herr_bookman | OOM: A Stitch In Time

“Mutterchen?” Autor asks, approaching his mother as she sits by the fire, working on her embroidery with quick, even stitches. He clutches a handkerchief in one hand, and makes a fluttering gesture towards her work with the other. “I… I was wondering if you would teach me. To do that.”

“You know your father won’t approve, Autorchen,” Erna says cautiously, and Autor wilts. But then she smiles. “We don’t have to tell him.”

Autor eases into a small smile of his own. “Thank you,” he says, and passes her his square of white cloth.

“Oh, no, this is much too thin to embroider. Your stitches will tear right through,” Erna says, and fishes in her basket for a different handkerchief.

“Wait, is that one trimmed in red?” Autor asks, and Erna nods, offering it to him. “That’s perfect.”

“Why is it perfect?” Erna says, looking on him with cheerful suspicion.

“O-Oh, um, it’s… I like red,” the boy stammers, adjusting his glasses and glancing away.

“I see,” Erna says softly, and Autor has no doubts that she does. He also notes that she seems to be bursting with more questions. “Do you have a design in mind? You can embroider it in the corner or the middle.”

Autor turns the handkerchief over and over in his hands. “A-Ah. Yes. An apricot. In the corner.”

Erna gives him a Look. “Autorchen, why on God’s green earth are you sewing an apricot onto a handkerchief?”

“M-Mutterchen,” Autor starts, and swallows. “So. there’s… There’s this girl--“

She clasps her hands together and nearly bounces in her seat. “Oh, that’s wonderful--”

“No, it’s not like that--we’re just friends,” he babbles, raising his hands, the red-trimmed handkerchief tightly gripped in his fist.

Erna pauses, looking him over. “Embroidery is a lot of work for a friend,” she says gently. “Are you sure she won’t think it’s romantic?”

Autor hesitates. He hadn’t thought of that. He glances to his shoes. “I- I can’t guarantee that she won’t. But I want to do something nice for her. As a friend,” the boy says, clutching his arm. “She… She doesn’t get many gifts, really, and she doesn’t have many friends, and I have seen her cry before, and I’m always giving her my handkerchief for it, a-and frankly she really needs one of her own, you know? Because… Because I’m not always there to see her weeping, and she weeps a lot. She has a lot to weep over.”

His mother is quiet for a long while. “Here, let’s practice,” she says, retrieving some spare cloth from her basket.

The boy knows the basics of sewing--the back stitch and the blanket stitch and so on--but his mother patiently teaches him the satin stitch, clucking at him when he pulls too hard on the thread in his eagerness. She shows him how to pencil in a design. Eventually, he gets his stitching right, and embroiders the beginnings of a leaf on the muslin.

“Well done, son,” Erna says, nodding at his work. “Do you want to monogram it for her? And I think you might need to add a little something to fill out your design.”

“A-Ah. Yes, a monogram would be excellent,” Autor says, already planning out the look of the flowing, curvy KM--in red, of course. “And what do you think I should add? More leaves?”

“Flower petals, perhaps? The pink would go well with the orange, but we'll have to get the right shades to work with your border.”

Sakura petals would suit, as she’s from Japan, Autor knows. But cherry blossoms remind him of Punie. He glances down to his hands, fiddling with the pencil. He can put blossoms on this, he decides. Just for this. After all, the pink will go well with the apricot color.

Erna helps him space out the blooms and pencil in the monogram. It takes him a few tries, but they eventually get the design looking the way he wants. The boy threads his needle with emerald green for the apricot’s broad leaf, and smiles at his mother. “Thank you, Mutterchen.”

“You’re welcome, son,” she says quietly, and squeezes his hand.