Softly Falls the Weaver

Noelle Franzone

University of Iowa

She is quietly spinning. 

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She is a good girl, the villagers say. A good girl, a little odd. Quiet. But good.  

She spins. The villagers talk. She spins.  

Her clothes are homemade. Some would expect them to look rough, but she always looks like she’s clothed in silk, the colors vibrant even against the road's dust. She wears the colors of royalty—dark purple, and light blue. The embroidery on her dresses shines with gold. 

She is not a beautiful woman, and she is not ugly. Her hair is fair, a little long and a little short. She is a little tall, and a little not. She is a little round and a little thin. She is a woman made of “little’s”—unremarkable in nearly every way, 

The only extraordinary thing about her is her weaving. Her clothes, yes, but the tapestries she weaves are like moments in time, frozen. 

Villagers whisper as she weaves on her stoop. The sun catches the threads just right, and for a moment it looks like the grains on the tapestry are waving in the breeze. 

“A witch,” they whisper.  

“Blessed,” they whisper. 

Like many things in her life, they cannot decide who she is. The only thing they know is that her tapestries are coveted, her dresses even more so. Women stick their heads in her windows at night, only to be met by her pale gaze as she sits, always spinning, always weaving. Men propose marriage to her, offering dowries of lamb, and sheep, and cow, but she refuses to see them. Her father sends the men away with a sigh. 

She doesn’t seem to sleep. She doesn’t seem to eat. She only comes to the sacrifices to lay a tapestry, newly woven, on the fire. The figures in these tapestries always seem to leap, to dance in the flames. The entire village watches as it burns. Some cry. Some laugh. The woman who is nothing and everything evokes feelings of both in everyone.  

She leaves. She does not stay to watch the threads burn. She does not talk to the villagers.

People in the village talk. She turns down a hectare of sheep from a visiting prince, who had been awestruck by her skill, and people talk more. 

The talk turns harsher. Words are spat with more bitterness. Some of the women of the village resent her for not being married. The more the women hate, the more men desire. She is wanted by everyone, and hated by everyone. She is a woman of opposites.  

And does she know this? Is she aware that her every movement draws glares? Is she aware that half the village would throw themselves into the river if she asked? 

She spins.  

The tapestries pile in her house. They are hung on every wall, thrown over every piece of furniture. The effect is magnificent. The walls breathe with life—there is an ocean hung over her bed, and a forest swaying softly in her kitchen. The streets of the village undulate under her feet in the main room, a rug woven of the very people that whisper her name with venom. 

She spins. 

There is no way to tell what sparks the first flame. It could be nothing. It could be everything. This is the way of the woman—no one knows.  

They will theorize, though, that it is this: 

The woman’s fame has spread, despite her best efforts to retain her anonymity. The Prince who visited spoke of her tapestries endlessly in his home country, the memories made only sweeter by distance. All her dozens of suitors spread her name, whispering of a talent that made even the winds stand still. The children of the village, grown up and married off, talk about her dresses, the way the thread moving between her hands seemed to flow like water.  

The woman is known, but no one knows her name. Still, they manage to find her.  

The first people that show up are simply curious. It’s an innocent enough curiosity—they watch her spin, eye her clothes, peer through the windows to catch a glimpse of the tapestries. Some would say this is nothing—they do not even speak to her. Others would recoil, tell of creeping eyes and wandering hands. They can never come to a conclusion.  

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The next visitors are invaders. They come to her house and barter with her for long hours, promising more pieces of gold than the village as a whole has ever seen. They stay for days, yelling through her door. Eventually, when she does not come out for a sixth day, they leave, cursing her. 

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What was she doing while they shouted numbers at her? She was most certainly spinning. Did she know the value of what was being offered? 

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The mood in the village turns bitter after that. The men were yelling loud enough for everyone to hear, and most people’s lives would have been changed with just a fraction of the amount offered.  

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Perhaps this is why, when the Lady comes, they gather. 

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The Lady stands outside the woman’s house, her head held high. The Lady wears a gown of deep purple. Around her brow is a golden circlet, glinting among her dark curls. She is gorgeous, and powerful. This is certain.  

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“I have come,” The Lady announces. “What will you do?”

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The villagers that have gathered murmur amongst themselves. They speculate on where The Lady is from—Anatolia, or Crete, or Rhodes. They are certain she is not from here. 

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They are also right about this.  

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The Lady waits. She does not move. The wind shifts her cloak behind her, but never moves her hair. 

Slowly, the door opens. The woman stands there. She is wearing a dress of blue, golden embroidery circling her neck.  

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“I was waiting for you,” the woman says to The Lady. “What do you want?” 

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The Lady does not rankle at the woman’s tone. She simply raises a brow.  

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“I want you to weave,” The Lady says. “And I will too.” 

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The woman considers this. She looks behind The Lady, to where the crowd is gathered. 

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“I will,” the woman says. “Let me gather my things.” 

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The Lady procures a wheel and a frame. They are fine pieces, polished honey-gold and smooth as silk.  

The woman drags her wheel and frame out of her house. They are worn with age, splinters peeling off from the edges.  

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The villagers should know the results of this contest. They have been the ones watching the woman. They should know that no matter the apparent power of The Lady, the woman makes miracles. But their hearts were bitter after so many years, and so they supported The Lady. 

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Time may have stopped. It may have sped up. Years could have been lived in seconds, minutes could have stretched to centuries. What did time matter, when The Lady and the woman were creating life between their hands? The thread unspooled like blood, like wine, like honey, like all the things that have names. Their tapestries, the dimensions perfectly even, came together like the things the villagers didn’t have names for, but could have been called death, or atoms, or gravity.  

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The end of the contest doesn’t matter. The contest was never the point. The point was the weavers—the woman, alien, and The Lady, otherworldly. 

The part that matters is that the contest ended, and The Lady stood up, tall and imposing. 

“They did not lie,” The Lady said. “Your skill was not exaggerated.” 

The woman said nothing. She simply cut the ends of the tapestry carefully, rolling it up to be displayed later, on some free wall in her home. 

“But I wonder,” The Lady continued, “I wonder . . . are you happy?” 

The woman’s hands froze. It would have been barely an instant, but they stopped in their practiced motions. 

The Lady walked towards the woman. “Are you happy? You could have everything your heart desires with a gift like this. And yet you live alone, and you sleep alone. You will die alone.” 

The woman put her weaving down. The villagers watching, as if entranced, should have marked this as unordinary. But they were focused on The Lady, and so they did not notice. 

“I can offer you what you want,” The Lady said, bending close to the woman. “I can offer you anything your heart desires. I would give it freely, for a talent like yourself.” 

“What could you give me?” the woman croaked. Her hands, out of habit, had begun moving through familiar motions. The woman spun. 

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The Lady smiled, and bent even closer to whisper in the woman’s ear. 

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The woman listened, her eyes shut. 

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And then she laughed. She laughed so loud and long that the villagers began to whisper, unsettled. 

The Lady stepped back with a smile.  

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“I will see you again, weaver,” The Lady said. 

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The woman kept laughing, and as the villagers watched, she changed. 

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First her hair greyed and fell, drifting to the ground in soft waves. Then her eyes bulged grotesquely, swelling to four times their size until they split and leaked blood down her face like tears. Finally, she shriveled, her arms and legs compressing inwards and shrinking until she looked more like a husk of a person. The sound of cracking bones made people shiver, but the woman did not scream.  

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When the villagers could bear to look again, the woman had disappeared. 

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They never found where she went. Her tapestries were taken from her house quickly, and then the house fell to ruin. The woman was forgotten slowly, as her weavings lost their resplendent color and the thread of life that seemed to animate them. 

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Sometimes, a villager would look out their window. Sometimes, they would see the ruin of a house, and they would not remember who lived there. They could recall a young woman, but not her name, or her looks. 

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But sometimes . . . sometimes, they would watch a small creature spin a web in the corner of their ceiling, or between the posts of a sign, and they would not remember. No, they would not remember, but they would feel. They would feel disgust, and they would feel awe, and they would feel despair.  

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What wish was it that The Lady granted? An unusual one, not for gold or love or revenge. No, there’s no way of truly knowing what the woman wanted on the day of that fateful contest. 

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But perhaps, perhaps she got exactly what she needed.