Greenie's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Greenie sat on a workbench inside the abandoned toy factory, one felt paw pinned under a bolt of green fleece. The bolt weighed more than he did. He had dragged it across the floor for an hour and moved it four feet. Outside, Marshwood was quiet the way it had been quiet since the children vanished. Inside, dust drifted through broken windows onto rows of empty cutting tables. Greenie had counted the missing children twice. Two hundred and eleven. He needed two hundred and eleven plush copies of himself, one for each empty bed, so that when the children came back there would be something waiting that remembered them. He could not cut fabric. He could not thread a needle. His paws were sewn shut. The industrial serger stood at the end of the row, four spools of thread still loaded from whoever left last. Green. Pink. Orange. Blue. Greenie climbed the stool and pressed his whole body against the foot pedal. The machine screamed and jammed. Thread snapped. A needle bent sideways. He climbed down and stared at the bent needle for a long time. Then he opened his catalog to a blank page and wrote: cannot be done alone. He walked to the doll repairer's shop before dawn. Sawyer Goodwin was already awake, sorting through a pile of small clothes on his stoop. A one-eyed cloth rabbit sat in the window behind him. Greenie set the bent needle on the step. Sawyer picked it up. He looked at Greenie for a long moment. "Two hundred and eleven," Greenie wrote on the page and turned it toward him. "For which children," Sawyer said. "All of them." Sawyer folded a small shirt and set it on top of the pile. "I can thread the machine. My hands shake. I can't run it fast." "I found someone who can," Greenie wrote, and hoped it would be true by nightfall. He found Jordin Yu at the park bench, the one with the missing lace still cataloged in Greenie's book. Jordin looked like he had not slept. He was drawing the same street corner over and over on the back of a receipt. "I need hands," Greenie wrote. "Two hundred and eleven copies. A factory. An old man who can thread a needle." Jordin stopped drawing. "I made this town wrong." "Then make one right thing." Jordin folded the receipt into his pocket. "Show me the machine." By midnight the serger ran clean. Sawyer threaded. Jordin fed the fabric. Greenie stood on the table and marked each cut with a pin from his hat. The first small green body came off the machine at 3:14 a.m., limp and unstuffed, no eyes yet, no hat. Greenie set it in a crate and wrote in the catalog: one. Then he looked at the empty crates stacked to the ceiling and understood he now needed stuffing, eyes, hats, and rainbow spikes for two hundred and ten more, and had until whenever the children came back to finish.