One fine Needle

Feeling was decided by the powerful, and its relevance was decided by ego. She doesn’t know when she became ‘sharp’, when the dull shine of her nickel plating became… tarnished.

Maybe it was Emery, the powder sand of it on her burs giving her, her.

She doesn’t know how she’s a her, how as an object defined by sharp-primness even before animance, something so oppositional to the chaotic feminine could be her. How as her eye pulled thread, and her point guided her holder, and the shaft of her bent so slight under the weight of the fabric as the threads of it brushed against her so fully…

But she is. Almost as certainly as she is an ephemeral thing. Obsolescence even the unplanned kind. It’s death.

Her eye pulls the thread again, as is her purpose before life, and she fears. She fears the snapping of her eye, and the loss of her use in so good a form as she was then.

She doesn’t want to be a pin, the weight of her, her use would be so rare after that. She knows in the emery as it sharpens her, that needles her weight face good use, but pins do not. She can accept this, like she did the little spark that made her sharp.

But such was not ideal.

Still with the care of the hand which used her she hoped such a time was far from her, a moment slippery, rare and unmanaged by orderly things like false silks, like polyester and acetate. A rare thing for a needle of her weight and width.

A rare thing for the hand which wields her, beautiful and callused as the shaft is pushed through again and again, fast and just by feeling with her eye, the tension surrounding her, a whip stitch.

Quick, dirty, sturdy, thread pulls taught and weak as it snaps in her eye, only to be pulled through her again with a bent wire, a thoughtless thing, most certainly facing so little use. Though the needle knows not what with its inability to communicate with any other object. Maybe it was the equality of things, that she could not hope to speak and prove her sentience to anything else. That nothing of a similar function could.

She’s pulled quickly twice in a fashion she’s come to associate with the loss of her guiding hand. And usually a gap in use. The thread once snapped and reinserted was collected from her eye, a wrecked nubbin of polyester. She anticipates a new fabric to tension around the shaft of her body, and a new color of thread inserted into her eye, she imagines, as limited as it might be, new material for her sharp end to pierce, a pull through the emery if she became sticky.

Soon, maybe a day, maybe a week, she sees use again. New thread pulled through her eye and evened out to a knot farthest from her point, prim and even, she’s pushed on the wrong side of a new fabric, thinner than the last, but likely not see through under light. Her shaft pulled between the legs of the knot secured at the edge of the material.

She feels two maybe three layers on her shaft, as she’s pulled under tension in a straight line, a backstitch, she feels sharp where her eye had just been.

Tight, and singular, each stitch pulls together in a familiar fashion, as one yard of thread folded in half only covers ten inches of material. Again and again this is done, until the seam was fully connected, knot after knot secured, the stitch made hardy by stitch length and repetition. The fabric will die before the stitch they’d lain together.

It was the pride of all needles, a stitch that wouldn’t break on material which would certainly break down, fabric being the ultimatum of the loom, the machine, the mechanism, so much the function of threads in a twist as well, yet less capable of permanence than a brother or singer. Even less so than the strong stitch a sharp like her could produce.

Tiny, and sturdy, and by only the most certain and now rare of hands.

It made her nickel plate shine.

She bends slightly and she again fears disuse, a snapping under careful fingers injurious but hardly traumatic as by machine, she feels the depression of her eye backwards into padded skin and she’s thankful that she only possesses the one closed eye.

She knows they exist. Needles fashioned with two in something like herown nickel plate, one half opened and only really forgivable with a well-fit thimble. She doesn’t think that such forms with modern limits ever face so much use as to gain an ego, more ready to snap threads than to guide them.

Threads snap more easily in the eyes of hand needles in the first place, the sharp act of threading on a second eye doesn’t help one bit.

Its with this thought, too fast a motion and an ill thought flick of the hand that she’s launched. Far from the beauty of her work and onto some fashion of vision obscuring static. Hidden in the carpet, she thinks that this while a great misfortune might well be a blessing in disguise, for she is now departed from the natural pattern, the nature of her use, the tendency of needles to face disuse. Dull, and bent, and broken in twain.

Though she faces a similar if not ordained state.

Without the arbiter of her seamstress, the hand upon her leading, or the cushion in which she’s been left for days or more, brushing shafts with less important items, she waits. The metal pull takes her up from her hiding place, a place she’d regretted so much going to, but as it takes her back to safety…

Even dull bent needles have a use. But with the pull of the magnet she is lost, the emery evermore sharpening her corpse.