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"I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern, practically, to fix it right," said the second lady.
"What a shame." They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with the flaw in it.
The second lady began to pick away at the thread with her little deft scissors flashing. The pattern came out thread by thread. She pulled and yanked, almost viciously. The man's face was gone. She continued to seize at the threads.
"What are you doing?" asked the other woman.
They leaned and saw what she had done.
The man was gone from the road. She had taken him out entirely.
They said nothing but returned to their own tasks.
"What time is it?" asked someone.
"Five minutes to five."
"Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?"
"Yes."
"And they're not sure what it'll do to anything, really, when it happens?"
"No, not sure."
"Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?"
"It's twice as big as ever before. No, ten times, maybe a thousand."
"This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones. This is different. Nobody knows what it might do when it comes."
They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass. "What time is it now?"
"One minute to five."
The needles flashed silver fire. They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.
Far away a mosquito sound. Then something like a tremor of drums. The three women cocked their heads, listening.
"We won't hear anything, will we?"
"They say not."
"Perhaps we're foolish. Perhaps we'll go right on, after five o'clock, shelling peas, opening doors, stirring soups, washing dishes, making lunches, peeling oranges..."
"My, how we'll laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment!" They smiled a moment at each other.
"It's five o'clock."
At these words, hushed, they all busied themselves. Their fingers darted. Their faces were turned down to the motions they made. They made frantic patterns. They made lilacs and grass and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth. They said nothing, but you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.
Thirty seconds passed.
The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.
"I think I just will go shell those peas for supper," she said. "I--"
But she hadn't time even to lift her head. Somewhere, at the side of her vision, she saw the world brighten and catch fire. She kept her head down, for she knew what it was. She didn't look up, nor did the others, and in the last instant their fingers were flying; they didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country, the town, this house, or even this porch. They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.
