A Stitch in Time

by Gill McKinlay

“Your mum has bought a knitting machine, Karen,” Florrie said. She’s Mum’s next-door neighbour and keeps an eye on her for me.

“It’s hardly a crime,” I replied.

“She reckons aliens have contacted her…”

Ever since a television documentary named our village as the number one spot for star gazing, Mum had been obsessed with sightings of aliens. She’d spent hours trawling the stars with a telescope looking for signs.

So far, she hadn’t seen a thing.

I’d dismissed her actions as harmless. But thinking aliens had made themselves known to her via a knitting machine was worrying…

In the living room, I stepped over a huge cardboard box, several sheets of bubble wrap waiting to be popped, and numerous chunks of shattered polystyrene.

Mum was seated behind a vast silver contraption.

It emitted a low-level hum as she shunted a gadget over a row of needles. An antenna that looked like an aerial for receiving every invisible wave imaginable, held the wool aloft.

“What’s going on?”

Mum rolled her eyes heavenwards.

“Aliens — they contacted me.”

“How did they do that?”

“Through a knitting pattern. They monitor the stitches I knit, and decode them…”

“Why would they do that when we have masses of technology?”

“They’re not very intelligent. They can’t read computer code. They find knitting patterns easier…”

“Do they understand the abbreviations?” I asked. “K2tog TBL would be double Dutch to your average ET.”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

Rows of stocking stitch spilled out of the machine, albeit with a lot of dropped stitches.

She looked happy sitting there though, the happiest I’d seen her since Dad died last year.

Mum had struggled to cope after his death. We both had. But she’d become a recluse,

She wouldn’t go to Zumba with Florrie or join the U3A. All she wanted to do was sit at home reading sci-fi books.

“How does the machine, or knitting pattern, contact aliens?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure, but I read a book that mentioned the fabric of time. A piece of knitting counts as fabric, and it takes a long time to make,” she said, as if that explained everything. “And I found a knitting pattern inside the book.”

“What, you mean it was part of the story?”

“No, it was folded up, shoved between the pages.”

“Where did you get the book?”

“I borrowed it from the library.”

“So, the pattern could have been left there by somebody who’d used it as a bookmark.”

“I suppose that’s one theory,” Mum snapped.

“Are you knitting from the pattern now?”

“Yes.” She handed it over.

“It’s for a scarf,” I said. “Like the one Dr Who used to wear.”

“Exactly, and he’s the ultimate Time Lord. When he was pretending to be Tom Baker, he wore a knitted scarf which meant he always had the fabric of time about his person. He was trying to tell us something, I know it…”

Most of the sci-fi I’d read was set in a dystopian landscape with a political war raging in the background. Mum’s version seemed domestic by comparison. But then maybe cosy sci-fi was a new genre, one I’d missed.

Mum read about far-flung galaxies peopled by androids, robots and daleks. Keeping her grounded was going to be difficult…

Next day, I tripped over the scarf as I entered the living room. It had travelled halfway across the cardboard box and was spilling over the packaging.

She’d been knitting at the expense of everything else…

“I managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep,” Mum said, when I asked if she’d been to bed. “I must keep knitting; I must get this finished. Time won’t wait for aliens any more than it will for humans. They’re being thrown off their planet, and have nowhere to go…”

“I’ll make us a cup of tea.”

“Thanks. I could do with a break.”

She switched off the machine and followed me into the kitchen.

But glancing over my shoulder, I noticed the machine was still glowing, and I could hear a noise like a million knitting needles all clicking together.

“I thought you’d switched it off…”

“I did.”

“It doesn’t look very off to me.”

“That’s how it looks when it’s off.”

I went to unplug it but couldn’t find a plug.

“Does it run on batteries?” I asked.

“Of course not. Imagine shoving AAs in that — the actual knitting provides the power, and it takes a while to wind down.”

I left the house feeling troubled.

Was Mum in danger? Could the wool be poisoned? Was she suffering needle abuse… It all sounded ridiculous.

Florrie turned up later that evening.

“There was a huge bang Karen, and all the lights went off, yet your Mum’s place is lit up like the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And there’s a weird noise, like several million knitting needles all clacking together…”

I found Mum surrounded by miniature multi-coloured aliens. They were pouring out of the machine, swarming about everywhere.

“They’re moving into the cardboard box.” she told me as we watched them squabbling over sheets of bubble wrap still waiting to be popped.

“But how did they get here?”

“The stitches I dropped made holes in the fabric of time, which allowed them to sneak into our world.”

It sounded like a load of rubbish to me, but there was no arguing that the aliens were real, and that Florrie was screaming the place down.

“Odd looking creatures,” Mum remarked. “Their skin looks just like stocking stitch…”

Bio:
Gill McKinlay writes short stories, with many published in UK magazines. Loves reading, writing, gardening, and her grandchildren.