Grayspace

The Forgotten Teddy

The old tailor lived at the edge of a forest that was of no real note year-round until Autumn.  In that span between Summer's death and Winter's birth, the trees were an inferno of yellow and orange and red and every shade between them, as if they had reached with their branches into the sky and grasped the sun and torn it apart.

His customers came just as much to see his forest as they did for the quality of his work.

And there were a few that even liked him.

He was a quiet man with a gray mustache and round glasses.  An overlap of a father and a grandfather.  Though he never married and knew nothing of caring for a family of his own.

Plenty of families came to him.  He got a remarkable insight into the life of a family from the projects they'd bring him.  More than torn trousers and suit jackets deprived of buttons, above all else he was called upon to mend the clothes of children.  He was often left wondering how any small human could be so destructive.  

Nobody put him in this mind more than a small chestnut-haired girl named Molly.  

She tore her dresses.  She popped her buttons.  She ripped hems and stitches as if she were trying to see how a piece of clothing were put together.  Other times she seemed to run through thickets of thorns just to see how well her clothes could bear up.

Sometimes the old tailor could mend her clothes.  But often enough he'd just make her new ones.  

Molly's parents had a thing for adorning her in all shades of pink and purple.  It wasn't long that our old tailor had amassed a collection of pink and purple fabric from clothes that were beyond salvage.

One exceptionally vivid Autumn day, Molly was brought into the tailor's workshop where her first sight was a large, if not slightly misshapen teddy bear that looked to be a frankenstein of dozens of fabrics.  She regarded it with wide brown eyes as the tailor came from a doorway smiling at her.  

"I made all your old clothes into a teddy bear," he stated.  "I figured it was the only useful way you could ever get them back."

Molly took the bear into her arms and examined it.  She recognized each patch of fabric.  She could even place the buttons that made its eyes and nose.  

The bear suffered more as a toy than it ever had as pieces of clothing.  Not because Molly was rough with it, but because it followed her everywhere.  EVERYWHERE.  Every imaginary adventure.  Every errand with Mum.  Every last movement and affair. 

And so the bear would come into the tailor's shop for repairs just as Molly's clothes would.

Time seemed caught up in a single loop in the old tailor's world.  He never got any more gray.  The same customers brought him the same articles of clothing to be repaired.  Molly's family kept this ageless rhythm, bringing Molly and her clothes and her teddy bear for regular checkups.

But Molly herself betrayed this illusion of a seamless cycle.

She got taller.  Her voice went from a squeak to something musical.

The tailor spent more time making her new clothes instead of repairing old clothes and the old teddy.

Her parents looked more and more... well... tired.

One day when the fires of the Autumn trees burned low and gray within the grasp of Winter, the tailor replaced the left eye of Molly's teddy bear with a slick new black button.  

Molly didn't come back for it.  

Her parents no longer visited.

The old tailor set the bear out on the banister of the porch, just in case Molly remembered her bear.

The bear watched the snow fall and accumulate.  It watched the bones of dead leaves appear as the Spring thaw moved in and brought a wave of angelic green.

It watched all sorts of flowers wink into life.  Pink blossoms swell into apples like dull rubies.  And just like that the snow was here again.

The bear weathered storm after storm after storm of every season.

Molly never came.

The old tailor still took the bear in to replace any fabric or button that the elements ravaged.  He even took to giving the bear an oil lamp.  Warmth for the bear, light for Molly, if she should ever return. 

The years rolled by and the teddy sat vigilant by the oil lamp.

It was during one especially bitter rain that the bear frowned and looked at the oil lamp.

"This lamp has burned night after night.  It's not the same load of oil burning now that burned last month."

The teddy looked at the toadstools sprouting in the rain-sodden earth.

"I've seen entire seasons of these mushrooms.  They look alike, but no two seasons have been the same."

The teddy made the same remarks to itself about the leaves of the trees.  Blades of grass.  Flocks of birds.  Until it had enough and marched into the tailor's workshop.

It looked up at the tailor and held out it's nubby arms.

"She's not coming back.  She's forgotten me.  She's forgotten you.  She's forgotten anything you ever did for her."

"I know," the tailor said.  "Now come here.  Your back needs patched up again."

The bear winced away.

"I just said she isn't coming back.  Why are you going to keep doing anything for her?"

The tailor said nothing and gently brought the teddy up onto his knee.

"Our Molly will probably never benefit from our love for her ever again.  But that doesn't mean we should, too.  What will we be, indeed -- become -- if we stop loving her?"

The teddy cast it's large button eyes to the floor beyond the tailor's lap.

"Molly may have forgotten, yet forgetting is quite an accident.  We haven't forgotten her.  If we do, it's because we've done it on purpose.  Pardon me, Sir Bear, but I can think of no greater betrayal than to consciously decide to stop loving someone."

The bear's lower lip of black thread quivered.

"I'm tired of the rain and the cold.  And I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of waiting for a chance to prove something to someone I may never get back."

"I know," said the tailor.  "It takes more than the usual strength to be timeless."

He held the bear for a long moment, until its fabric grew warm.  Then he set it back down next to the oil lamp.  He refilled the lamp's fuel and turned it up as an especially dark storm warned all of it's arrival with a heavy yet still air.

The tailor clicked on the radio for any weather alerts.  There was the expected buzz of warnings and cautions and so forth.  

He eyed the dim and rusty light of the lantern through the window.

"We'll be here."