Chapter 71: The seamstress's professional composure shatters as she measures each woman's impossible proportions, her hands lingering on their bodies while they tease her about which of their exaggerated curves she finds most arousing.
The dust of the main street seemed to cling to our borrowed cloaks more insistently after leaving Bell’s. It was a different kind of pollen, one of stares and whispered calculations. We moved with purpose now, a unified front. The general store was our last stop—flour, salt, nails, the mundane anchors of a life that felt increasingly unreal.
“Mack’s Mercantile,” Cora read aloud from the faded sign above a weather-beaten door. The window was a jumble of enamel washbasins, seed packets, and coils of rope. “Looks like the place.”
The door groaned on a stiff hinge. Inside, the air was thick and still, saturated with the smell of dried lentils, oiled metal, and decades of undisturbed dust. A single fluorescent tube buzzed and flickered overhead, making the shadows of crammed shelves jump and twitch. It was a cave of practical things, a cathedral to usefulness.
A woman stood behind a high wooden counter, polishing a glass mason jar with a rag. She was older than Bev, maybe sixty, with a cap of steely grey curls and a face lined like a well-used roadmap. She looked up, her eyes a pale, watery blue.
The polishing stopped. The rag fell silently to the counter.
Her gaze didn’t flutter or dart. It landed on us and stuck, a steady, absorbing pressure. She looked from face to face, down over the cloaks, and her thin lips parted slightly. There was no blush, not like Bev’s frantic crimson. This was something slower, a deep, subterranean heat rising to the surface. A flush, yes, but it mottled her neck and cheeks like a slowly spreading wine stain.
“Help you?” she asked, her voice a dry rustle. It wasn’t unfriendly. It was utterly focused.
“We need supplies,” Elara said, pulling our list from a pocket. She stepped forward, her boots sounding too loud on the worn plank floor. She placed the list on the counter.
The woman—Martha, according to the embroidered tag on her denim shirt—didn’t look at the paper. She looked at Elara’s hands, at the width of her shoulders straining the wool, at the defiant thrust of her bound chest. Martha’s own breathing seemed to have changed, growing deeper, more audible in the dusty quiet.
“Flour. Fifty pounds,” Elara read.
Martha finally moved, turning to haul a sack from a stack. The muscles in her arms corded, but her eyes kept snapping back to us as she worked. She dragged the sack to the counter with a solid thump. Dust puffed into the slanted light.
“And salt. A big box,” Cora added, leaning casually against a display of canned corn. The simple movement made her body shift under the fabric, a symphony of hidden motion.
Martha’s gaze locked onto Cora’s midsection, then dropped, unmistakably, to the staggering swell of her hips. A low sound, almost a hum, escaped her. She fetched the salt, her movements deliberate, almost ritualistic.
“Nails. Six-penny. Two pounds,” I said, my voice quieter. I felt exposed here, more than in the clothes shop. This wasn’t about adornment; this was about the raw materials of survival. And our presence was warping it.
As Martha scooped nails from a barrel, the metallic shush-shush sound filling the air, she spoke without looking up. “You’re the ones from up the mountain.” It wasn’t a question. “The Larson place.”
“We are,” Cora said, cheerful.
“Heard you been to Bell’s.” Martha poured nails onto a scale, her eyes flicking to me. “Bev’s been… distracted all afternoon.”
She weighed the nails, folded the paper bag with sharp, precise creases. Her hands, I noticed, were shaking. Not with fear. With a terrible, focused intensity.
She finished packing our order into a sturdy box. Then she just stood there, her palms flat on the counter, her knuckles white. She was looking at our bodies the way a miner looks at a seam of unclaimed gold—with a sheer, avaricious hunger that transcended propriety.
“Something else?” Elara prompted, her eyebrow arched.
Martha swallowed. The sound was loud. “You…” she began, then stopped. She tried again, her rustling voice gaining a strange, lush texture. “You carry yourselves like you’re balancing the world on those curves.” She was staring at Cora’s breasts, at the way the rough binding only emphasized their impossible weight and pull. “It’s a gravity. Makes a person feel… planetary.”
Cora’s smile was beatific. “That’s kind of you to say.”
“It’s not kindness.” Martha’s eyes shifted to Elara. “It’s observation. You… you look like you could stop a charging bull with that.” A calloused finger pointed, not at Elara’s face, but at the formidable line of her chest. “Strength like that… it’s not just for lifting. It’s for holding. For keeping.”
Elara didn’t smile, but a slow, acknowledging blink was her answer.
Then Martha looked at me. The avarice in her eyes softened into something more complex, a painful yearning. “And you… you’re the sun at the center of it, aren’t you? All that fire, coiled tight. It’s in your hair, your skin… I can smell it on you.” She inhaled, deeply, shamelessly. “Like sap and wild cinnamon. It makes my old bones ache.”
The flickering light buzzed. The store was a silent bell jar, and her words hung in it, thick as the dust.
I felt a familiar, dangerous warmth deep in my core. A sympathetic pang, a release. The bindings across my chest felt suddenly, unbearably tight. Damp. Not much. Just a betraying hint of warmth and that pervasive, golden sweetness, cutting through the dust and dried peas.
Martha’s nostrils flared. Her watery blue eyes rolled back for a fraction of a second, a spasm of pure, involuntary pleasure. She gripped the counter’s edge to steady herself.
“We should go,” I said, my voice tight.
We paid in cash from the old farm stash, coins and worn bills that Martha took without looking. She simply held out her hand, her gaze still glued to the space between my collarbones.
We carried the box out, the groan of the door hinge sounding like a gasp. The grey afternoon felt cleansing, a cold shower.
We were twenty paces down the street when Cora let out a long, held breath. “Planetary,” she murmured, chuckling. “I like that.”
“Her bones ached,” Elara said, a note of grim satisfaction in her voice.
I didn’t speak. I adjusted my cloak, feeling the faint, cool dampness against my skin. It wasn’t just our shapes they saw. It was the scent, the essence. We were leaking into the world, one stunned, hungry person at a time. The forest’s claim was spreading, and the town, with its buzzing lights and dusty stores, was fertile ground. We walked back toward the tree line, not just carrying supplies, but carrying the dazed, lust-heavy silence of Martha’s mercantile with us. It was a trophy. And a warning.