the death tapestry

The already-dead man’s body convulsed. He was not becoming deader, getting resurrected, nor being necromanced, but a robed mage did indeed stand over him. This was Mr. Flitter. He was here to remove the soul from the husk—that is, freeing what little life clung to the lifeless—and the body could sense it.

This sort of thing usually happened in a chapel or a church. Somewhere sacred. People loathed the idea that something frightening as death was a regularity and strove to keep it contained in places they didn’t often go. But here Mr. Flitter stood, in a sea-side cottage complete with a view, cluttered with a family and whispers of what was coming next. Truthfully he would always prefer this. Men of God cared for nothing but God.

The family—a husband, wife, son, and daughter—did not speak to Mr. Flitter. Did not speak to each other, even. Their murmurings were for comforting themselves, nobody else. Before them lay their stalwart patriarch who, through the roughest tides, always kept them honest, true, and most importantly, smiling. He, to them, had warded off Father-Time and been granted immortality. Really it was nothing more than longevity. Mr. Flitter’s heart went out for them. When you expect someone to live forever, they often go suddenly, and nothing cuts deeper than waking up to the absence of someone you saw every day.

Mr. Flitter vowed to do his duty without compromise. He could not heal their wounds but he could close them, and with his needle and thread and imaginative head he would do exactly that. He did not know the deceased’s name (he did not like such information, it interfered with his work) but could see their importance etched onto the faces of those they had left behind. This man’s story…he would do it the justice only he could.

The corpse was withered and bunched together like a gnarled bundle of sticks. He looked, to put it bluntly, cadaverous, with pallid skin and opaque, clouded corneas. As Mr. Flitter inspected the body, their souls entwined briefly, gifting him with splashes of information about the life that had been lived. He saw first a boy struggling to put food in his belly, soaking dirty shirts with sweat as he swung a pickaxe under the scorching sun, chipping away at ores until his hands bled. Then a scholar who poured his ideas onto sketch-paper well past midnight, eating his food as he worked and marveling over blueprints of buildings he was determined to one day build. Finally an elder who enjoyed nothing more than the company of his family, who he cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for, never unwilling to share a story, tell a joke, give advice, or simply lend an ear.

A core tenant of Mr. Flitter’s profession was to never stitch from the threads of one’s own heart—to work with impunity and leave empathy at the doorstep. To him, that was callous. Inhuman, even. If it burdened his mind, but amplified his work, then he would take the extra baggage. When he looked back at the family, he said: “He was a great man.”

They all nodded. He was. But now, he was gone, and it was time for Mr. Flitter to work. From his pouch, he removed a thick tapestry needle meant for weaving. In the hands of a craftsman, it could fashion a duvet or blanket to put all others to shame. In the hands of a Weaver such as himself, it could do something extraordinary.

It could weave the incomprehensible; it could weave one’s memories.

It was no mere tool, but rather a gateway into the Beyond—that mystical realm where everything that Was, Is, or Will Be runs on like an endless river. To even wield such a thing without becoming blighted was a gift.

Mr. Flitter took a deep breath. “I’m going to get to work,” he said. “I don’t like to make requests of the grieving, but I do require silence, else something terrible may occur.”

The murmurings hushed. The shuffling, too. Even the children, who couldn’t ever keep themselves still, found patience their parents did not know they possessed. Mr. Flitter took another deep breath and held this one in—he abided by his own rules.

Then, he dipped the needle into the patriarch’s chest. It cut through like butter but produced no blood, and when he removed it, it brought not the threads of the body but rather the threads of the soul. Braided knots of entwined cosmos, space specked with stardust and planetary globes which twinkled in the candlelight, stretched out of the man. The stardust contained his thoughts, emotions, feelings. The planetary globes were his memories. In essence, Mr. Flitter held an entanglement of what made him, him.

He spun it around his arm carefully, using his own skin and bone to create a mold for it. It seared his calloused epidermis, filled the cramped room with the pungent odor of burning flesh, but the care he took was not to ward off injuries to himself. Rather, it was to keep everything together. A human was a complex cobweb of intangibles of which he held an entire collection of, all perfectly aligned and strung in order. A mere glance gave him the entire the nonsensical story of a life with all its twists, turns, and unexpected hiccups. He saw drama, action, adventure, comedy, romance and tragedy. He even saw a pleasant ending, despite all the depressed faces around him, because it was a life which had been worth living. A life which had been, and Mr. Flitter had seen many that had not, lived to its fullest.

While what Mr. Flitter had removed from the man was a soul, what was now wrapped around his arm was a tapestry. A Death Tapestry. One which would tell the family everything they ever knew, everything they never knew, and everything they would need to know about the one they had lost. When the glue he had stuck them together with cracked apart, this would pull them back together, and one day even those who never met the man would know his story.

What you Weavers do is create miracles, someone had once told him. You don’t try to make sense of a life. You don’t gussy it up, make it pretty, or just play out the sweet songs of it. You immortalize it. All of it. That is a miracle.

The tapestry tightened around his arm, losing its scorching heat but not its impact. Among the cosmos, those bedazzling moments—the first loves, the empowering achievements, the victories, the failures, the joy—glistened with an incandescence not even the sun could match. When he slipped it off his arm and presented it to the family, they said nothing. He hadn’t expected them to. There was nothing to do in the face of the death other than turn away from it.

The tapestry, he knew, would be locked away. Ignored. The family would try to move on and find ways to live without the man in front of them. In time, the murmurings would return. After that, the words. Then, the smiles. Finally, the laughs. One day, when this memory had swam far enough down the Beyond that they could remember it without tears, the tapestry would be unrolled and poured over, and that day, Mr. Flitter’s work would truly be done, for it would bring the one thing only a Weaver could truly bring.

Closure.

THE END