I wrote a short story recently and I actually really loved it. It was extremely challenging returning to the fiction genre after so much time writing professional pieces for school. I had to relearn a lot of skills, but I’m proud of how this turned out for my first foray back. Let me know what you think, and give me some title ideas! I’m definitely not sold on the current title, so I wouldn’t mind suggestions.

For context, this story is based on the classic story commonly known as “Peter and the Magic Thread,” where a boy meets a witch who gives him a spool of thread. Every time he pulls on the thread, it moves him forward in time a little bit. He keeps skipping past mundane parts of his life before he gets to the end and realizes how much he missed out on. My dream would be to write a novel on the premise that everyone has a thread that defines their life – this short story is about a girl who’s thread ended at a certain point, but somehow her thread wove itself longer and she survives. I am super excited about this character, Bernadette Honey (Bee for short), and I hope you like her too! Happy reading…

The Golden Thread

By Me

The birds take flight from the trees when the gravel rumbles behind Bee. She whips around to see headlights careening toward her spot on the bridge out of the blue hour sky. A shriek, a swerve, an off-kilter step back. Bee’s old sneakers slip on the loose stones. The vehicle course-corrects like a lumbering beast ignoring meager prey, but Bee has lost her balance. Her knees knock into the low bridge railing and buckle. Arms pinwheeling and heart pounding, she stretches toward the peeking stars.

In the blink of an eye filled with dried tears, there is nothingness beneath her. She is falling.

As her stomach drops, time seems to go with it. Bee feels weightless and paper-thin. The offending car’s headlights disappear into the woods, but the sky is still lit by a nearby streetlamp. The sky is all she can see.

I walk by this same sky every day. I never stop and look. All I can do now is see it. Beautiful. That rich shade of blue, the suggestions of clouds covering patches of pinprick stars. Despite falling away from it, I feel closer to the sky than I’ve ever been.

I craved this feeling of low gravity when I was young. I recall jumping off a rock into a lake in elementary school, imagining I was an astronaut making an earth water landing when the freezing Oregon freshwater splashed over me. My heart pounded before the jump but flew into the sky with exhilaration as I soared. I told my parents every day that the stars were so beautiful, and I wanted to go to them. They would pat my head and say, “You would make a great astronaut, Honey Bee. You can be anything.”

Little Bee saw wonder in everything. The backyard was my frontier and each little snail and ant my animal companion. I explored with abandon; both lost in the moment and lost on a fictional planet waiting to be explored. For Christmas one year, my parents bought me a kid’s telescope. I would spend hours in front of that lens, transported to different worlds.

In middle school, my father lost his job, and my mom’s eye bags swelled along with her money concerns. My dad started dropping hints about pursuing stable and money-making hobbies, despite my age. They sold my telescope and bought me college prep books. “It’s time to start preparing,” they would say, “for your future.”

I guess I will have no future now.

Bee’s body feels both suspended in time and rushing to an end. She is a ball at the tip of its arc, hovering with kinetic energy. How far is she from the ground? Life isn’t exactly flashing before her eyes, but her heart beats wildly through random memories and emotions. The twilight air feels still and dry. This is different from every other time Bee has flown through the air – jumping on a trampoline or into a pool. The rocky creek underneath her has no give. She will not survive this fall.

It is more peaceful than Bee expected, being so close to death. The world is losing nothing more than a chrysalis before its time, and Bee is losing the future she’d deferred all else for. For once she cannot rush by this bridge to get to her 8:00 AM lecture. All she can do now is let her eyes appreciate the sky she once desired to know intimately while her body hurtles ahead to the rocks below.

Twisted branches spindle overhead like gnarled hands reaching for the stars. In Bee’s paused moment, she observes tiny insects rimmed in rings of streetlamp lights take off from the trees and slowly buzz away. At the edge of her vision, a dark-hued bird hangs suspended in a cloud of dust and feathers – frozen mid-flight to Bee’s mid-fall. Bee’s outstretched arms brush floating dew drops. The splashes of moisture make the hairs on her skin stand on end. Spider-silk snaking through the air glistens with gold.

I woke up this morning to my alarm, without the usual splashes of golden light on my bed that slip through the curtains. It was officially winter. I didn’t want to get out of bed for another mind-numbing Microeconomics lecture. I didn’t want to get out of bed at all. My phone vibrated again. I got out of bed.

A few minutes later, I speed-walked up the only hill on the University of Oregon campus, clutching the straps of my backpack with white knuckles. The chill that remained of the night seeped into my coat through the open collar, and my muscles already felt sore from tensing against the cold. My fingers protested as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and typed in the password.

That girl from Statistics had texted me, asking if I wanted to get coffee sometime. I mentally scanned my schedule. Classes, studying for the exam, applying for internships this summer… if I wanted to get a full night of sleep, I didn’t have time for anything else. I typed back a short excuse for the third time this month and slipped the phone back in my pocket with hands numb where the wind could bite my skin. We would hang out when I had time.

I passed the small bridge over the stream running through campus. The sidewalk there is thin and cars speed way too fast down the hill, so I always walk fast. The burbling below filled my ears, reminding me how cold they felt. I pulled up my hood and savored the warmth of the cheap fur lining.

Bee’s ears are warm now, and this time she lets them fill with the activity of the water below. How fitting it seems that her final resting place will be among water – it is always moving ahead, never staying in one place for long. Unlike the water, Bee is stuck in place, mind powerlessly rushing ahead as her limp body turns over to face the ground. It is impossible to judge the distance she has yet to fall. Is she yards away? Mere feet?

As Bee’s long wool coat undulates behind her, things begin slipping out of the pockets – her house keys, her U of O key card, her wallet. A snapped-off old button that she never reattached. The hair tie she had shoved in her pocket this morning when she didn’t have time to do her hair. The note she had written on a rare whim for the cute boy in Accounting class that she would never deliver. Each relic of her existence tumbles ahead like feathers gently drifting down, settling into the current below. Ripples grow lazily from each splash. The concentric circles are like targets, drawing her in to her own end.

The vestiges of twilight leave gold in the air. Sparkling threads of spider silk swim fleetingly past her vision. Yellow highlights catch off mini waves running over rust-colored stones worn smooth by centuries of movement. Bee realizes that she is as frictionless as those pebbles now, easily cutting through the air as she is slowly lowered to the earth. Her smooth edges come from years of movement as well. Just like the stones, she had no say in where she ended up. They both stop their journeys here.

My journey was so sure just a few seconds ago. When I made it home from my walk, I would start on homework and internship applications. In a few months I would begin working at said internship. From there: graduating college, getting a career, starting a family. My parent’s American dream for me.

But my dreams were different, weren’t they? When I look at my life and see what could’ve been, it’s not a cubicle. It’s not a picket fence and a mid-sized house. It’s not kids and minivans and soccer games.

I see myself going to school not to learn about human greed and money but to ascend above it all, to fly to the stars. I will once again soar alongside my younger self, among planets and celestial spheres.

I see myself spending time with people I love. People I met by slowing down and building something strong.

I see myself making loose plans and resting in between. Real rest that restores my soul to do good work, work that I care about.

I will meet a man who wants to help me reach the stars. Together, we make a beautiful life with little. I will walk by the nursery we painted robin’s-egg blue and decorated with well-loved thrift store furniture. I will stop in the doorway and inhale new paint and new beginnings. I will feel my stomach, swollen with the one I thought I would never be ready for. I am ready now. Everything is happening now.

It does not happen while I am running at it. Life keeps running, and it is always faster. I can only catch it when I slow down to let it unfold in front of me. If only I had caught it before now.

Now I am surrounded by life. I see it swimming below in the fish wriggling downstream, scales shimmering in the dark waters. I hear it in the familiar low croaking of frogs rising in volume as the twilight deepens. I smell it in the rich stream-fed soil and sweet, lonely wildflowers gazing up at the emerging stars.

I am so close to landing on the ground, but I never made it to the sky.

I never knew the stars.

I never lived.

I want to live now – truly, fiercely – but that life is being ripped away.

Bee is out of time.

She had turned to face the ground in her tumbling descent, but the stars still leap out at her from their distorted reflections in the water as if in a final embrace. They twist and dance around her, glowing with ethereal gold light.

Those are not stars. Beneath her, what she thought were pinprick reflections now float and stretch like lazy golden threads of spider silk. They seem to be weaving themselves into longer and thicker strands as they circle her body. The golden threads slip by, cross over, and whirl around each other until a net of soft light knits itself together between Bee and the creek. She is filled with wonder.

The net seems to rise and catch her, gently enveloping her in its glow. The soft fibers caress her cheeks and warm her to the bones. Bee remembers jumping in her mom’s piles of sheets straight from the dryer and letting the steamy softness absorb her big feelings. For too long Bee has merely tucked those feeling away – she would deal with them when the tears were less bothersome and time-consuming. Now, she lets those feelings go. The threads seem to take away all her anxiety, her pain, and her frustration – frustration at finally desiring to truly live only to have life torn away.

Bee closes her eyes and lets the threads surround her. Is this death? It is not so bad. Her family will miss her, and she will miss them. For now, gold light is carrying her away. It is the gold that used to slip in through her window every morning. It is the gold that compelled her toward her telescope as a child. It is the gold of the fleeting dew that froze with her in the seconds of her fall.

For a few long moments, Bee rests.

Then she feels water lapping at her ears. Her eyes shoot open. The threads and dancing gold light are gone. In their place, the stars, and a now utterly black sky. Bee is lying on her back in the middle of the stream. Water runs over her body, as if ignoring her to continue on its all-important journey. The droplets that leap out and strike her skin feel as cold as snowflakes in the sudden absence of the threads. Bee does not get up. She lets the stream soak into her thick jeans, splash over her open jacket, and curl the ends of her short hair into waving tails.

She was supposed to die. She had been falling – so fast it felt like ages. Her body had whipped downward toward the unforgiving rocky bed below. Her life and future had flashed before her eyes. Yet the universe had reached out a hand. Those threads… what were they? Why had they saved her? They had caught her as softly as a snowflake on a glove. She melted into them the same. They must have lowered her down to safety. But why?

Deep down, Bee was pretty sure she knew. She was breathing for a reason, and it wasn’t so that she could keep putting off her life until she had this or accomplished that or became someone else. It was time to let life chase her back.

Lying peacefully in the creek now, she felt more alive than ever.

The End.