The Mending of Small Things

Tib was no taller than a teacup, and he was, by every measure that mattered to him, having a perfectly ordinary Thursday.

He had darned a stocking. He had warmed a pot of tea three times without Eleanor noticing. He had argued with a moth in the linen cupboard and won, more or less. Now he sat on the windowsill behind the geranium, watching Eleanor knead bread, and he was so pleased with the smallness of it that he almost did not notice the wrongness.

The wrongness was this: when Eleanor passed the windowsill, she did not glance at the geranium. She always glanced at the geranium. It was where Tib left her the small things — a thimble she'd misplaced, a needle threaded with the right colour, a sprig of rosemary on the mornings she felt thin. The geranium was their post office. And today she walked past it as if it were nothing but a plant.

Tib told himself this was fine. He told himself this twice.

By evening, three other Pocketkin had come over the rooftops to find him.

Old Marn from the bakery had a face like a folded map, and tonight every crease was deeper. "Mine baked the wrong loaves," she said. "He's baked the right ones every dawn for forty years, and this morning he made them wrong, and when I left the corrected recipe in his apron pocket as I always do, he found it and threw it away. Threw it away, Tib. Like it was rubbish."

Pip from the schoolteacher's flat was younger and was trying not to cry. "She didn't put out my saucer. She always puts out my saucer."

The fourth was Wren, who was very small and very old and very tired, and who said nothing at all, only sat on the edge of the windowsill and looked at her hands.

"They are forgetting us," Marn said at last.

"They cannot forget us," Pip whispered. "That isn't allowed. That's the whole — that's the whole shape of it."

Tib watched Eleanor through the window. She was eating bread by the fire and her face was soft and tired and human, and she had not, all evening, looked at the geranium.

"Something is taking the small magics," Wren said. Her voice was so quiet they all leaned in. "Not stealing. Unmaking. The little spells that say this matters. The thread of meaning between a thimble and a Thursday."

"Why?" Pip said.

Wren shrugged, which on a Pocketkin was a whole-body sorrow. "Things rot. Even meaning."

They sat with that.

It was Tib who said the thing none of them wanted to say, because it was Tib's turn to be brave and he could feel that as plainly as weather.

"We could give them back."

The others looked at him.

"The small magics," Tib said. "We've been hoarding them. A thousand tiny spells each, kept warm in our pockets. The warming-the-tea. The finding-the-button. The why-this-matters. We've been holding them so the humans don't have to. What if — what if we let them go? Back into the houses. Back into the things themselves. So the meaning lives in the kettle and the thimble and the loaf, and not in us."

"They won't see us anymore," Marn said. Flat. Knowing.

"No."

"They won't know we were ever there."

"No."

Pip was openly crying now. "But the tea, Tib. Who's going to know the tea wants three minutes and not four? Who'll remember she takes it without sugar on a hard day and with sugar on a sad one? We know. We're the ones who know."

"The cups will know," Tib said. He did not know if this was true. He hoped, with the whole of his small body, that it was true. "If we put it back into them properly. The cups will know. The bread will know. The buttons will know. They'll forget us, but they'll remember each other. And the humans will live inside a world that still — still leans toward them. Still tries."

Wren lifted her head. Her eyes in the dim were the colour of very old tea.

"It will cost," she said.

"I know."

"All of it."

"I know."

They went, that night, to every Pocketkin in the town. There were one hundred and forty-three of them. Forty-one said no, and curled tighter around their hoards, and Tib did not blame them, not for a single breath.

One hundred and two said yes.

It took them until the grey hour before dawn. They climbed into the kettles and the breadboxes and the sewing baskets and the coat pockets and the geranium pots, and they let go. Each Pocketkin opened their small fists and poured out a life's worth of tiny meanings — the this is how she likes it, the this is where it belongs, the this is what matters about a Thursday — and watched it sink into the bones of the houses they had loved.

And then, one by one, they faded.

Tib was the last. He stood on the windowsill behind the geranium and watched Eleanor sleeping by the banked fire. He could feel himself going thin. He put his small hand on the cool clay pot of the geranium and gave it the last thing he had, which was the memory of her humming while she kneaded bread on a Thursday in autumn.

In the morning, Eleanor woke and went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. She did not know why she let it sit for exactly three minutes. She did not know why, when she passed the geranium, she touched its leaves and smiled.

She only knew that the house, somehow, was leaning toward her.

That it was still trying.

That something small and good had loved her, once, very much.