The back room of the seamstress shop served double duty as an apothecary. Jars of dried herbs, roots, and animal parts lined the shelves. Below them, an entire shelf crowded with leather bound books and sheaves of yellowed papers. A folio packed with diagrams and geometric shapes and lists and images and myriad other things covered the entire far wall. A few live plants sat on the small windowsill with its poor sunlight that struggled through the oak tree in the front yard. Outback was the garden, always with something sprouting, blooming, or dormant, depending on the season. The work counter faced the back wall. A small fire with a purring pot of water sputtered in the hearth.

Of the two women in the room, the Seamstress, the older woman, stood at her counter and crushed minced herbs with a stained wooden pestle. The rounded tip of the tool ground against deep sides of the mortar. The pestle droned a low base note as it circled around and around. The Seamstress gripped the protruding lips of the cavity and hummed a lullaby her mother hummed to her, and her mother to her, as far back as the family stories went. She brushed the ground herbs into a heavy-hewn wooden bowl.

“What are you humming?” the younger woman said.

She sat in a chair by the door. She held an empty mug in her hand. A pair of men’s pants hung on the back of the chair.

The Seamstress glanced over her shoulder.

“How long?” she said.

The older woman reached for a small container on a high shelf. She shook a few spoons of the content into the rough-hewn wooden bowl.

“Eh,” she said. “Did you hear me?”

She carried the bowl to the pot of water simmering in the hearth.

            “Three months,” a younger woman said.

            At the hearth, the Seamstress ladled the warmed water into the bowl. She returned to the workbench and stirred the steeping herbs with her fingertips. She muttered something, blow softly over the bowl, muttered again, tapped the workbench with her knuckles, then let out a sigh.

            “Are you praying?” the younger woman said.

            The woman preparing the tea shook her fingers over the bowl and sprinkled the brew with droplets that formed concentric circles that expanded until they merged with each other and disappeared. She wiped her fingers on her apron.

            “Worrying,” the Seamstress said.

            “Worrying?”

The younger woman began to stand up.

            “Sit.”

The older woman signaled for the younger woman to come to the workbench.

“Worrying and praying are the same,” she said.

The young woman sat back down, then began to stand up, then sat down again.

“You told me to—”

“Come,” the Seamstress said.

She nodded towards the workbench.

“I don’t worry God,” the young woman said as she stood. “I pray to God.”

“If you pray to God, then you worry God. Have no doubt about that.”

            The younger woman stepped forward, stopped, looked at the door, then at the old woman, again the door, and finally walked to the bench. The Seamstress took the empty mug from her client. She scooped the steeped black brew from the rough-hewn wooden bowl into the young woman’s cup. She smelled it with a deep and audible breath.

            “Drink this.” The old woman inspected at the stained wood of the workbench. She pulled her fingernails across the grains. Her fingertips were stained. “And rememeber—”

            “What is this, in my cup?”

            The older woman hmphed and stretched her arm towards the mug as if to take it.

            “If you don’t want it, then—”

The younger woman held the tea against her swelling breasts. 

            “Three months,” the woman with the mug said.

            “Three months what?”

            The pregnant woman bit her lower lip.

            “You asked how long.”

The older woman angled over the sitting woman and considered the youthful body. She felt the younger woman’s breasts.

“Three months? Humph.”

“My husband—”

“Always the husband.”

“The people, here, in the village.”

“The people? The people.”

The woman standing next to the workbench and holding the mug of black bitter tea struggled to speak. The woman who had brewed the bitter tea shook her head and waved her hand.

“You should have seen me sooner.”

“I didn’t know—”

“It’s been more than three months.”

The young woman began to cry.

            “Go,” her older host said. “Sit. Drink.”

            The Seamstress led her client back to the chair and forced her down. The client rested the mug on her lap until the herbalist gently guided the mug to the young girl’s lips.

            “Drink.”

            The Seamstress tweaked the young woman’s nose.

            “Do you want me to hold your nose and force your mouth open?”

            She smiled and laughed and stroked the cheek of a girl as if she were comforting a daughter distraught by a nightmare.

            “No,” the seeming daughter said and drank. At first, she wet her lips, then she sipped just a bit. She frowned.

            “It’s bitter.”

            “Better to remind you, my dear.”

            “Remind me of what?”

            “Of the bitterness.”

            “What bitterness?”

            “This bitterness.”

            The Seamstress put her hands under the young woman’s elbows. She only nudged the arms to rise. The woman with the mug braced herself then drank the entirety of the contents. She tiled her head backwards. The bottom of the mug faced the ceiling. She held as if she were a fertility lares set in the niche of a home alter.

            The Seamstress took the mug.

            “Rest here for a bit.”

            She poured just bit of the herbal brew into the mug then filled the rest with the warmed water from the hearth. She pulled a chair next to the young woman.

            “I drink just a bit,” the Seamstress said, “to remind myself.”

            “Of the bitterness.”

            “Maybe of the bitterness.”

            “Bitterness?”

“Maybe of the reprieve.”

            “Reprieve?

            “Only a delay.”

“From what?”

            “In ten, twenty years, you will know.”

            The woman who had made the tea sipped and winced.

            “It is bitter, isn’t it?” she said as she rested her hands with the mug on her lap.

            The young woman put on a look of contempt.

            “You never had children,” she smirked.

            The Seamstress smirked in return.

            “I never wanted children.”

            “Many women say that, but they still have them.”

            “I have my work.”

            The Seamstress surveyed her apothecary, waved her hand as much to indicate as to dismiss, and nodded, more to herself than to her guest.

            “What more do I need than my work?”

            Dim strands of sunlight stretched from the window to the floor, except where the taut bands settled on the lap of the Seamstress. She smoothed her apron, as if to capture the light. As her hands moved across the cloth, she seamed to strum the silent strings. She hummed the same lullaby as before.

            The woman who had drunk the entire mug of bitter and black tea let her head fall back and her eyes close. She began to rock to the meter of the lullaby.

            “You never said which one?” the woman with her face turned to the ceiling said.

            “Which one?” the woman strumming the transparent strings said.

            “Which lullaby.”

            The woman who had been humming picked at her apron as if she were turning the pegs of a lyre.

            “My mother taught it to me. My grandmother also sang it to me. Along with my aunts. All the woman of my family knew this song. It’s about love. The love a woman has for—”

            The young woman winced in pain, clutched her stomach, and bent over her knees.

            “It’s time,” the older woman said. “Go home.”

            “How long will it last?”

            “A few hours. There will be bleeding.”

            “What if I need you?”

            “I’ll stop by, on pretense of your husband’s crotch in need of mending.”

            The Seamstress lift the pants and stuck a finger through a hole where the inseams met. She wiggled her finger then let is fall limp.

            “I have some cures for this.”

            Her finger stiffened.

            “I have some cures for that.”

            Her finger limped.

            “And maybe even for . . . .” 

She laughed and pocked two fingers through the hole.

The young woman moaned, almost a growl, like a dying animal.

            “This won’t be as painful as childbirth,” the Seamstress said.

            The young woman looked at her with scorn.

            “No, not that I would know.” The Seamstress snickered. “You’ll be the better for it in the end. Hurry, before dark.”

            The young woman took the door handle.

            “The shadows are already on the common,” she said.

            “Go,” the Seamstress said as she placed a palm on the other woman’s back and ushered her out the door.

            After the young woman left, the Seamstress poured the remainder of the bitter tea into the fire. The flames cackled, almost winked, as if it knew some hidden joke between only it and the woman who worked with herbs. It was time for sleep.

*                    *                    *

One morning, a young mother of one of the village girls stood at the counter of the local seamstress shop and begged for a new coat for her daughter. Sitting behind the counter on a stool, the Seamstress drew on her pipe, hmphed, and quoted a price too high for the poor woman.

            “We can barely afford food,” the young mother said.

“The good you pay for,” the Seamstress said. “It’s the bad you get for cheap.”

She tapped the ashes of her pipe onto the floor. As she was opening her tobacco pouch, the young woman reached across the counter and took the Seamstress by both wrists.

“The fall is coming,” she said. “I need a new coat to protect my daughter, for the cold and the rain.”

The Seamstress chuckled. She shook her arms free and refilled her pipe. 

“Protect your daughter all you want,” she said. “In the end, she’ll be both cold and wet.” 

The younger woman began to cry.

“It seems—,” she said.

“Seems? Seems?” the Seamstress scoffed. “A woman is she seems.”

The mother stopped crying. Her face screwed into a scowl.

“You’ve forgotten what it’s like to love,” she said. “You’ve grown cold in your own way while still alive.”

The Seamstress lit her pipe with a match. She watched the match burn down to the fingertips then tossed the match onto the floor covered with tobacco ash and scraps of cloths. It was true, the Seamstress thought. She had grown old, and alone, but not lonely.

She looked out the window to the dark and deep woods beyond the village fence. Once, she was a young girl, younger than this woman before her. In her memory, the Seamstress saw the dappled sunlight among the trees and the small yellow flowers along the path. And up, further, hidden behind a tree, she saw who she thought was her lover, the most handsome young man in the village, in the entire county! She would go, and kiss him. That was end of love for the Seamstress. Even now, she felt like a fool for what happened and hardened her heart.

Her pipe had gone out.

“Please,” the young mother begged.

The sound of another’s voice awoke the Seamstress from her daydream. She lit a second patch and puffed on her pipe until fully lit.

“Come back in three days,” the Seamstress said. “I will have a new coat for your daughter.”

            When the young mother left, the Seamstress hobbled from behind the counter. She deadbolted the front door and slid the drawbar into place. Through the window, she watched the young mother made her way down the side street. The sun was setting and the shadows grew long and the darkness deepened.

As she watched the young mother, the Seamstress saw one of the bad men of the village. Already drunk before sundown, he lounged against a tree in the common and watched the woman pass him. He wet his lips and ran his tongue across his teeth. His eyes glowed in the dimming light. The Seamstress knew this man. He looked at her. She, at him. He nodded and smiled. His teeth shown large. The Seamstress pulled the curtains shut.

            In the back room of the shop, the Seamstress poured herself a half cup of wormwood tea then filled the rest with clear liquor from a flask. Sat at her stool, she sipped from the bitter cup and smoked her pipe. When finished with both, she tapped her pipe out onto the floor and examined the dregs in the bottom of the tea cup then tossed them onto the floor, too. She staggered to her workbench.

            It is love, she thought, isn’t it, that makes us what we are.

A tightly-bound package of waxed butcher paper lay on the well-worn benchtop. With a pair of scissors, the Seamstress cut the twine and loosened the wrapping. She had bought the cape from another young mother dressed in black. This seller had folded the cape in such a way as to hide the tears and stains.

The Seamstress undraped the coat and held it up to the flickering lamplight so that it hung fully before her. So small, the Seamstress thought, to protect such a tiny body. She fingered the hole along the right shoulder.

“Here,” she said, “I will put crimson silk patches, epaulettes befitting a little princess.”

The Seamstress spoke as if someone were there, stood beside her.

“What do you think? Do I give it to her for free. No? People have contempt for things they do not pay for.”

She drew the loose threads at the neck until the edging began to unravel. These seams never hold, she thought, and showed the wayward thread to her companion.

 “And here, on the collar, I will fasten cutwork lace.” 

In her own mind’s image, she could see this used coat remade into what it should be.

“And the stain,” she said as she pulled the back cloth tight between her hands. “What to do with the stain?”

She shook the cape in the face of the person who was not there.

See, look here, her actions spoke.

Outside, the sounds of night began. The hoot of an owl. The softness that comes with the setting of the sun. Maybe, in the distance, the talk, laughter, and happiness from the tavern. And the whisper of the wild, both those things never tamed, and those gone feral.

“A good dying,” the Seamstress said, “then three days’ rest and this red velvet cape will be born anew.”

She spread the red velvet cape on the bench, her scissors to her right, her thread and needles to her left, and like a priest about to consecrate, she folded her hands before her, bowed her head, took a deep breath, and began her work.

Author’s Bio:

Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), over forty poems in Michigan Quarterly Review, Faultline, and december, and others, nearly two-dozen flash fiction in Blue Mountain, Good Life, Typescript, and several scripts. He is a poetry reader for Ariel Publishing and a fiction reader for The Maine Review.

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