The Spindle

I was never meant to be sharp.

I was made smooth, turned from pale wood by a patient hand, balanced so that the thread would trust me. I knew weight before I knew blame. I knew how to spin wool into something useful, something warm. I knew the sound of breath and the rhythm of fingers working without thinking.

In the beginning, I lived among others like me—spindles of different ages, bobbins, looms leaning like tired animals against the wall. We were not dangerous. We were necessary.

Then the story changed.

I remember the day the room went quiet.

The women stopped speaking all at once, as if a hand had closed around their throats. One of them—the youngest, I think—had pricked her finger. The blood was a small, astonished thing, bright against her skin.

She laughed at first.

Then someone else screamed.

After that, they stopped letting us lie where we pleased. They began to store us carefully, wrapping us in cloth, stacking us out of reach. Whispers followed us. I learned my new name before I learned what it meant.

Spindle.

They said it like a warning.

When the child was born, the castle filled with sound. Bells. Footsteps. Joy that tried very hard to drown out the memory of a single drop of blood.

I was already hidden by then, locked away with the rest of my kind. We were counted, recorded, sealed behind doors as if wood could conspire.

From the dark, I learned the rhythm of fear.

They burned some of us.

I smelled it before I understood it. Smoke curling through stone. The sharp, final crackle of wood forced into meaning. The women who fed the fires cried as they did it, as if destruction might earn forgiveness.

I was spared.

Not because I was innocent, but because someone decided to keep me—proof, perhaps, or contingency. Or simply because no one remembered where I was.

Years passed. The child grew. The castle aged around her.

Fear does not fade. It learns manners.

They rewrote the rules.

No spinning. No needles. No sharp things. No work that left marks. The women were reassigned to tasks that did not threaten destiny. Wool rotted in storage. Cold crept into rooms that had once known warmth.

They told themselves this was protection.

They told themselves that removing the object removed the danger.

I lay forgotten in a tower no one visited anymore, wrapped in linen that smelled faintly of hands long gone.

I listened.

I listened to the girl’s laughter echo up stairwells she was not meant to climb. I listened to guards scold her gently, firmly, constantly. I listened to the way people spoke her name—like something fragile, like something already half-lost.

She was not curious the way stories say she was.

She was bored.

Boredom is more dangerous than curiosity. It makes its own doors.

On the afternoon she found me, the tower door resisted at first. She pushed anyway.

Dust lifted, startled. Light entered where it hadn’t been invited.

She stood there, hands on her hips, surveying the room like someone arriving late to a conversation.

“Oh,” she said. “So this is where you’ve all been hiding.”

Her voice was not reverent. It was amused.

She moved through the space slowly, fingers brushing covered shapes, cloth giving way to wood beneath. She uncovered me last.

I lay exactly as I had been left—smooth, unthreatening, balanced.

She picked me up.

Her grip was careless. Unafraid.

“You don’t look dangerous,” she said.

I wanted to tell her the truth.

That I had never asked to be part of this.

That sharpness is not the same as harm.

That a kingdom afraid of a tool will always find something else to fear.

But I was made for spinning, not speaking.

She turned me over in her hands, testing my weight.

Then, distracted—because she was young and the world was large—she pricked her finger.

The blood was immediate.

She stared at it, surprised, then laughed.

“That’s it?” she said. “That’s what everyone’s afraid of?”

Her knees buckled before she finished the sentence.

__________________________________________

Sleep is a strange word for what followed.

Her body went still, but the castle did not. Panic ran faster than truth ever does. They carried her as if she might shatter, laid her into silks she had never chosen.

They did not look at me.

They did not need to.

They knew where to put the blame.

I was taken from her hand and hurled against stone. I cracked, but did not break. Someone screamed—not in fear, but in fury—and I was thrown again, harder this time.

It did not help.

It never does.

They locked me away once more, deeper than before, as if distance could undo inevitability.

Above me, the castle froze itself into a museum of grief. Time thickened. Dust settled with intention.

People came to look at her. To mourn. To speculate. To hope.

None of them asked why a single moment had been allowed to hold so much power.

Years passed.

I counted them by the way silence changed.

The castle learned to live around absence. Ivy climbed walls that no one trimmed. Servants grew old and quiet. Stories softened with retelling.

They said she would wake when the right thing happened.

They never questioned why waiting felt more righteous than responsibility.

When the prince arrived, the castle did not greet him with reverence.

It greeted him with exhaustion.

They told him the story the way tired people do. Stripped of complications.

A curse.

A spindle.

A sleeping girl.

They did not mention the fires.

They did not mention the rooms that had gone cold when spinning was outlawed. They did not mention the women sent away because their work had become illegal.

He kissed her because the story demanded an ending.

And it worked because the kingdom needed one.

When she woke, the castle erupted.

Cheers filled the halls. Bells rang until their ropes burned the hands that pulled them.

But when the noise thinned, she lay very still, eyes open, breath shallow.

She did not smile.

They brought me to her that same day.

Wrapped in linen. Carried with both hands. Presented as if confession alone might erase years.

“This,” someone said, pointing, “is what caused it.”

She looked at me.

Not with fear.

With something quieter.

“You destroyed everything because of this?” she asked.

No one answered her directly.

“She must never touch another spindle,” someone said quickly. “Ever.”

Another voice followed. “It’s safer this way.”

I understood then what safety meant to them.

Not understanding.

Not accountability.

Erasure.

The king ordered it that night.

Every remaining spindle—hidden, forgotten, spared by chance—was to be burned.

They brought us out in crates and bundles, carried by hands that shook.

Some of us were smooth and old. Some newly made, never used. Some cracked from being thrown aside in panic years ago.

We did not scream.

Wood does not scream.

But if it did, the sound would have filled the kingdom.

They built the fires high.

The people watched—relieved, reverent, hungry for closure.

I was thrown in last.

I felt the heat split me before I burned.

The girl, the princess, the queen, whatever name she wore now, stood at the edge of the crowd.

She did not stop it.

She did not turn away.

She watched.

That was worse.

As I burned, I understood the final truth.

It had never mattered that I was harmless.

It had never mattered that fear had sharpened me more than any blade.

The kingdom needed proof that the harm came from somewhere other than itself. That people's choices aren't but their own.

And objects are easy to condemn.

The fire erased us thoroughly.

By morning, the kingdom was warm again.

They celebrated this as progress.

They told the story differently after that.

They said the curse had been defeated.

They said wisdom had prevailed.

They said the danger was gone.

But no one spun wool anymore.

No one taught their children how to make warmth with their hands.

They lived wrapped in imported things, traded things, borrowed things. Which were softer, colder, and farther from themselves.

The girl ruled.

She ruled gently.

She ruled carefully.

She never spoke of the spindles.

And the kingdom learned nothing it could use in time.

Because the most dangerous lesson was never the curse.

It was this:

That when fear demands a sacrifice, it will always choose the thing that cannot argue back.