A Ritual of the Heart

The silver needle didn’t care for sentiment. It only cared for the resistance of the oak floorboards and the brittle strength of the thread Mathius had harvested from her scalp that morning.

“Steady,” Mathius whispered. He sat in the high-backed velvet chair, his feet planted firmly. He looked like any husband waiting for a hem to be fixed, save for the fact that his eyes were focused intensely on the floor, and his skin had the translucent quality of parchment held too close to a candle.

Ruth knelt at his feet. This was their twelfth year.

The ritual always began at 11:14 PM, the exact moment they had said I do in a rain-slicked chapel in Vermont. Back then, Mathius had been a man of heavy footfalls and booming laughter, a carpenter who smelled of sawdust and cedar. Now, he was a collection of whispers and light.

She took the first stitch. The "thread" was a braid of three of her longest grey hairs, soaked for seven days in a brine of her own tears and sea salt. It was a delicate, agonizing process. She pushed the needle through the dark, flickering edge of his left heel’s shadow and anchored it deep into the wood.

Mathius gasped, his chest heaving. It didn't hurt his body, at least, not in the way a cut or a bruise might. It hurt his presence. It was the feeling of a kite being jerked back to earth just as it found a thermal.

"I felt that one," he managed, a small, thin smile touching his lips. "I feel... heavy again, Ruth. Thank you."

Ruth didn't answer. She couldn't. To speak during the Salt-Stitch was to invite the wind in, and the wind was what wanted Mathius most. She could feel it scratching at the windowpane now—a low, predatory whistle. The world wanted to unmoor him. It had started small: him losing his balance in the garden, his fingerprints fading until he couldn't trigger a touchscreen, the way he would occasionally float a few inches off the mattress in his sleep, his nightshirt billowing as if he were underwater.

The doctors had spoken of rare densities and neurological "drifting." Ruth knew better. She knew that some souls simply lose their grip on the gravity of this world.

She moved to the shadow of his calf. The shadow was stubborn tonight; it twitched like a landed fish, trying to pull away from the oak. As she worked, Ruth noticed the floorboards were scarred with the puncture marks of a decade of devotion. Thousands of tiny holes, a map of her refusal to let him go.

But there was the friction: the more she anchored him, the more he seemed to resent the floor.

"Sometimes," Mathius said, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering on pavement, "I wonder what it’s like. Above the treeline. You know? To just... stop fighting the up-pull. I wonder if it’s quiet up there."

Ruth’s hand trembled. She pulled the stitch tight, knotting it with a fierce, desperate jerk. Mathius wince, his shoulder hitching. The shadow stayed put, but his actual leg thinned, the bone visible beneath skin that was becoming more window than wall.

By the time she reached the shadow of his shoulders, Ruth’s fingers were bleeding. The salt in the thread stung her open cuts, a sharp, rhythmic reminder of the cost. She looked up at him. His eyes were beautiful, but they were looking past her, toward the ceiling, toward the vast, empty sky that seemed to be calling his name.

She realized then that the ritual wasn't just keeping him here. It was pinning him down.

She had three stitches left. Her hair was thinning; a bald patch at her temple throbbed where Mathius had carefully clipped the strands that morning with a pair of silver shears. She wondered if next year there would be enough of her left to keep enough of him.

The clock ticked toward midnight. The final stitch had to be through the shadow of his heart.

She leaned in, needle poised. Mathius reached down, his hand cold and light as a dandelion seed, and brushed her cheek. His touch felt like a draft of air.

"Ruth," he whispered, "look at the knots."

She looked. The thread wasn't just anchoring him to the house. Over the years, the salt and hair had tangled around her own ankles, binding the wife to the floor as much as the husband. To keep him, she had to remain a statue. To love him was to become his cage.

She took the final stitch.

The clock struck twelve. The wind outside died down. Mathius sat solid in his chair, his weight returned, his shadow pinned firmly to the oak. He looked human again. He looked loved.

But as Ruth tried to stand, she felt the pull of the floorboards. She looked at her own shadow. It wasn't moving. She had stitched so well, so deeply, that the boundary between the anchor and the boat had vanished.

"Happy anniversary," Mathius said, his voice now rich and heavy, almost too heavy.

He stood up easily, but Ruth remained on her knees, her hair and heart tied to the grain of the wood. He walked to the kitchen to pour the celebratory wine, his footsteps echoing like thunder, while Ruth stayed in the circle of salt, wondering who was truly the ghost.