The knitting circle met every Friday in a corner of the local used bookstore after it had closed for the night. The women sat in a collection of mismatched chairs, arranged in a loose circle around the scuff-legged coffee table. Paper cups filled with coffee and a box of doughnuts sat on the table’s surface. Balls of yarn pitched and rolled about in their baskets as needles clacked and fingers pinched and pulled at the colorful strands. 

Andrea had been coming to the meetings for a few months now. When she and her husband, Evan, had first moved to the city, she had been optimistic about their new beginning. What she’d quickly learned was that making friends in a new city halfway across the country without knowing anyone at all, while being married and in her thirties, was harder than she’d thought it would be. She hadn’t been able to really click with any of her coworkers at the law office she was secretary for, and although she and Even did intend to have a baby someday soon, she felt as though trying to connect with mothers in the park while she herself had no children was a bit awkward. And so, browsing a website that advertised social groups and clubs in the city, she had settled on the knitting circle.

“Thank goodness it’s starting to warm up a bit out there, huh?” Gabby, a portly middle-aged woman with a soccer mom haircut and long French-manicured nails, said as she worked on her hundredth baby sweater. Gabby had five kids and a dentist husband. She drove a cobalt-blue minivan that had those stick-figure family decals slapped onto the back window. Despite the fact that the woman was a walking cliché, Andrea found herself envious of Gabby more often than she wanted to admit.

“Certainly is nice,” agreed Tabitha, a bony woman who looked like she could be somewhere between thirty and sixty-five. “The warm weather sure helps the bones move better, don’t you think Agnes?”

“Don’t need spring to get the bones moving,” The old woman across from Tabitha croaked, her fingers moving with lightning speed. “Just a good long soak in a hot bath will do the trick—but I am excited to see the flowers poke their little heads up again.”

Agnes sat beside her sisters Sigrid and Elsa. The three old women always came to the meetings together, and they always left together. Andrea assumed they lived together. If she had to guess, she would say the women were probably at least in their seventies, but no one had ever told her exactly how old they were, and she certainly didn’t feel comfortable asking. They all spoke with an accent, but it was hard for her to place it. Her best guess was somewhere in northern Europe.

“Andrea, how are things with you and Evan?” Ellie was the only other woman about Andrea’s age in the knitting circle. The two of them had hit it off after a few meetings, and now they got coffee together on Mondays and Wednesdays.

“Oh, about the same, I suppose,” Andrea said hesitantly. She had spoken to Ellie about her marriage issues a few times over the past month, but never in front of the rest of the knitting circle. “We’re still trying to make things work.”

Sigrid looked up from the scarf she was knitting with sudden interest. “Trouble with your man?” She asked, fixing Andrea with a penetrating look.

Andrea paused, but the old woman’s dark crow-like eyes somehow made her want to tell the truth of the matter. Without really meaning to, she found herself saying, “It’s nothing big, really. Evan and I just haven’t been spending as much time together as we used to. I’ve been trying to get us to do things we’ll both enjoy, but I feel like I don’t know what he wants.”

Gabby nodded sympathetically. “I know how that feels, hun. Me and my Chris went through the same thing in the first couple years of our marriage. I wouldn’t worry too much about it—it’s something all couples go through.”

Sigrid went back to the scarf she had been knitting and finished the last few rows with frightening speed. She quickly cast off and wove the ends into the scarf with almost supernatural precision. She held out the finished product to Andrea. “Here, take this scarf. Give to your husband, as present.”

Elsa looked up sharply from her work, and Agnes put a hand on Sigrid’s outstretched arm. “Sister,” Agnes said in a tone too sweet to be pleasant, “You have worked so hard on this. Do not give it away.”

“Yes,” Elsa chimed in, her small chin bobbing like a bird’s. “Your reasons to give this gift are your own, sister. Do not trouble this nice young woman.”

“We agreed not to give gifts to other people anymore,” Agnes said through clenched teeth. She gripped Sigrid’s arm with her claw-like fingers, fixing the other woman with a stern look.

“Oh, I couldn’t take your scarf, Sigrid,” Andrea said quickly, starting to feel uncomfortable. She had no idea what the three old women were quarreling about, but they looked like they were about to get into a nasty fight, and she did not want it to escalate.

Sigrid shook her sister’s arm off. “I have made it, and it is mine to give as I like.” She looked back at Andrea and held out the scarf again, more insistently this time. “It is my gift. Give to your husband. It will help you discover what he wants, as you say.” She shot a haughty scowl at her two sisters, who looked as though they had both swallowed a lemon whole.

Andrea took the scarf from the old woman and folded it, quickly putting it away in her knitting bag. “Thank you, Sigrid.”

Sigrid, looking satisfied, sat back in her chair and reached for a new ball of yarn. Agnes and Elsa stared daggers at their sister, but after a moment continued with their own projects.

Everyone in the circle relaxed and resumed their knitting. Soon Gabby and Ellie started up a conversation about patterns for baby blankets, and the episode with the sisters was swiftly forgotten. Once, when Andrea reached for her coffee, she thought she saw Agnes giving her a pitying look, but the old woman quickly turned back to her work when she noticed Andrea looking at her.

§

That night when Andrea got back from the meeting, she took the scarf with her into the one-story bungalow she shared with her husband.

“Honey, I’m back,” she called as she stepped in through the doorway. She shrugged off her coat and hung the keys on their hook, kicking her boots off as she did. She went into the living room where Evan sat in his spot on the couch, his attention glued to the television screen and the hockey game that was playing.

“Hey,” she said, sitting down beside him.

“Hey babe,” he replied, glancing at her for a moment before directing his attention back to the screen.

“I brought you a present,” she said, pulling the scarf out from under her arm. She draped it over Evan’s shoulders and sat back to admire it on him. The scarf was a gorgeous shade of moss green, knitted with intricate Celtic cable work all along the center. With Evan’s copper-colored hair, it was quite striking. It was almost as if the color had been made for him.

“It looks good on you.”

Her husband looked down at the scarf. “Thanks. Did you make it?’

She shook her head. “No, I’m not that good. One of the old ladies gave it to me.”

“Why are you giving me an old lady scarf?” Evan asked, quirking a smile at her.

“I just took it to be nice,” she smiled back. “But now that I see it on you I think it really suits you.”

Evan went back to watching the game. “Did you bring something for dinner?”

“Oh. I thought you got something. Tonight was your night, wasn’t it?”

He gave her a harassed look. “Don’t you ever check you phone? I texted you. I didn’t get off work until half an hour ago.”

Frowning, she pulled her phone from her pocket. He had indeed texted her two hours earlier, at five-thirty. “Sorry,” she apologized. “We can order in tonight. Would you rather get pizza or Chinese?”

He shrugged, still looking at the television. “I don’t care.”

The moment the words left his lips, Andrea could have sworn the scarf around Evan’s neck suddenly flared, glowing a brighter green for an almost imperceptible moment. Blinking, she looked again, but the scarf was the same color it had always been. I’ve been staring at my knitting too hard, she thought, and then hit the number for the pizza place on her phone.

When the pizza arrived, they ate their dinner on the couch together. Andrea allowed her head to rest comfortably on Evan’s shoulder as they watched a rerun of Jeopardy. As the questions got more and more obscure, her interest began to wane. Bored, she tilted her head up to her husband’s face and began to lightly plant a series of kisses along his neck. When he didn’t react, she grinned and slipped her arm around his waist, playfully leaning into him. “Do you want to get in a little extra exercise tonight?”

Evan glanced down at her and rested his arm on her own, stopping her hand from wandering further. “Not tonight. I’m pretty tired.”

When he said it, the scarf suddenly seemed to glow a brighter hue again for a split second, and then it was back to the color of moss again. Andrea straightened, frowning. Seeing it happen once was one thing, but twice…well, that was odd. Confused by the scarf and feeling a little put out by her husband’s rejection, she found that she no longer wanted to stay and watch television. She untangled herself from his arms and got up from the couch. “I think I’m going to go to bed early then.”

“Okay. Good night.”

When she had finished brushing her teeth and going about the rest of her nightly rituals, Andrea slipped beneath the covers of their bed and lay in the comforting darkness, her mind inexorably coming to rest on the scarf that the old Scandinavian woman had given her. Either there was something wrong with her own eyes, or the scarf had inexplicably changed its own color for half a moment, twice in one night. And somehow, Evan hadn’t seemed to notice it at all. It was impossible, she knew, but it was still hard to shake the feeling that there was something odd about that scarf.

§

The next morning, Andrea got up before her husband.

She left him snoring on his side of the bed and went into the kitchen to start breakfast. Before the move, the two of them had gotten up together every Saturday morning to make pancakes and bacon, waffles, or eggs benedict—something to spoil themselves with. Ever since they’d moved and Evan had gotten a job as a paramedic however, he’d started sleeping in on all of his days off, usually citing how tired he was from the long, odd hours he worked. She was sympathetic to her husband’s situation, and prided herself on not being a wife who nagged to get her way, but she still missed those Saturday mornings. Now she went about gathering the ingredients and cookware on her own, perhaps hoping that if she just kept up the tradition things would go back to the way they had been.

She was just adding the last pancake to the stack she had on the counter when Evan entered the kitchen and groggily began pouring himself a cup of coffee.

They ate breakfast together, Andrea occasionally breaking the silence with remarks about her job or the weather or her current project in the knitting circle. Evan said little, and mostly contributed to the conversation with nods or the occasional mhm. His phone buzzed on the table, and he picked it up to look at it. Andrea watched him, not sure what she could do to get him out of his own world and back with her. The gulf between them had been steadily widening for a month or so now, and it felt like everything she tried was met with indifference.

“Hey,” she brightened as a thought struck her, “let’s stay in and spend the entire day binging on movies, soda and popcorn, just like we used to when we were dating. That sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah it does,” her husband murmured, distracted by whatever he was looking at on his phone.

Out of the corner of her eye, Andrea saw the scarf—which Evan must have left draped over the back of the couch last night—glow briefly.

“Did you see that?” She blurted, pointing in the direction of the living room.

“See what?”

“The scarf, it just changed color.”

Evan peered over his broad shoulder at the scarf. He looked back at her, raising an eyebrow. “The scarf…changed color?”

Andrea felt a flush of heat spread up her neck and to her cheeks at his reaction. “Never mind. It must have just been the light.” She gathered the dishes from the table and carried them over to the sink, her mind churning. That had been the third time she’d seen the scarf turn a brighter shade of green, and each time it had only lasted a second before going back to normal again. And every time, it was just after Evan said something, she realized with a start. Wait, no. That’s insane. You’re being insane. A scarf that changes color when someone talks was prime material for getting herself an all-expenses-paid trip to the nuthouse. Maybe there’s something wrong with my eyes.

She shook her head vigorously in an attempt to dislodge the thoughts from her brain. She turned and faced the pantry, looking for the things she would need for their movie marathon. She pulled out the box of microwave popcorn and set it on the counter. When she reached for the two shakers of popcorn seasonings they always kept (dill pickle for her, and cheddar cheese for him), she noticed that the cheese shaker was empty. “There’s only dill pickle left,” she said, mostly to herself. She was going to have to make a trip to the store before they could start—Evan hated dill pickle.

“That’s okay,” her husband said in a distracted-sounding tone from the living room. He was sitting on the couch, still looking at his phone. “Dill pickle is fine.”

Hanging on the couch beside him, the scarf immediately flashed from deep green to the color of lime juice. Andrea stared at it open-mouthed. Evan hated the taste of pickles. She knew that. She’d known that since they’d started dating. The scarf wasn’t changing color randomly after her husband said anything—it was changing color when he lied.

Dumbfounded, she thought back to each time she’d seen the scarf glow a different color. Had he lied to her all of those times?

Evan looked up from his phone, saw her staring at him, and frowned. “Are you okay?”

Andrea closed her mouth so quickly her teeth clicked audibly. “Yup,” she said weakly. “Just trying to think of what movies to watch.”

“Well, you can pick first. It doesn’t matter.”

Her eyes flicked to the scarf as he finished speaking, but nothing happened. “Okay,” she mumbled. “Let me just make the popcorn.”

Robotically, she opened up one of the packets and set it in the microwave. As it rotated slowly, her mind whirled, trying to comprehend what was happening. She’d always thought the three sisters were a little batty, but magic? Obviously that sort of thing was crazy. Magic didn’t exist. Obviously. And yet…

“Hey honey,” she turned to look at him. “Did you manage to take out the garbage yesterday?”

“Hmm?” Evan did not look up from his phone screen. “Uh yeah, yeah I did.”

The scarf flared bright green. Andrea looked down at the garbage bin beside her, stepping on the pedal to swing the lid open. A full, sagging garbage bag sat inside. So that was it, she thought numbly. It was some kind of magical lie detector. And Evan didn’t seem to notice it changing color at all. Only she did.

The microwave timer went off, jolting her from her thoughts. She retrieved the bag, fetched a two-litre bottle of Orange Crush from the refrigerator, and sat down beside her husband.

She chose Love Actually entirely out of habit, her mind awhirl with so many possibilities she hardly paid the movie any attention at all. It was a bit of an odd thing to give someone, she thought as she watched the images flash across the screen. Why would old Sigrid—if she really was some kind of crazy magic witch lady—give her something that told her when Evan was lying? All married couples lie to each other, don’t they? It wasn’t a big deal. She looked at her husband beside her, his body relaxed and fully immersed in what was going on in the television screen. With a sudden feeling of desperate need to be comforted, she snuggled her body in close to his. For a moment she thought she felt his muscles tense and his body lean away from her. Dismayed, she tilted her head so she could see his face, but he was still engrossed in what was happening in the film.

She leaned back and tried to relax so she could watch the movie too, telling herself that she had imagined it, but it was hard to ignore the tiny seed of doubt that had sprouted in her belly and begun to grow questing roots that took hold deep inside her.

Resting on the arm of the couch beside him, Evan’s phone buzzed again.

§

They finished their movie marathon around supper time, and this time Evan called for Chinese food to be delivered. While they were eating their chow mien and ginger beef at the kitchen table, Evan’s phone vibrated. He picked it up and began typing out a message. He had been on his phone for nearly the entire day, which was odd since on his days off he usually avoided his phone like the plague. Curious, Andrea said, “You’re Mr. Popular today. Who are you talking to?”

“Huh? Oh,” Evan looked up at her. “Paul, mostly. He and a few of the boys want to go out for drinks after work tomorrow.”

Lying on the back of the couch where it had been all day, the scarf glowed a sudden shamrock green.

Andrea stared at it as a cold, clammy sensation burst somewhere inside her and began to spread its icy fingers. Trying to ignore the feeling of alarm rising in her stomach, she said, “Boy’s night out, huh? Just you and the guys?” She tried to keep her tone casual despite her rapidly rising heart rate.

Her husband nodded, his attention again going back to the phone. “Yup. Just me and the guys.”

The scarf flared once again.

Andrea’s hand flew up to cover her mouth as her heart dropped into her stomach. Swallowing the lump in her throat, all of a sudden she felt the intense need to be somewhere else.

“I think I’ll go to the store,” she said, standing shakily. She scooped up the scarf and hastily retrieved her purse from the kitchen table. Her heart beat at a horrible pace within her chest, and her stomach was rapidly tying itself into knots. “We need milk. Do you want me to grab anything?” She tried desperately to keep her voice calm, but her words still came out sounding breathless.

“We’re running out of toothpaste,” he said absentmindedly, still gazing at the phone screen.

“Okay. Toothpaste.” Andrea repeated, trying to keep her suddenly weak knees from buckling. She could feel bile rising in the back of her throat. She swallowed again, and grabbed the keys to Evan’s SUV off their hook. The SUV warmed up faster than her little car, and the nights were still cold. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

She drove to the nearby mall and parked the SUV in the open lot. She sat in the vehicle and tried to gather her thoughts. She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d driven to the mall in particular—she just knew that at that moment, she’d had to leave. She reached into the passenger’s seat and grabbed the scarf, holding it up under the light of the mall’s parking lot. “This isn’t real,” she said, her voice desperately soft. “This can’t be real.”

As she sat in the car, the hammering in her chest slowly began to diminish. After an hour, the sour feeling in the back of her throat faded until it was barely noticeable. The shock began to wear off, and in turn her thoughts came more clearly. The scarf might be wrong. It was even possible that she was going crazy and imagining what she saw. There had to be a way for her to know if the scarf really did do what she thought it did. And why Evan would lie to her about who he was talking to.

She looked up and saw that the shop she had parked in front of was an electronics store. An idea forming in her mind, she got out of the SUV and crossed the near-empty lot. Once inside, she wound her way through the aisles until she came upon what she was looking for.

§

The SUV rolled into the driveway with a thump-thump fifteen minutes later. Andrea put the car in park and killed the engine before reaching for the small plastic bag that contained her purchase. She felt a hard knot of guilt form in her belly as she tore open the packaging.

The GPS tracking device was the size of a USB stick. It was so small that she would be able to hide it just about anywhere in Evan’s car, and he would probably never find it. After considering her options for a moment, she twisted around and tucked the device deep underneath the back seat, wedging it tightly in between the seat and the carpeted floor.

Feeling guilty but resolved, she took the scarf back into the house with her, clutching the soft wool tightly in her hand.

§

The next day, Evan left for work at six-thirty in the morning. Andrea, finding herself unable to sleep any longer, got up not long after.

She paced around the empty house for most of the morning, checking the tracker app on her phone every half an hour. Each time, Evan’s location inevitably appeared on the map at the hospital, where he worked. She was so nervous that she found she couldn’t eat anything, and instead sustained herself on a near-constant stream of coffee. At one point she tried to get some of her knitting done, but after only a few minutes was too restless to sit any longer.

So she fell back into pacing, and trying to think about anything but the GPS device hidden in her husband’s vehicle.

The sun was beginning to dip low on the horizon, its crimson-gold rays drenching the city in an ethereal burnished light, when the icon on the tracker app began to move. Andrea watched it blink on the map as Evan’s car drove through the city, the little blip stopping and starting as he made his way through the traffic she couldn’t see.

Eventually, the tracker ceased its movement. The circle on the map blinked on and off but remained motionless for five, ten, and then finally fifteen minutes. Andrea zoomed in the image until she could see the address, her insides crawling with anxiety and doubt and something else she couldn’t identify.

Evan was parked in a residential area, twenty minutes’ drive from their house. The closest bar was seventeen blocks away.

Stifling the panic that was rising in her chest, Andrea grabbed her coat, her car keys and, after a moment’s hesitation, the scarf. Looking at an app on her phone wasn’t good enough. She needed to see for herself. Using the address she had found, she drove onto the main roads and followed the map, glancing at it every few minutes. She throttled back the impulse to speed the entire way there and tried to focus on her breathing. Her hands shook on the steering wheel and, the closer she got, the more she felt as though she might vomit.

She pulled her car up on the opposite side of the street from the address just as night began unfolding around the city. Across the street, Evan’s SUV sat in the driveway of a modern two-story townhouse beside a sleek white car with a pink decal that read ‘nurse girls rock’ on the rear window. Andrea had never seen the car before. She let her own vehicle idle as she sat there, staring at the house and feeling as if the building blocks of her life were tumbling down around her. Her eyes drifted over to the scarf that lay in a heap on the passenger’s seat beside her. After a minute of debating, she picked up her phone from the car’s console and dialed the number for Evan’s cell. She kept her eyes on the house as the phone rang one, twice, three times. On the fourth ring, her husband answered.

“Hello?”

Feeling her gorge rise in response to his voice, Andrea swallowed and said, “Evan?”

“Hey babe,” her husband’s disconnected voice sounded odd. Hollow, somehow. “What’s up?”

“I was just wondering where you were,” She managed to keep her tone mostly even. Tears threatened to rush forth and she rapidly blinked them back.

“I’m at the bar with Paul and the guys, remember?”

The lie was flawlessly executed. Nothing in his voice indicated he was being anything but truthful. In the passenger’s seat, the scarf’s color briefly flashed a bright green hue. Unable to stop herself, Andrea began to cry in earnest, fat tears streaking her cheeks and falling from her chin in an overwhelming flood. “I…I love you,” she choked. In the house, she saw the light in one of the upstairs rooms flicker on. The silhouette of a woman appeared behind the curtain, and a moment later one of a man joined it.

“I love you too.”

The scarf flared the color of new grass.

She hit the ‘end call’ button, settling back into the driver’s seat in resignation. Her reaction surprised her. She’d thought that she would scream and rage and curse, and a part of her did want to do those things. But a separate part had known all along, and that part was not surprised or appalled. Just tired. She sat there for several minutes, thinking. In the end, she brought the cellphone up again and dialed a number. She waited as the line rang once, twice, three times. A woman’s voice picked up. “Henderson divorce attorney’s office, how many I help you?”

§

Across the city in the living room of a dingy three-room apartment, a green scarf materialized on the arm of a flower-print couch. Three old women sat in the living room, watching a rerun of Jeopardy! on an ancient TV screen.

The woman closest to the scarf glanced at it and said, “Well, are you happy now? Your gift has led to the separation of another young couple.”

Sigrid grunted from her perch on a worn armchair. “It would have happened anyway, ten years later. Better for her to learn now.”

“You should stop meddling with the threads of their lives,” Elsa chided. “Just because you were wronged once.”

“I am helping them,” Sigrid sneered at her sister. “This one will see that she is better off soon enough.” She perked up suddenly, her black eyes flashing. “Ha! See, I told you the answer was 1969.”

The three women lapsed back into silence, listening as the contestants answered the questions they were given. Beside them balls of silvery yarn knitted themselves, hovering several feet from the floor.

Amanda Dawson grew up in rural Alberta, Canada, where she spent her time reading books and stargazing (there wasn't much else to do). She is currently a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing candidate at the University of Saskatchewan.