with stitch markers, you keep them on the needles – you don’t hang them off the thread.

See, what I imagined she was suggesting is that I put the rubber bands on the needles, and knit through them, a bit like knitting two stitches together. Then, when I’d worked up a few more rows, I’d cut them out and set a new batch of markers. (Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me, either, now that I try to explain it to someone who doesn’t live inside my skull.) Probably not as big a pain as threading those tiny split-ring markers onto the thread, but it was still going to slow me down. And I don’t knit that fast to start with.

Today, though, I was thinking that if I could figure out an easier way to hang stitch markers off my knitting, I’d be more likely to use them. I have a bobby pin hanging off the “increase” end of this bias scarf I’m knitting, for instance, and that’s plenty easy to move. And I have a whole bunch of French hooks in my sewing box, which seemed like they’d be easy to make stitch markers out of. So I started Googling. And I found this awesome tutorial on making beaded stitch markers out of metal toggle clasps. Michael, who makes them, says he likes the clasps because they’re solid rings, so they don’t snag on anything, and they don’t come open.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If they’re closed, and they’re made of metal, how do you get them out of the yarn when you’re done?”

So I went back to Google.

And I found an old thread from the Knitter’s Review Forum in which I learned that I’m not the only one who couldn’t figure out how closed stitch markers don’t wind up as a permanent part of your project.

I’m so relieved.

(The same forum thread, by the way, has a really cool tutorial on making scrap-yarn row counters. I’m definitely going to try that. Just as soon as I’ve put this new stitch-marker knowledge of mine into practice.)

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