STITCH

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PrologueThe sound of a new shiny red scooter is a specific thing—a rhythmic clack-clack as the wheels pass over seams in the concrete. To Elias Silas, it was a background noise, barely deserving his attention. He was used to the sound by now, since Santa had delivered to Leo almost three weeks ago.
To Martha, it was a timer. A metronome of sorts. The cadence was reassurance that Leo was riding his new toy safely.
“Leo, stay on the sidewalk!” She called out from the porch, her voice sharp with resolve but not unkind. She was snapping the ends off green beans into a ceramic bowl, a task she performed with the same rhythmic precision she used to organize the funeral home’s ledger.
Then came the roar.
It was a sound that didn’t belong in Oakhaven—a high performance engine, pushing seven thousand rpm’s that suggested a driver that had lost his way or his mind, one of the two. Perhaps both.
Martha dropped the bowl of green beans to the floor. The bowl shattered and beans spread out around the glass shards like small severed fingers.
She didn’t look at Elias, she looked at the street, following the sound of the black sedan as it crested the hill. The car’s front end dipped as the brakes locked—tires sliding over the oil-sheened pavement, sending it into a sickening side-ways slide.
She saw Leo. Then a bright flash of red, hurled into the air—the scooter, his helmet, his favorite shirt, the chocolate candy mark still on his right cheek. The cheek she kissed each morning before he left for school.
Then he was gone.
The car mounted the curb with a metallic thud that Martha felt in her teeth. The car didn’t stop until it hit the brick retaining wall, a collision that sent a cloud of red dust into the air like a bloody mist.
Silence followed.
Elias was already running, a guttural wounded sound tearing from his throat. But Martha stood frozen on the porch for one moment longer, in disbelief. She saw Danny Miller stumble out of the driver’s side, his face a mask of shock and blood from a small cut above his eye. Thank goodness, he had been wearing his seatbelt. She saw the girl in the passenger seat, the Miller girl, Sarah. Her head was tilted back at an impossible angle against the headrest, her throat a jagged line of red.
Martha descended the porch steps.
She didn’t go to her husband who was wailing over the small broken form on the sidewalk. She walked to the car and looked in through the shattered glass at Sarah Miller.
“Elias,” Martha said. Her voice was flat, devoid of panic that was consuming the neighborhood. “Elias, look at me.” The mortician looked up, his face smeared with his son’s blood.
“She’s fresh,” Martha whispered, her eyes locked on Sarah’s pale, unblemished skin. “And Danny is alive. He’s the one who gets to stay.”
She turned her gaze to Danny, who was vomiting on the asphalt. Guilt mixed with cheap whisky, collecting near his feet. His eyes filling with tears as the enormity of his circumstance settled in.
Martha’s expression didn’t hold anger, it held a terrifying predatory calculation. She walked over to her husband, knelt in the sharred glass, and took his hands in hers. He has the hands of a master embalmer and yet the tender hands of husband and daddy.
“We aren’t going to just let him walk away, Elias,” she whispered into his ear. “We’re going to make him help us rebuild our world, our family. Piece by piece.”
In that moment, the pact was sealed. The path was chosen. The route had been charted.
Before the sirens, before the police, before the ambulance, before the grief had even turned into a scab—Martha Silas had already decided that the Sarah was no longer a neighbor.
She was inventory.© 2026 Rich Petrelli. This material is shared privately and may not be distributed.