From the story shelf
The Crane at the Loom
There was once a young man who lived alone at the edge of a village, in a house with one room and a loft, and made his living by cutting reeds and weaving them into mats. He was poor, and not clever at being anything else. He was the kind of man who would carry a beetle out of the house on a leaf rather than tread on it, and the village thought him soft for it, and bought his mats anyway, because they were good mats.
One evening in the first deep snow of winter, he was coming home from market with a few coins and a sack of rice on his back when he heard something crying in the reed bed. It was not a child's cry, and not a dog's. He set down the sack and waded in, knee-deep in snow and black water, and found a crane caught by the leg in a hunter's snare. She had fought it until the cord cut her, and the snow around her was marked with red.
"Hush now," he said, though she did not hush. "Hold still. I am not the one who set it."
It took him a long time with his cold fingers to work the cord loose. She struck at him once with her long beak and caught his wrist, and he said, "Yes, that is fair," and went on working. When the noose came free she stood a moment on one leg, looking at him with a round bright eye. Then she opened her wings, which were wider than he was tall, and went up over the reeds into the dusk, calling, and was gone.
He picked up his rice and went home, and sat a long while by the fire with his wet feet in his hands, feeling foolish and quite happy.
That night, when the snow had begun again, there was a knock at his door.
On the step stood a young woman, slight and pale, with snow in her hair and on her shoulders. "I have lost my way," she said, "and the road is gone under the snow. Will you let me sit by your fire until morning?"
"Of course," he said. "It is not much of a fire. But you are welcome to all of it."
In the morning the snow was too deep for her to go. The next day it was deeper. By the time the road was open again she had swept his floor and mended his coat and put the house into an order it had never known, and it seemed to both of them that there was no great reason for her to leave. So she stayed, and after a while they were married, with two neighbors for witnesses and a bowl of rice for a feast, and the village said the reed-cutter had done better for himself than anyone would have guessed.
They were very poor. The winter went on and on, and there were days when there was more water than rice in the pot. One evening she looked at the bare shelf, and then at him, and said, "There is an old loom in your loft. I saw it when I swept. Let me weave something for you to sell."
"It was my grandmother's," he said. "I do not think it works."
"It will work for me. But I must ask you one thing, and you must promise it." She held his eyes. "While I am weaving, you must never look. Not once, not through a crack, not for any reason at all. Will you promise?"
He thought it a strange thing to ask, and he promised anyway, because she had asked it.
She went up into the loft and drew the curtain across. For three days and three nights he heard the loom going, clack and hush, clack and hush, and he did not look. On the fourth morning she came down the ladder thin and white as paper, and in her arms was a bolt of cloth such as he had never seen. It was white, and it was not white. When he moved it, it held the light the way water holds it, and it was so fine and soft that it seemed to have been woven out of air.
"Take it to the town," she said, and lay down by the fire and slept the whole day through.
He took it to the town. The merchant there turned it over in his hands for a long time without a word, and then paid more for it than the young man earned in two years.
That money carried them through to spring, and through a summer, and through most of another winter. But money runs out, as water runs out of a cupped hand, and in the second winter the shelf was bare again. He said nothing about it. He would have cut reeds until his hands bled before he asked her. But she saw, and one evening she went up the ladder without a word and drew the curtain, and the loom began.
This time it went on longer. Four days. Five. The sound of it changed. It grew slower, and between the clack and the hush there were long pauses, and once, in the night, he heard something that might have been a small cry, quickly stifled. He lay awake below with his hands over his face. He thought of how thin she had been the first time. He thought of what it might be costing her, this cloth that seemed to be made out of nothing, and he was afraid.
On the sixth night he could not bear it any longer. He did not go to see the cloth. He went to see her. He climbed the ladder very quietly and moved the edge of the curtain by the width of one finger.
There was no woman at the loom. There was a crane, thin to the bone, with one leg scarred where a snare had cut it. She was reaching around with her long beak to her own breast and drawing out the soft feathers, one at a time, and laying them into the warp. Half her body was bare. The cloth on the loom shone like the moon on snow.
He let the curtain fall, and went down, and sat by the fire, and waited.
In the morning she came down the ladder with the finished bolt in her arms. She was a woman again, and very pale, and she laid the cloth on the table between them and sat down across from him.
"You saw," she said.
"Yes. I am sorry. I was afraid for you."
"I know." She reached across and touched the scar on his wrist where she had struck him in the reeds. "I knew you would be. That is why I came. A man who would wade into black water in the snow for a bird that bit him is a man who would one day climb a ladder to see whether she was well." She smiled a little. "I should have known. I think I did know."
"Then stay," he said. "I will never ask for cloth again. We will eat reeds."
"I cannot," she said. "Not because I am angry. I am not angry at all. But I have been seen as I am, and that is the end of my being able to stay as I was. That is how it is with my kind. It is not a punishment. It is only the shape of things." She stood. "Sell the cloth. Live well. And do not go into the reeds in the snow without your boots."
She went to the door and opened it, and the cold came in. On the step she stood a moment with her back to him. Then there was no woman there, only a crane, thin and ragged, opening her great wings. She rose over the roof, and he ran out barefoot into the snow and watched her circle the house once, low, calling, before she turned and flew away over the reed beds toward the mountains, and grew small, and was gone.
He did not sell the last bolt. He went back to cutting reeds, and lived plainly, and kept the cloth folded in a box beside the old loom, and on cold nights he would take it out and hold it, and it was always faintly warm.
Some people tell this as a story about a broken promise, and say he should never have looked. I have never been able to hear it that way. She gave what she had because she was grateful, and he looked because he loved her, and neither of those things was wrong. Sometimes two creatures who care for each other simply cannot go on in the same shape. The cranes still come over that village every winter, they say, and one of them, always, comes down low over the reed-cutter's roof.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.