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Tailor of the Sky

he harbor city loved its banners — bright rivers of silk that streamed from every tower each festival season. Sailors said those colors guided them home, and massive banners adorned the lighthouse. Jovan had sewn them all for forty years. His attic overlooked the sea, his stitches keeping rhythm with the wind. He didn’t use rulers or chalk. “The cloth knows,” he said. “I just listen.”

His apprentice, Maris, did not trust such talk. She measured everything twice and feared mistakes like curses. “The guild loves precision,” she reminded him.

“The guild loves control,” he replied, smiling. “But the wind laughs at that.”

Then came the storm that changed him. The city’s Great Banner — royal blue and silver — tore loose from the high tower. Jovan went to save it, climbing against the gale. Maris begged him not to. Lightning split the clouds; the banner vanished into the sky. When he came down, his eyes were full of grit and salt. Within weeks, the world grew dim.

He hid his blindness as long as he could, then the guild retired him “with gratitude and regret.” He left the hall in silence, fingers tracing the edge of his dismissal letter as if feeling a seam that shouldn’t be there.

Maris visited often, bringing food and worry. “You should rest,” she said. “Let the city find another tailor.”

“I’m still working,” he answered.

“With what?”

He smiled, lifting an empty frame to the window. “With the nothing that moves between the threads.”

At first she pitied him. He sat for hours, hands moving through air, threading nothing. The sound of his needle against wood was steady, patient. Sometimes he paused, tilting his head as if listening to something only he could hear. Maris told herself it was grief wearing the mask of habit.

But one night the sailors saw a faint blue seam across the harbor sky. It glowed softly, bending with the wind. They argued about it in the taverns — some said lightning, others magic. The next night the seam lengthened, curving toward the lighthouse. Children called it “the sky's seam.”

Soon the sailors began steering by it. The shimmer always marked the safe way home through the reefs, even on nights when clouds hid the stars. No one knew its cause. It was simply there — as if the sky itself had learned compassion.

Maris tried not to think of it. She told herself, “Coincidence is the favorite cloak of madness.” But each night, after work, she climbed to his attic with a lantern and found him before the open window, needle in hand, eyes blind but luminous.

“Master,” she whispered.

He did not turn. “Do you hear it?”

She listened. The city murmured below — the sea slapping the piers, ropes creaking — but beneath it was another rhythm: a faint, pulsing hum, as if the night itself breathed.

He moved the needle and the hum deepened. Through the window she saw, far above the rooftops, a shimmering thread of light answering his gesture. The seam in the sky shifted with his hand, matching his movements.

Her lantern trembled. “How — ?”

“It was never cloth,” he said softly. “Only the nothing that moves between the threads.”

She stood beside him until dawn. When the first light came, he lowered the needle. “The sky tears more easily than we think,” he murmured. “Someone must mend it.”

The next morning, he was gone. The door was locked from within. The window stood open, the frame empty. On the sill, a single silver thread caught the sunlight before vanishing into the air.

Maris took over the workshop. She measured carefully, stitched precisely, kept the accounts in perfect order. The city needed banners, and she gave them banners. But sometimes, when the night was windless, she climbed the attic ladder and sat by the window.

Then, faintly, she would hear it — the quiet tug of a needle through invisible fabric. The seam over the harbor would brighten for a heartbeat, then fade. In those moments, all her calculations dissolved. She felt the breeze around her fingers, alive and waiting.

She would whisper into the dark:

“Leave a seam for the wind.”

And the wind, kind and unhurried, would answer by turning the pages of her ledger until it rested on a blank one.

—William Zeitler
2025 October 28

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