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A knock at your door interrupts the steady woosh of wind and rain outside. Lucky peers in, a paw on the doorframe. Their ghost umbrella drips on your pine-board flooring.
“Have you seen Stitches? They’re usually out and about this time of day, rrr-owch.”
"I’ll go with you to check on them,” you offer.
Lucky holds your hand as you walk through fields of windflowers. “I was saving them some of my sandwich. Last week, I found some special bologna in a bottle on the beach. It made me feel funny, rrr-owch.”
You nod.
“It was labeled BIOHAZARD - SPECIMEN. What do you think that means, rrr-owch?”
“No clue,” you shrug. Stranger oddities have washed ashore before.
Rain flumes down off the roof of the stoplight-colored house where Stitches lives. Rivulets like dynamic icicles land in puddles beneath the eaves. The windows are dark.
“I know they’re in there, rrr-owch.” Lucky knocks vigorously on the door. “Can we come in? Ready or not, here we come!”
Their hand is on the door, the bolt rotating in the lock when Stitches appears in the round window, back-lit. They’re not tall enough to reach that height without standing on a chair.
“Uhhh... howdy, stuffin’. I’m kind of busy right now.” They smile and wave, their voice level through the glass.
Lucky taps the door. “We were worried about you.”
“Everything is fine.” Stitches nods. “It’s just. The bugs in my floor say I can’t see anyone right now, stuffin’.”
“It’s fine if it’s messy. Wait... I know what this is about. Are you hiding your sauce packet stash from me again? I told you I was sorry for drinking your chili oil from 2001, rrr-owch. It just looked so appetizing.”
You clear your throat, busting out the stern Resident Representative demeanor you’ve rarely needed since your island’s population stabilized. “By moving to this island, you agreed to an open door policy.”
“I really can’t.” Stitches shakes their head, distressed.
“Open door policy, coming right up!” Bells jingle the town tune as Lucky slips inside.
Stitches falls from whatever they’re standing on. The lights go out.
Barks and growls behind the door give way to a flurry of scratches.
The doorknob turns. You help it along, but the door is jammed within its frame.
You’ve never heard Lucky howl, not like K.K. Slider, but that’s the closest match for the pained noise from inside Stitches’s house.
Why don’t you run in?
You never agreed to this. You bite your lip. Lucky and Stitches didn’t either.
The door creaks open, so gradually you smell it before you hear it. The foulest rotting stench wafts at cornea-searing strength.
“Come in, stuffin’, the water’s fine.” A lone yellow eye blinks in the darkness of the unlit room. It reminds you of the lighthouse you built on the southern coast.
As you open the door, the overcast sky outside illuminates mom’s lively kitchen mat in the entryway. As the quadrangle of light grows, you see yards and yards of bandages, pristine white, as if they had come from sterile packaging and been tossed like streamers.
You don’t see Lucky.
K.K. Dirge whispers from the cute radio, lying capsized on the patchwork-tile flooring.
“Stitches, can you tell me what happened?”
They right a toppled baby chair and motion for you to take the wooden simple bed. Your eyes adjust to the dim light.
You wait for an explanation. None comes. “Well?” You never imagined raising your voice at a villager. Then again, you never imagined losing Lucky.
“The bugs whispered to me that I had to do it, so I did.” Anguish pulls at their face but Stitches smiles through it.
“The bugs.” You put exasperated fingers to your forehead.
“In the floor. In the floor.” Stitches says expectantly, almost dancing. “In the floor, stuffin’!” They get up and claw desperately at the tiles. Their digitless hands bounce softly off.
You rummage around in the pocket dimension of your inventory and toss out a shovel and an axe. You offer them to Stitches.
“They won’t let me. It’s up to you, stuffin’.”
“Tom Nook will have my hide for this.” The sound of bells rubbing against each other plays in your head, but you persist in breaking through the boards.
You didn’t watch Tom Nook construct the houses you then filled with villagers. One day there was a pile of materials; the next, there was a house. You had no way of knowing there was a good foot of space in the foundation.
Every available inch crawls with bugs. Segmented bodies slither over each other, too alive. Several species here you’ve caught and listened to Blathers wax and wane poetic over, disgusted; others you have never seen.
They pour from the gash in the wood like blood from a wound. As you listen to the click-clack of chitin against itself, the rhythm falls away. The whispers are real and they are many.
"This is a recipe for a bonfire. One campfire. Ten wood. Bonfire. Bonfire.” One voice among thousands. Every recipe they’ve ever given you is chanted in monotone Animalese.
You never thought your villagers were being literal. Now you know better.
Stitches grabs your attention with a pat on the back. With a sweeping gesture they direct your attention to the room.
The bugs have danced with the bandages. What remains of Lucky now spells out NOOK.
“Before I do anything else, I want to be very clear about one thing. What happened to Lucky?”
Stitches paces around the room, gathering the bandages into a pile and shaking off the critters. Breathing in heavily, they blink at you, the thread x’es of their eyes squeezing impossibly as they always have. Pill bugs stream from where tear ducts aren’t, a tear in their fabric skin.
“I’m so sorry, stuffin’. The bugs. and...” They dab at their face. A single pill bug crawls on their hand. “I’m next.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s be friends forever.” Stitches gives you Stitches's photo. “Remember me. Promise, stuffin’?”
Your jaw clamped tight, you can only tremble as bug after bug leaves Stitches’s body until it is a pocket of orange and purple cloth on the floor. Last to emerge are the butterflies. They wander aimlessly, but find the light in the end.
In the photo in your hands, Stitches smiles.
Your tears are punctuation on the glass.
A stitch in time saves nine.