The Moth Who Mended Space

How it begins

Mina Silk found the hole in the night while mending a curtain. One star had fallen through it and landed in her button tin.

It was very small and very cross.

'I was standing there,' it said.

Mina looked up. A narrow tear ran between two constellations, showing a pale nothing behind the blue. The edges fluttered like badly cut cloth.

'Who made that?' she asked.

The star folded its points. 'Nobody is admitting it.'

Mina was a moth seamstress. She repaired coats, curtains and the occasional leaf damaged by an overly enthusiastic caterpillar. She had never mended space. Still, the tear looked familiar in all the important ways.

She fetched her largest needle.

Basil Quill arrived from the observatory carrying a telescope lens and a spool that glowed softly.

'Old wishes,' he explained. 'People leave them in the sky after they stop looking for them.'

'Will they hold?'

'Some have lasted a hundred years.'

Mina threaded the needle. The first stitch pulled the night together with a sound like somebody remembering a song. The fallen star climbed out of the button tin and watched.

At the third stitch, something tapped from the pale space beyond the tear.

Mina stopped.

'Wind?' she asked.

'There is no wind up there,' Basil said.

The tapping came again, patient and small. Mina thought of the star complaining in her tin. She thought of every curtain she had made with a little space for light beneath it.

'What if someone needs to come through?'

Basil adjusted the lens. In the pale distance, a shape moved that neither had a name for. It did not seem angry. It seemed new.

Mina loosened the last stitch.

'Perhaps a good repair,' she said, 'should leave room for something we haven't measured yet.'

The old wish thread warmed between her paws, as though it agreed.