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The Thread that Does Not Burn

here was once a tailor who lived on the edge of a city that was always on fire.

Not literal — but as if people were running from flames day and night: in the racing footsteps, the wild, panicked eyes over market stalls, the fevered cacophony of deals struck in haste.
The people lived fast, spent fast, aged fast.
And whoever slowed down was swept away like ashes.

The tailor kept her shop quiet. There was no sign. Those who found her did so because they were ready.

She did not sew ordinary garments. She wove cloaks from a thread that did not burn.

“Is it fireproof?” they would ask.
“No,” she’d reply. “But it remembers water.”

Her clients were few.
A musician who had lost his sound.
A judge who forgot what mercy felt like.
A courier who could no longer tell direction from speed.
Each came ragged, scorched by the world. Each left wrapped in something strangely plain, but soft, and oddly heavy — like memory.

The cloaks did not stop the fire.
But they kept the wearers from catching.

The musician found himself humming again in alleyways.
The judge wept behind the bench, just once, and pardoned the boy.
The courier slowed down, and doing so, began to see.

Soon, whispers spread. Others came.
A merchant offered her a fortune to mass-produce her cloaks.
She declined.

“They’re not made with machines,” she said. “Each one must be spun with compassionate hands.”

One day, a youth came with soot in his lungs and fury in his bones.
“How can you just sit here while the city burns?”

The tailor met his gaze gently.
“Because if I burn too, who will weave?”

He didn’t answer, but he sat beside her a long while, watching her hands.
She gave him no cloak.
Only a single thread, and a spool of silence.

—William Zeitler
2025 June 11