The Seam Sorceress

Tilly's Mama, part 2.

 If she could have, Tilly would have willed her heart to stop beating—if only for a moment, and if only so she could better listen for her mother's reply in the aching quiet. It came soft, hushed like an unwanted sob, from somewhere close yet as she felt around in the dark, Mama was fathoms away, unreachable, untouchable.

"Where are you?" Tilly hollered. She bumped against a side table near the stairs and heard the clatter of glass. It was the oil lamp. Patting for a pack of matches, she struck a light and fed the wick. The room was filled with amber warmth and jumping shadows that hid in the family hearth.

"Here," Mama croaked from the stairwell. "I fell. My crutch slipped and I fell—"

Tilly took the lamp. "How long you been there?"

"Don't know—it was still light out—" She was interrupted by a retching cough that reduced her voice to little more than a whisper. "Oh, honey, I don't know if I want you to see me like this."

There was a part of her that didn't want to see Mama either, an imaginative piece of Tilly that pictured her mother shattered and scattered across the stairsteps. The lamp shook in her grasp. Tilly swallowed hard and forced a smile that grew more genuine as she cast the light into the stairwell. "Well, tough. Here I come."

Something glittered from the steps. To an outsider, the small flecks might have been mistaken for diamond dust or the impossibly small shards of a smashed mirror. Tilly knew it was all that was left of Mama's right leg.

Once she fell, Mama had tried to climb back up the stairs. It was clear in the way her body was twisted, crutch hooked around one of the worn spindles in the stair railing as a makeshift tether, leaving a trail of crushed fey-skin behind her. Her body had given out with only two more steps to go. Mama laid still, chest falling in shallow crests. Her hair was thin and curled with sweat.

"I'm sorry," Mama said, blinking away tears. "I'm so sorry you have to see me like this, sweet thing."

Tilly put the lamp down on the bottom step and climbed up after her. "Aw, ain't the first time I seen you in your housecoat."

It took her mother a moment too long to get the joke. When she did, she broke into a broad smile, but her laugh sounded an awful lot like a cry. "Oh, sweet thing—"

"I love you. You're my brightest star." With a kiss to her sweaty forehead, Tilly laced an arm around Mama's waist and another under her still in-tact knee. Three hours prior, the act of lifting her mother would've been little more than carrying a toy, but the last shred of magic was utterly gone from Tilly's dress. Her muscles were shot. She puffed, face going red. "Gimme a second—"

The struggle was not lost on Mama, whose dark eyes flitted to the tattered hem of her daughter's dress, then the dried blood on her forehead. "Oh, no. What happened to you?"

"It's a long story," Tilly panted. She looked up at the sound of the front door opening. "Sprout, Boogs—can y'all help me? Mama fell while we were out."

Between the three of them, they got Mama back upstairs and onto the bed. Tilly did the best she could to clean and dress the stump of her leg, while Sprout brought up a cup of water and a bowl of rampion and strawberries from the backyard. All the while, the younger of the Lafayette siblings retold the events of the day—with her own particular brand of embellishment, of course.

"I think we must have cleared about 40 plates each." It was hard to tell if Sprout was putting on a brave face or if her excitement from the fair genuinely overrode any concern she had about the current situation. "Booger was probably the best of the bunch but they wouldn't let her place on account that she's not people—"