The Hollow Stitch
The Hollow Stitch by: Marcel Helmar - https://horrorandhexes.com
They said the old tailor in our town never measured twice without whispering a name into the cloth. Mothers told children not to press their ear to the shop window because the tailor liked to practice his counting on the hems of strangers. Count too loud and the fabric will remember you, the grandmothers warned, and memory is a thing with teeth.
I met Lenora by the river, where she sold moth‑stained linens and stories in equal measure. She moved through the town like a seam: quiet, helpful, the small urgencies of neighbors—mending, shortening, re‑hemming—forgotten as if they had never needed fixing. She kept a set of needles threaded with hair from the first pet of every customer and a thimble carved from a bone that knew how to listen.
One autumn evening, with wind that tasted of iron and the river low and patient, Lenora asked me to bring her a coat. “Not mine,” she said, “yours.” I had meant it as a joke; the coat was a thing of practical thrift—navy wool, elbow patched by previous owners—nothing ritual, nothing of interest. She took it in both hands as if it were a living thing and examined the lining with a gentleness that made me nervous.
“There’s a place in the shoulder,” she said, “where the stitches loosen and the thing that wears it begins to leak.”
I touched the seam where she pointed and felt, absurdly, like my hand had brushed a memory that didn’t belong to me: a summer I had never lived, a mouthful of salt and the taste of someone else’s name. I pulled my fingers back.
“What will you do?” I asked.
Lenora smiled a small, careful smile. “We’ll stitch what ought to be there,” she said. She set up a workspace in the back of her shop: lamp low, spools of thread arranged like small, patient planets. She drew a circle on the table with chalk and within it placed twelve pins that reminded me of the hours on a clock. “Counting keeps it honest,” she said.
The ritual was simple in its parts and strange in its assembly. We threaded a single needle with thread cut from the hem of the coat and from a strip of paper where I had written my name and a thing I wanted to forget—an old argument, a number, the smell of a burned dinner. Lenora folded the paper thin and tucked it under the shoulder pad.
“Why the paper?” I asked.
“To give the stitch a doorway,” she said. “A destination.”
She counted the stitches aloud as she sewed—one for the cough you carry from youth, two for the dreams you never told anyone, three for the faces you borrowed at parties, and so on. Her voice was a metronome; each number made the room settle a little deeper. At the ninth stitch, the needle snagged on something that was not thread. Lenora’s hand stilled. The lamp made a small halo over the table; in that light the snag looked like a sliver of old bone.
“Do not tremble,” she told me, and her voice was both comfort and instruction.
She worked the needle through whatever the snag was and pulled. It came loose with the sound of a page being turned in a house without wind. A thin thread of shadow unspooled and wound itself around the needle like lint. It tasted of mothballs and snow. For a moment, the shop smelled like my childhood bedroom as if the coat had kept the air of a season and now was letting it breathe out.
“You stitched someone else’s memory into it,” Lenora said, not a question.
I tried to remember: had I lost something here? Had I given away a piece of myself without knowing? The coat was warm on my shoulders as she worked, and I felt the shoulder settle into me in a new way, like a key finding its lock.
When she reached the twelfth stitch, she tied the thread with a knot so small and precise it could have been stitched by the wind itself. Then she took a single spare button from a jar and sewed it onto the inside seam as a hiding place. “A place to keep what would otherwise wander,” she said.
“Will it work?” I asked.
“It will hold,” she said, “as long as you remember to breathe and to keep your hands busy when the house hums at night.”
I wore the coat home. It fit differently, as if the fabric had accepted my shoulders and let go of some other shape it had held. That night I dreamed of a house where every chair had a folded photograph under its cushion, and in each photograph a child whose name I almost knew. I woke with the taste of jam on my tongue and the feeling of being moved through a room by someone silent and kind.
A week later, Mr. Holloway from two doors down knocked on my door carrying a bundle of newspaper. He had a way of looking as if he was searching for a clause in a conversation he had missed, and when he smiled he showed two missing teeth that made him resemble a house with a crooked eave.
“Have you seen this?” he said, and pressed the paper into my hands. It was an old funeral notice—my grandmother’s name printed in a small, polite column—and beneath it a line I had never seen before: a note of thanks to a tailor who repaired her coats when she traveled. I read the line and found my breath folded into it. The name there matched a stitch in the coat I had just mended.
I returned to Lenora and found her at the window, mending a child’s stuffed rabbit. She did not look surprised to see me.
“Memory likes company,” she said simply.
“How will I know if it tries to leave?” I asked.
“When the coat grows heavy in the shoulder, when your hand reaches for something you cannot name, tie a thread around your wrist and count the stitches again,” she said. “And if you must give one away, do it to someone who will use it gently.”
Months passed. I found envelopes of thank‑you notes sewn into hems of other garments returned to me, stories I had not told stitched into the lining like confessions. Sometimes, in the dark, I thought I could hear the soft sound of a page turning in the house next door and I would sit up and listen as if the world had leaned in to eavesdrop.
When Lenora left—one chilled morning, with only a satchel and the bone thimble—she left behind a spool of thread that shimmered like a river at moonlight. On the shop table she left a single card: “If you must unmake a memory, do so kindly. The cloth remembers kindness.”
I wear the coat on damp days and sometimes feel at the edge of my shoulder a small, steady pull, like a memory bumping into the seam. I press my thumb to the inside where the button hides and think of Lenora threading names into the world. I do not count the stitches aloud anymore; I let them keep their own watch. The town says she moved away toward the hills where the houses are spaced like secrets, and perhaps she did.
If you ever find a tailor who counts and whispers names into cloth, hand them a scrap of paper with a clean name on it, and ask them to stitch you a place to keep forgetting. If you are lucky, they will listen. If you are luckier still, the stitch will hold.
About the author
Marcel is the founder and sole operator of Horror & Hexes, an occult horror studio crafting mythic prose, ritual guides, collectible merch, and layered soundscapes. He writes stories that treat language as craft and produces small‑run objects with detailed production notes so collectors know materials and edition sizes. Explore more at https://horrorandhexes.com.