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A middling giraffe-of-a-woman with long stick legs—"Ichabod” to her dastardly workmates—weighed conflicting horoscopes at her desk when she spotted a penny on the floor outside her cubicle. This instantly resolved a dilemma plaguing her since breakfast: Should she splurge on a burrito and some guacamole instead of eating in (a grilled cheese, perhaps)? She took it as a favorable sign for going to the Taco-Burrito Hut for dinner. This cent was the fortune of the universe smiling upon her. She swiveled and leant to retrieve the copper coin with all the grace of a crawling bat. It is said in these times of late that a penny heads-up is good luck and that heads-down bodes bad, but Ichabod (naturally) believed the older, more ominous rhyme: See a penny, pick it up All day long you’ll have good luck See a penny let it lie, Need a penny till you die.
She blew a dark, narrow drape of hair from her face and held the coin in her cold hand so as to simultaneously warm the poor thing and enter into mental communion with Abe Lincoln’s tiny profile. “Thank you for finding me,” she thought at every red cent chance threw under her feet, “I understand how little the world appreciates a penny nowadays, but I am happy to find you, happy to save you, happy to spend you on what truly matters. Call your friends and cousins, tell them I’ll take them all—regardless of orientation.” True, Ichabod was superstitious and strange—she did not, for instance, subscribe to cable television—but still, even she was surprised upon lifting the penny to discover a thin red cord running loosely from it to the floor! Except for its solid red color, it was very much like traditional red-and-white bakery twine, and the further she pulled, the further the cord extended. She climbed atop her trembling, swiveling desk chair to scientifically test her impression that the slack came from both ends, though how so much cord could come from the penny left her mystified. She lost balance, fell, and just missed cracking her head on the edge of the desk. Pulling herself from the oatmeal-chic industrial-wear carpet to sit in her treacherous chair, she looked again; the red cord had vanished. “Silly,” she thought. She flipped the penny into the air, caught it with flair, and fancied, as she tucked the coin into her pocket, that she had seen a flash of that thin red cord again—connecting the penny with the palm of her hand this time, looping into a small knot as the coin flipped—but this had all happened so split-second that she mistook it for a trick of her tired eyes. And as she picked up the phone to explore just how much of a benefit the old company vision plan was, she dismissed the whole incident. * * * Six months later, this same tall, thin young woman with long stick legs tripped along the sidewalk, and the misstep flung her awkward figure to the ground. After untangling her elbows from her knees and her ankles from one another, blowing dirt out of various scrapes, brushing the dust from her palms, and recovering her wits (which, miraculously, took moments and not days), Ichabod discovered that she had tripped over a long, red string—very thin, yet for all that, extremely strong. It came out of nowhere and led to the same. Rather, one end disappeared into the polished black granite of an office building and the other trailed down a sewer drain. She recalled the incident with the penny, but this was more than a trick of the eye—she could feel this string—it had, in fact, caused her to trip and fall. Ichabod did what comes natural to us all; she wrapped the string around her fist and yanked. The end issuing from the black granite gave an inch or so, and a twenty-dollar bill fell onto the sidewalk, landing not far from the wall. "Curious," she said, quietly pocketing the bill. Looking round for witnesses, she pulled again, but the string refused to give at either end, and as far as she could ascertain, nothing happened. After several tries, and feeling more than lucky—for what is a twenty dollar bill, but the most convenient equivalent of 2000 pennies?—she continued on to work. To work, to work, where she cleaned the dirt out of her stinging knee, and when she tore open the paper wrapper of the bandage, she drew up short at the tiny red thread staring out from the initial tear. “One can only trust one’s luck so far,” she thought, “It always eventually turns.” She shivered before tugging it, but the string the tore wrapper and the bandage slipped out so easily that she reproached herself for her fearful little fit. After that, the day ground down into the ordinary until, home again, home again, ziggity-zig, she looked for her twenty-dollar string, but it had disappeared. Disappointed, though not entirely surprised, she took advantage of its absence to discover that the black granite façade of the office building was utterly unblemished; there was neither a hole nor a glue spot where the string had been. "Perhaps I’ve lost it." But she reached in her pocket and, behold, the twenty-dollar bill still rested there. She stuffed it back into her pocket and wandered home, racking her brains, which, up to now, had felt up to most tasks. The money had come from somewhere: “Law of physics!” she thought, “Cause and effect!” Was it not also a law of physics that two different objects cannot occupy the same locus in space and time? And was it not also a law that objects could not simply appear and disappear at will? So what of the string? She rolled and scorched against her mattress half the night, fretting with these questions, but as before the incident retreated through time like a hard-to-fetch dream. * * * Three months later nearing her stop on the bus, Ichabod reached for the stop-request cord without looking and accidentally pulled the unnoticed, unpredictable red string running alongside it like the ghost of a parallel universe. She suddenly sank through the floor as the bus continued forward—leaving her behind as if jerked by an invisible tail through the back bumper of the behemoth bus. It was like being shot through with a cloud of grimy tacks and diesel smoke. But there was no time to dwell on this. She rolled for the curb, hell-for-leather, to avoid being hit by an impatient taxi and an even more impatient Cadillac, flipped onto her back in the grass and wondered what was happening to her life. It did not help her ruminations to discover—through that grass-syrupy stench and strangely familiar paste-texture against her elbow—that she had landed in that traditionally unclaimed grass patch between street and sidewalk that served as a dog-toilet for the neighboring three blocks. A one-woman disaster, she humped along the block to her usual stop, turned corner, and limped home, suspecting—without certainty—exactly what had happened. * * * Several weeks later, Ms. Ichabod wrestled in her cubical with a problematic report. Her concentration was utterly shot as her co-workers spoke of the latest television program—she did not own a working TV, and so couldn't make bitter or sweet out of what they said—and, to make matters worse, her figures would not add up. Her eyes were going batty in her new glasses. She feared the onset of a migraine. "Oh, I wish they’d shut up!" She threw down her pencil in vexation. "Am I the only one who works here?" She stretched against the back of her chair until she saw spots, and then rested her face in her hands—to be honest, she was pouting. Resigned to scrapping the report and starting over, Ichabod looked up. She couldn't believe her eyes: A short end of red string dangled from the receiver of her phone. Another length ran from somewhere inside the percent button on her calculator, loosely across her desk, down through the report, through the desktop and down to the floor below. She stood, peering over the cubical wall, to see if the pal-around Charlies were laughing at her expense, only to find another length of red string that ran down the floor, veering in and out of cubicles, looped the wheel of an office chair, then turned a corner and out of sight. No one seemed to notice. Her colleagues' conversation told her only that they'd been scandalized by something on a highly rated show. She slid quietly back into her chair. One time something like this had happened, she'd ended up twenty bucks richer. Then again, there was the whole dog-shit thing. It certainly was mysterious. She picked up the string across her desk without tugging out the slack and rolled it between her fingers. It felt like cotton and certainly seemed an ordinary—though extremely thin—red string. To pull it was irresistible—but which one? What direction? Impulsively she reached under her desk and gave that string a yank. A gaze to the desktop, found that her willful report was gone! It made sudden sense that if pulling one direction made something disappear pulling the opposite way might bring it back; so without hesitation, Ms. Ichabod pulled the string issuing from her desktop. Not only did the report not appear, now there were three little red ants communing with one another through their feelers. “Getting that twenty was dumb luck," she thought. "This string is, at best, a mixed blessing. Actually it’s getting to be more and more of a curse, and I don’t see any way of escaping it." By the time she had re-gathered the statistics and drafts needed for her report, the water-cooler party had disbanded and the three ants lay mashed inside a facial tissue in her trashcan. When she stood to drop off her report and leave for home, the sun had gone and the windows were dark and she could not guess where the strings had vanished to, or when. * * * The next morning, a red cord issued from the center of Ichabod’s left hand, which had grasped the twenty, and disappeared down into the center of the mattress. Another went from her mattress through her right palm and into her hip, tracing with a tiny knot the path of that first fateful penny. As she pondered these strange stigmata, she became aware that yet another made itself an axis through the crown of her head, down through her body, and out her perineum—each end taut through the perpendicular walls at the head and foot of her bed as though to create a novel skewer of her very own meat. Through a bed-ridden inventory, she discovered herself completely ensnared in red. Furthermore, there was no escape; if she moved one part the slack would be taken up in another, rendering it immobile. What’s more, replacing the former had little or no effect in loosening the latter—indeed, it seemed that whether she moved or not, the strings only slid through her like cosmic floss, tightening by degrees. One moment they vibrated through her and against her with the chill music of distant spheres, the next it was more like the close, prickly heat of a devilish violin. Her face turned grim with the anguish in her heart. She had tugged the strings, and now it was her time (who knew how long it might last?) to be pulled by them, through the actions of others and the strange machinations of the universe as she scorched against her red, red bedsheets. “This thing is going to kill me,” she thought, and owing greatly to that belief, her doom arrived three days later in the red, red breaking of a single heartstring.
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