A Tyranny of Petticoats by Jessica Spotswood Page A

“One of the villagers gave birth this morning,” she says, holding the thread up for my inspection.
    I gently pluck the thread from Maria Elena’s dainty grip, but I don’t have to look very closely to see that it isn’t going to last very long. The thread’s intended green hue has already faded, the color slowly being replaced by a shimmering silver with which I am all too familiar. Even if I hadn’t already read it in the stars last night, I would know. The child’s only fate is death.
    Maria Elena’s face falls when I shake my head. If we wait any longer, the mother’s thread will begin to turn as well. If nothing else, lifetimes of experience have taught me this. “Go wake up Rosa,” I say. “They won’t last until tonight.”
    Maria Elena sighs. I watch as she makes her way through the labyrinth of threads that fill the room and block the door. I have to admire her agility; she somehow manages not to catch that leg of hers on even one loose thread.
    I open my hand and peer at the thread Maria Elena just gave me. It sits curled in my palm, quiet and complacent, like a docile garter snake. Most of Maria Elena’s threads are thick like ropes and just as sturdy. But this one is feeble at best. A weak little wisp of a thread that is growing more iridescent with every passing minute. It is so fragile, its color so faint that I fear if I drop it, I’ll never be able to find it again. And neither of my sisters has the capability to help me either. Maria Elena weaves the threads. That’s her role. It is my job to decipher which ones need to be cut.
    It is Rosa who must cut them.
    The uneven thumping sound of my younger sister’s steps draws my eyes to the door. Maria Elena’s face emerges from the web of threads, quickly followed by our elder sister, Rosa, though she certainly doesn’t look much like herself. I stifle a laugh and she glares at me, shaking her foot free from a tangle of threads and rubbing her hands sloppily over her tired eyes. Rosa is typically the epitome of refinement; that she resembles such a disaster in the morning is the only reason I can bear to love her.
    Rosa stretches her arms over her head and yawns noisily. “Well, where is it, then?”
    Maria Elena points at me before shuffling to her loom and sitting down heavily. She runs her hands up and down the length of her impaired leg, kneading the sore muscles there, and I feel a twinge of guilt at having asked her to wake Rosa.
    My older sister peers at the frail thread I hold out to her. “It’s ready, then?” she asks me. I nod and then I hear it. We all do. It starts as a low thrumming sound, as if someone has reached over and plucked the string of a harp or a mandolin. The thread has begun its death song.
    Rosa gives an irked nod, and a pair of large shears appears in her outstretched hand. She leans over and plucks the thread with the glinting edge of one of the shears’ sharp blades. I want her to examine it, as if she can check the thread’s
vitalidad
as well as I can, but that isn’t Rosa’s role. And it isn’t her way, either. With barely a sigh of hesitancy, Rosa instructs me to pull the tiny thread taut. She cuts it in half with a quick snip of those mighty shears. I let them go, and the two pieces flutter to the ground like wounded birds, the silver sheen fading to a dull, lifeless brown. The task now complete, Rosa turns on her heel and ducks through the labyrinth, swinging her shears in time with her steps.
    There is something that I find particularly frightening about those shears. Perhaps it is simply the rigid way she wields them. They once called her She Who Cannot Be Turned, and it was a proper moniker if there ever was one. There is no compromising with Rosa. Things are black or white with her; it is life or death. There is no in-between. Folks around here are swayed by the silk slippers on her dainty feet, the tortoiseshell comb that rises from the back of her elegant head like a crown, but they shouldn’t