Benny Stitch's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

Benny opened his shop each morning and waited. Passersby glanced through the window at his hanging seams, then walked on. He heard the same thing from every mouth. The seamstress up the way already made their clothes. She had for years. Her dresses each held some small magic, they said, and nobody needed a stranger in a city coat. By the third day Benny understood the truth. He was not competing with a shop. He was competing with a habit. A woman with a paint-stained apron stopped at his window. She did not look at his seams. She looked at him. Aster Bella. Benny knew her only by sight, the painter who kept to herself and sold pictures of rot. "You're new," she said. Short. Flat. No greeting. "Nobody comes in," Benny said. "They have their seamstress." Aster stepped inside. She studied his shelves, then his hands. "The old maker makes pretty things. Everyone makes pretty things." She stopped herself, jaw tight. "I paint what people won't look at. It took me seven years to sell one." Benny waited. "Pretty is crowded," she said. "Ugly is empty." She left without buying. Benny stood alone with her words. He looked at his neat seams, each one clean and correct. Correct was the habit he was losing to. He thought of the mud outside his door, the sticks in the hedges, the dry hay heaped by the lane. Nobody sewed with those. Nobody could. He worked three days without sleeping much. He gathered stalks and stems and bundled hay. He wove them onto a wire frame he bent by hand. His ink-stained fingers bled from the sticks. He built a gown from the ground itself, wild and raw, the skirt a spray of dried reeds, the shoulders bristling like a hedge. He set it in his window facing the lane. By noon a crowd stood outside. They pointed. They laughed, then stopped laughing. A dress made of mud and sticks. No one had seen such a thing. A young shopkeeper pressed her face to the glass and would not leave. People came to gawk and stayed to ask his name. "Who makes this?" a man asked at the door. "Benny," he said. "Benny Stitch." By dark he had three orders written on his old desk. None were for stick gowns. They wanted plain hems and mended coats. But they wanted them from him now. They knew his name. They had a reason to open his door. Benny sat at his machine that night, not laughing, not resting. Three orders meant three deadlines. He had won the town's eyes with one strange dress. Now he had to prove his hands could do the ordinary work too, and do it faster than a maker they had trusted for years. The habit had cracked. Keeping the customers would be harder than getting them.