I remember the first time I caught a wisp of air between my thumb and forefinger. I spooled it around and around like a forkful of spaghetti, marveling at the sheer impossibility of its color and texture. I couldn't help but give it a tug.
       Of course, I remember it. How could I forget the moment that came to define my entire self-conception? It was the moment that separated before and after.
       Because that first time? The very first time I plucked one of those shining threads from the sky? It was also the first time I killed.
       I was ten.
       I'd seen them, now and then, for some weeks: the loose ends, dangling threads from the woven fabric of the universe. I had no idea that's what they were--not at the time. But those colorful bits of string hung about everywhere, suspended in midair, indoor and out, high and low, tantalizing and mysterious. How could it have ended in anything but disaster?

       My first glimpse of one had come as Gram and I walked the half-mile to the grocery store one muggy midmorning in June. I spied a bit of green dangling from a crabapple tree and thought it must have been some sort of cocoon. I grabbed at Gram's sleeve and pointed, but the look she gave me told me not to ask again. I kept my mouth shut and filed it away under Things Good Boys Don't Talk About.
       Still, what child sees and doesn't need to touch? So it was, later that sweltering summer, that I found myself no longer able to resist the temptation.
       I spent the better part of that morning as I often did: trudging through Garrett Creek, mapping its course alongside the old railroad tracks, exploring imagined kingdoms in far-off worlds. But, sooner or later, heat begat thirst, and imagination gave way to more practical needs, so I cut across the tracks and made my way down to Gil's filling station. Muddy water caked my bare feet and dripped from the hems of my blue jeans, but I hoped old Gil would still see fit to let me in for a cold bottle of pop.
       Only I didn't make it that far. A few blocks away, I saw it: the biggest one yet, a single golden thread draped across Main, like a sagging telephone line. It hung before me, dangling from nothing, catching the sun's light just-so. Across the street, it rose again and lost itself among the bushes that lined the road.
       I counted three cars as they drove right over it. Red pickup. Rusted yellow station wagon. Refurbished old sports car, blue chrome, and mirror-polished. Their guttural engines revved and then faded into the distance as each one blurred past me in turn, none of them slowing or swerving, as if the golden string wasn't there at all.
       But it was there, and I figured something so shiny and fine ought to be pulled clear of muddy tires and sputtering exhaust. My hand, fingers poised, hovered less than an inch away from it. A tickle of fear spread in my chest and rose up, lumplike, into my throat.
       Then, curiosity won out. I tweezed the string in a vice-like pinch and twirled it around my fingers like spun wool, noting its delicate, airy, barely-there quality.
       I tugged--
       --and discovered, at that moment, that time loses all shape when things go horribly wrong.

       At first, everything sped up. Events unfurled so fast I couldn't keep track. For instance, I didn't even see Jake Huber's mail truck pulling around the corner. To this day, I have no recollection of him accelerating into the thread, now stretched taut and cable-strong, but that must have been what happened.
       I do remember the cymbal crash that announced the impact. I remember the video reel of my perception slowing down to a near-halt.
       And I recall the image, the distilled moment that came next: the truck, midair, inverted, front crumpled, Mr. Huber visible through the spider-web cracks of the windshield, his face a mask of shock and incomprehension.
       It's etched indelibly into my memory, a bas-relief on the back of my eyelids.

       Eventually, time unstuck, and I wish I could tell you that I reacted bravely when it did.
       I wish I could say that my feet carried me toward the wrecked vehicle, that a rush of adrenaline flooded me, that I endeavored to pull Mr. Huber from the mass of crumpled metal--or even that I had the sense to call for help.
       But, truth be told, I fled. Not in body--my feet were as stuck to the pavement as if the summer heat had melted them there--but into some cobwebbed corner of my own thoughts. I fled into evasions and excuses, to the lies I'd have to tell.
       There was no question that I'd done it: I'd flipped Jake Huber's blue-on-white courier truck into the air, sent it tumbling end-over-end, and then crashing back down. I'd crushed a man between mangled shards of smoldering metal. I'd killed him.
       Knowing this as acutely as I'd ever known anything, my thoughts were of saving my own skin. But before I could even concoct an excuse, old Gil was nearly upon me. The oxlike man lumbered down the sidewalk in a septuagenarian's approximation of a sprint. The half-formed excuses caught in my throat as he came caterwauling toward me, and--
       He hardly stopped. A hand on my shoulder, a look into my eyes. Did he speak? Maybe--I couldn't hear him. And before I knew it, he was rushing to the wrecked vehicle.
        By some grace, I had dodged the immediate danger of Gil's interrogation, but I wasn't safe yet: a small crowd that began to amass at the scene.
       Voices swirled about me, onlookers speaking whirlwinds:
       A freak accident--
       Both front tires must've blown--
       Who'da thought his truck could flip like that?
       They don't make 'em like they used to--
       Shame about Jake--
       Poor Anna. Who will tell her?
       The gathered townsfolk were faceless--an amoeba, a single cell. Their voices, however, had color and mass. They were objects tossed about in a storm, spinning around me, caught up in eddying gusts of air. The swirl of voices took on shades of neon green and the foamy pink of bath bubbles. My head spun sideways as if the axes of the world had reversed.
       Can't let them find it, I thought. I couldn't let them know I was a murderer. Daggers of ice pricked at every inch of my skin as the shapes pressed closer.
       I fell to my knees and struggled to keep my breaths even as I ran my palms and fingertips along the sidewalk, desperate to find the telltale string that had moments ago been clasped between my fingertips.
       I didn't find anything but gravel and dirt.
       My airways tightened as I scrambled forward onto the asphalt street, nearly tripping as I groped for that impossible thread--
       A distant voice called out, and an arm enfolded me, pulling me away.
       Before I passed out, I looked to the summer sky and saw the scar--a tear in the world where the wire had pulled taut and torn into Jake Huber's truck.
       Then it all darkened.

        Someone must have driven me home, because the next thing I knew, I was making the solitary procession to my front door.
       Gram stood statue-still in the window of our old rancher on Shipley. She didn't say a word at first, just turned and let her eyes follow me as I marched sullenly into the kitchen. I strode across the stained linoleum and nearly made it to the front hall before she made her move. In a surprisingly spry step, she interposed herself between me and the hall door.
       "Well?" At ten, I was already taller than her, but somehow she managed to give the impression of towering over me.
       "Nothing, Gram," I uttered, barely audibly. Her eyes narrowed, then she turned away.
       In my room, I crumpled into bed. I lay there on my side and stared at flat white paint coated on drywall. My body felt numb. At some point, I slipped from thoughtless waking to dreamless sleep.

        Few words passed between me and Gram for the next two days. I mostly stayed in my room, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep.
       At one point, I heard a knock, and then Sheriff Hines's booming baritone voice. I tensed up immediately. My heart raced.
       Gram's side of the conversation was too quiet to hear, but the sheriff's voice practically echoed through the halls of our little house.
        "Heard young Eli was there, saw Huber's truck flip."
       A pause for some terse utterance from Gram, then:
       "Yes, I know. Gil Hammucker says he seen the boy standin' by on the sidewalk, seen him watch it happen...Yes, ma'am. Don't think the kid did a thing. Just wonderin' if he saw something...Yes, ma'am. Really, it's just some freak thing. Tragic, a'course."
       I pulled the pillow over my head to muffle the rest of it. If I'd thought that knowing I wasn't going to be blamed would make me feel better, I was wrong.
       On the day Jake Huber's funeral rolled around, Gram didn't say much. Didn't have to. Only, "It's time."
       She set my one good pair of slacks and white button-down shirt on the bed beside me, gave me a lingering, sidelong look, then walked out.
       The whole town showed up, sat solemnly on wooden fold-out chairs on the cemetery lawn. I don't remember much from the service, except noting that it was sunny out, which seemed wrong to me, unfit for the occasion. Certainly, it didn't match the truth I knew: that face, upside-down and twisted, slightly distorted, seen through cracking glass. I tried to pay attention to the little details of my surroundings: I noted the shapes of tombstones, counted the bare patches of grass, memorized the patterns of hickory bark and color-schemes of flitting birds.
        The entire affair passed as I retreated into the safety of those idle thoughts. At some point, when the preacher was done with his amens, and most everyone had let out a good deal of weeping, a man in a gray suit nudged me from the aisle and handed me a flower--yellow, with petals like a five-pointed star. I clutched it tightly and looked about, bewildered.
        Those sitting in the rows ahead of me had begun to stand and make their way to the aisle, forming a procession to Jake's casket, which was mercifully closed. Each one placed a flower gently onto the polished wood top of the coffin, forming an array of patterns and colors.
        The sight of it stirred me out of my self-imposed numbness, and an unbidden image came to mind: Jake Huber, on some Sunday afternoon in springtime, working on his knees in his front garden as his wife Anna looked on. I recalled Jake looking up from his gardening, wiping his dirty hands on an equally dirty brow, and smiling.
        Next to him was a little cart, like a small wheelbarrow, full of yellow flowers. In one gloved hand was a fistful of weeds he'd pulled, their roots dangling, tangled in clumps of dirt. And something I hadn't noticed at the time: among the roots, a single thread, impossibly golden, glistening in the sun.
        The memory froze me into my seat. I couldn't stand. Couldn't join the file of mourners, couldn't approach the casket.
        All I could do was sit there and stare at Mrs. Huber, whose husband would no longer kneel in the soil to plant fresh bulbs in spring. She sat there by the casket, an arm's length away from the man whose body was too mutilated to be shown to the gathered friends and relatives. Stone-faced and too exhausted to weep, she simply stared vacantly forward--
       --until her eyes met mine.
       I dropped the flower in the dirt and ran home.

       That night, as sleep evaded me, I tried to conjure pictures of Mama. I wanted nothing more than to recall her features just right, but images of Jake Huber--at one moment quietly gardening, at the next, mangled and battered, his face contorted in fear--kept intervening.
       Mama didn't come to me for hours--not until uneasy sleep carried me to dreams. Even then, I didn't see her face, just heard her voice:
       "You've gotta take him, Doreen. Doctors didn't give me much time, and Jason--"
       "And Jason never could get anything right, I know as well as anybody. Skipped out on you the first sign of trouble, hmm?" This was Gram.
       I could see only the interior of an old car. Ripped leather and stains. Dome light emitting a soft glow. Outside: night.
       My mother again: "I couldn't take him to my own folks. If he turns out like his daddy--"
       "He won't."
       "You're the only one who might understand--"
       But Mama's voice dissolved into a series of hacking coughs, and my dream veered off down some other avenue of sights and sounds I couldn't later recall.
       I awoke that morning as dim light slipped between the slats of my blinds, and I stared up at a bedroom absolutely hairy with strings.

       Knowing me as you do now, knowing what I've become, what I've devoted my life to in the years since, you'll doubtless be surprised when I tell you that I didn't touch them again for quite some time. More than that: I so thoroughly ignored them, so willfully lied to myself, that I nearly believed they weren't there at all.
       My self-imposed reeducation began with a recitation, that very morning: The ceiling is flat. The walls are smooth. There's nothing in the air.
       When my eyes couldn't help but register a loose thread here and there, I'd tell myself: The paint's just chipped. Or: That's a stain. A cobweb. A strand of hair caught in a gust from the air vent.
       These mantras got me through the rest of that summer, because Gram made it her silent mission to draw out a confession. Denial was a means of survival.
       I'd never known my father's mother to be a warm woman. She was firm, unmoving. She spared few words but meant the ones she said. But now, Gram's usual cold detachment became something new. She fixed me with strange glances. Always seemed on the cusp of asking me something, though she never did. She either knew what I had done, or she suspected.
       So, life with Gram became a game of Cat-and-Mouse--and although we never discussed the rules, I think we came to share an understanding, as though through telepathy: there was no need to go so far as confessing I'd caused Jake Huber's death. Simply admitting that I could see the strings would be sufficient to damn me in her eyes.
       I trained myself in poignant nonobservance. When, for example, Gram walked me to the grocery, she would stop to tie her shoe by the old crabapple tree. I would, in turn, force my gaze down at the sidewalk and ignore the dangling strand of green in my peripheral vision. Gram would simply grunt, stand upright, and continue her march.
       The rest of that summer saw countless tests like that. Gram--whom I now knew, could see them as well as I--constantly lay in wait, ready to spring her trap. She would position herself someplace where the threads wove conspicuously through the air. There, she would call for me and take up some pretense of conversation. All the while, she'd watch. I forced my eyes to meet hers steadfastly.

       By mid-August, I didn't have to pretend not to see them, didn't have to recite little lies to myself. I hardly noticed the strings anymore. Part of me began to believe they weren't there.

       The Sunday before I returned to school for the fall, Gram interrupted the ritual silence of our supper to announce she'd gotten me a gift to honor the summer's end.
       I ate my final bites of potato stew in solemn apprehension. Another trick? Another test? But when my spoon finally rested in my empty bowl, Gram smiled and drew a rectangular package from beneath the old oaken table. It was wrapped in brown parcel paper and cross-hatched with twine, tied in a neat bow.
       "You'll need new school supplies," Gram pronounced simply. "Have to tend to your studies if you want to amount to anything."
       The presence of a gift--a wrapped one at that--utterly leveled my defenses. I looked up to Gram, who nodded and pulled the package toward me. It wasn't until my thumb and forefinger had grasped the short end of the twine that I noticed the subtle way the afternoon light caught it and shimmered. By then, it was too late.
       It was the slightest tug, which failed even to loosen a single loop of the bow's knot, but I felt the sharp pang of its pull somewhere buried inside my skull. Memories came tumbling out, a jumbled mess of them, superimposing themselves over Gram's face as she stared down at me with a sadistic grin:
       Mama is driving away in her rusted caramel sedan.
       No, she's in a mail truck, blue and white, and it's driving along the underside of the sky--
       --or she's got her hand on my shoulder; she's wheezing and hacking, eyes locked tight in mine, and she's gone and she's gone and she's--
       --Gram, Gram is here and her eyes are staring piercingly into mine and I'm in that truck and the ground is the sky and I'm watching this boy (who is this boy) as he stares at me and the ground crashing down on my head, and I'm watching it--watching Jake Huber die, watching me kill--and Mama is gone, gone, gone and it's my fault, mine and--
       --I tugged again, much more forcefully, then let go of the twine, which slipped loose of its knot and fell away from the parcel with an audible thud on the tabletop. Upon impact, the entire length of it dissipated, and the parcel paper encasing the rectangular box flared up like the dying embers of a campfire before becoming air as well.
       Beneath, there was no box at all. Rather, in the shape of one lay a dense tangle of luminous, polychromatic yarn, which, untethered, now fell to an amorphous pile on the table's wooden plane.
       I stared at the tangled mass, suddenly aware that it was--
       "Nothing," came Gram's cool, rasping voice. "There's nothing there," but--
       Everything, I thought, the strings are everything.
       I turned and fled, slamming the screen door behind me and bolting heedless down county roads.

       The path along which my feet carried me was familiar but altogether new. Same dirt, same patches of half-yellow grass, same uniform rows of houses. Yet the world had taken on a new texture, like a tapestry once viewed at a distance but now examined closely. I could see the patterns that wove it all together.
       It was beautiful, and it terrified me.
       I ran across Main, dodged through hedges, ducked under a canopy of trees, and bounded over rusted rails. Along the banks of Garrett Creek, I slid down and hunkered along the incline, my body pressed to the earth, my eyes screwed shut in an effort to make the landscape vanish.
       For a time, I simply lay there, letting the creek's steady gurgle soothe me. When I finally opened my eyes, the pale glow of twilight was already waning.
       In that crepuscular light, the inescapable weave of thread glowed like the bioluminescent moss I'd once seen on a school trip to Henrich Caverns, or like a pastel painting of the Northern Lights.
       Eyes now wide, I lay on the bank, my only movement the rise and fall of my lungs and ribcage with each breath.
       The pattern held the sky and earth, the grass and stream, stitching the world together according to arcane and primordial laws of engineering far beyond my comprehension.
        Yet still...still, there was a logic to it. Not immediately intuitive, but the longer I let my eyes trace the woven strands of light, the more I felt a yearning tug at the inside of my chest.
        I traced lines that tied clouds to a web of dewdrops suspended across the sky. I skimmed along the water's edge to where roots were anchored in the world. I followed the labyrinthine lines to where my own fingertips pulsed with potential energy. And turning inward, I followed the threads as they spread through my bone, where they wove up my spinal column and radiated through brainstem, across the ridged furrows of myelination, and into memory.
       In a moment of sudden, swelling insight, I selected a single thread from the dewy air above the creek's water and lightly plucked. Ripples spread across the water's surface, and a cool breeze blew across my skin. I plucked again, and soft dulcimer tones reverberated through the air. The woven pattern of strings displayed before me pulsed with vibrant light.
       At the same time, it hurt. Each flash of light and polyphonic reverberation echoed not just through the space around me, but backward in time.
       I saw the string of moments unspool:
       A father skips out, knowing he'd made his wife sick but not knowing how.
       A mother drives the boy across six states and leaves him with a woman she hardly knows. She finds a place to die where he won't have to see.
       A grandmother believes the only way to end the cycle is to stamp it down. Extinguish it. Never let it begin.
       A boy knows no better; he pulls a thread, and kills.
       That boy was now hunkered down beside a creek bed. I saw him as if from above, and long threads emanated from his body, stretching in countless directions. A mass of them wound through woods and side-roads back to a rancher on Shipley Street; another thick tangle stretched over the ridge, terminating in midair above Main, where a jagged scar marred the sky.
       A number more were rooted in the soil beneath the boy's feet. My feet, I realized, and with an effort brought myself back into my own body. I felt the threads below me as they sank into the earth. They pulsed with light, hummed with energy as they connected to a complex system of roots feeding hickory and sage bush, weeds, wildflowers, and gardens...including the now-untended garden of Anna Huber. I recalled the funeral, the lost look in her eyes--
       For some reason, my thoughts flitted immediately to Gram.

        Gram was waiting for me on the front step when I arrived back at Shipley Street. She stood arms crossed, and was back-lit by the flickering floodlight above our door. Her face was as solemn as ever, her eyes as intently fixed on me with the usual disapproval.
       I didn't look away.
       Instead, I let a thread come into focus, just above her shoulder. This one would safe--I was nearly certain of it.
       Without a word, I reached over her shoulder and strummed the thread with a single, lithe finger. From one string, an impossible chord rang out. The night sky around us briefly lit up in rays of orange and yellow.
       Her face gave the slightest waver as the fireworks sparked around her. "So, it's true," She managed. Silence. Then, "You want to hurt more people, hmm?"
       "No...but I won't ignore them, either--the strings, I mean." I let my eyes wander, taking in the sight of the world newly unveiled to me. "And--" Here I met her gaze again. "--and I won't pretend I don't see them. I won't live my life that way."
       This time, she flinched. Her shoulders slumped, and she let out a heavy breath. She seemed a diminished version of herself as if some power in her were broken.
       "Not that I could do anything about it, anyway, not anymore," she practically wheezed. "I can hardly grab at them, not with these arthritic fingers. That box was the better part of a week's work."
       Then: a glint of something as she looked back up. "But I could still teach you a thing or two. If you're going to insist, we can make sure you learn better than that daddy of yours ever did."
       I felt a tug. Was it hope? I knew what I wanted, but I took a slow breath and spoke in a measured voice: "Can you teach me to make life?"
       She returned to her customary scowl. "Can't bring back a dead man, boy."
       This I knew already, instinctively. But something else was on my mind--and maybe it would be enough.
       "How about a single flower?" I asked.
       At this, her eyes showed something like kindness. "Yellow, with petals like a star?"
       I nodded.
       "Just one?"

        Over the next few months, as leaves toppled from treetops and sweltering heat gave way to gusts of cold wind, Gram slowly taught me how to weave fresh, green plantlife out of mere breath. I willed the first one out of the ground on the first of November. By winter, townsfolk began to gather in Anna Huber's garden, marveling at the spring flowers that flourished even as winter loomed.
        Each evening, Gram taught me more about our family's gift: the ability to see the Pattern, to unravel it, and to weave it anew. She didn't need to tell me that the utmost care was needed--that a single strand of thread could cause the world to unravel.
        There were tears to come, plenty more pain, and the scar above Main glared at me every day as I walked to and from school, a reminder that the pain was not mine alone.
       In a way, I was grateful for the reminder. But in time, I hoped, Gram would teach me to repair the sky.