Jonathan Cohen

From 2005.

Miss Blansky liked the way her house creaked and peeled, scaring the children the same way she had in her music lessons in school for twenty years.

She watched them from the bay window, wearing the same too-tight sweater, once baby blue and now an almost faded gray. The children dared each other to linger in front of the house as they passed, and Miss Blansky’s thin lips pursed together in a smile.

Her right hand felt something odd at her neck: a loose thread of yarn. She frowned; that wouldn’t do. Miss Blansky couldn’t knit, and she would never admit it. She tugged at the thread and some more came away. Unimaginable, she thought. Her mother had pressed on her the sweater the first day she taught music.

She tried to keep away from it, but her hands worried at it. And when the neck had unraveled, Miss Blansky breathed a little easier. She opened the back door, just a crack, to let the air in.

As the weather grew warmer, the stitches slipped away some more. The delivery man smiled at Miss Blansky for the first time, and looking down, she blushed. Then, in the privacy of her bedroom, she peeked in the mirror.

Her sleeves slowly unraveled and she felt air on her bare arms. She flung the back doors open, and eventually the front one too. When the astonished children looked at her, she smiled timidly. When the yarn gave way from her middle and her growling stomach was released, Miss Blansky made cookies, the scent of which drew the children and filled the house with laughter.

Marissa Blansky didn’t even notice when, one night, the last piece of yarn unraveled and sailed off in the midnight air, fluttering like a banner. Butterflies never look back.