John held his breath as he opened the box of needles. He placed one in the machine and wound a red string around the bobbin.

The felt he selected was dense and heavy; it reminded him of camping, the final days of his boyhood. His father wore a felt workman's shirt, which he used to polish rocks by the stream. John's father called the stream a "crick" and could make stones skip across it. The stones glowed in his fist after he polished them. When he launched them, they were no longer stones but birds or insects, driven by a writhing inner core. In John's hands, the stones lost their levity, went cold. They made arcs instead of lines, hitting the water dumbly and sinking back into the black silt.

As he sealed the edge of the felt figure, John imagined stuffing his own body with cotton. He removed the needle from the machine and jabbed it into the doll's gut, feeling a sharp jolt in his own belly, an electricity all his own.

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