Annotation:

The Distaff of Saint Petka is a short horror story rooted in Bulgarian folk belief: the feast of Saint Petka, the taboos around spinning, old funeral rites, and the warning never to answer when someone calls your name at night. Behind the Christian saint stands an older figure, Mokosh, the Slavic goddess who spins human fate.
Three generations of women in one family share the same name, Neda. The eldest spins the fog into thread and sews shut the mouths of the dead. But last autumn she broke the order to save a child, and now the debt has come due.
A story about love that steals from fate, and the price of one rescued life.

The Distaff of Saint Petka

“Still she hasn’t come, Mother?”

Old Neda did not turn around. She stood on the threshold in her long shift, leaning against the doorframe while the wind hurled the hem about her ankles. Her eyes were fixed upon the little spinning stool she had left on the porch. The distaff thrust upright from it, bare and lonesome as a branch stripped by the weather.

Every autumn, on the eve of Saint Petka’s Day, the old woman left the empty distaff on the porch, and come morning she brought it inside heavy with a grey, mist-wrought fog-like material, cool and damp to the touch. Then the fog would settle upon the river and not lift again until spring. From that misty fleece Old Neda spun the thread for the dead.

This morning, though, the river waters stretched naked before the human eye as far as sight could reach. Of fog upon the horizon-not a drop, not a breath of chill.

“She’s late,” Old Neda said, turning to her daughter, her silver braid swinging down her back. She made to close the door. “But she’ll come.”

Yet the fog did not come.

A week later, the mornings were still just as clear and cold. The old woman wound the last span of mist-thread left upon the spindle around her forefinger, unwound it, then wound it again, all the while staring beyond the crowns of the trees.

Every woman in their bloodline was a Neda. Every girl born beneath that roof was named for her grandmother, and the grandmother bore the name of her own grandmother, and so it went backwards as far as memory reached. At home, so they might know which was which, they called them by age: Old Neda, Young Neda, and Little Neda.

“Granny, d’you reckon Saint Petka’s forgotten us?” Little Neda scrambled onto the divan, her knees smeared with mud. Her grandmother gave her a shove.

“Saint Petka forgets nothing, girl! Get those muddy feet down!”

The child giggled but did no such thing. Old Neda clenched her teeth and caught her by the chin a shade harder than she ought to have, nearly pinching her.

“Hear me, Little Neda. If someone calls you by name come evening, you don’t answer. D’you hear?”

“What if it’s Mama?” The child’s eyes were wide and bewildered. Her grandmother’s fingers held fast, and she was growing impatient to be let go.

“If it’s your mother, she’ll come to you and say whatever she has to say. Whoever calls after you from afar is not your mother. Mind that well.”

Young Neda was washing clothes beneath the porch and heard them from where she bent over the washtub. Her own mother had told her the same thing when, at eight years old, she had first made her hold the lamp over a dead man’s washed body.

Made her watch how the mouths of the dead were sewn shut, lest they call to the living.

***

Grandfather Tanas died on a Friday. He keeled over on the bench outside his gate with an unlit cigarette still between his fingers. The burial was to be Sunday at noon.

That evening, once they had laid him out proper, Old Neda took the bone needle and the last span of mist-thread; Young Neda took the kerosene lamp, and together they went to the dead man’s house. Grandmother Elena met them at the door.

“Mind you sew him up well, Granny Neda,” the widow said with a sniff. “That silver tongue of mine gave me no peace for forty years with all his tavern tales. Now perhaps I’ll finally get some sleep!”

And she led them to the dead man upon the divan. Tanas was dressed in his Sunday clothes, his hair combed, a cloth tied beneath his chin and knotted over the crown of his head. Gena left them there to do their work.

Old Neda untied the cloth. Young Neda raised the lamp above his face. The old woman drew out the needle already threaded with mist-thread, took the cold lips between two fingers, pressed them together, and pierced them with the sharp point.

Stitch after stitch, the thread entered the dead flesh, and the lips closed behind it in one tight seam.

Halfway across the mouth, the thread ran out.

A hole gaped on the left side.

Old Neda had hoped the span would be enough to sew the lips shut entirely, but it had fallen short. There was no thread left for the little girdle either - the cord she must bind around the dead man’s waist, its loose end to be buried beneath the grave lamp.

Young Neda brought the kerosene lamp close to Tanas’s nose.

The flame leaned sideways, darted towards the unsewn corner of his mouth, and trembled there as though the dead man were still drawing breath through it.

The lamp quivered in her hand.

“There’ll be enough thread,” Old Neda said suddenly.

“How in God’s name will there be enough? Where will you get it, Mother?” Young Neda searched her mother’s face in confusion.

The old woman did not answer. She covered the dead man’s face with a cloth and went out. On the porch she turned to Elena.

“Don’t you take that cloth off Tanas’s face. And see that the candle doesn’t go out tonight. No one’s name is to be spoken in that room. No one’s, d’you understand? I’ll come again. Don’t bury him before I do.”

Elena nodded.

***

On Saturday, Young Neda was bathing Little Neda in the washtub in the yard beneath the rays of the last autumn sun. The child played in the warmed water and splashed her mother.

Young Neda caught her left foot to scrub it with the towel, and her thumb found something upon the girl’s heel.

She lifted the little heel towards the sunlight. The child slipped in the tub and caught the rim with a playful squeal.

Three rough grey stitches showed along the line where the foot met the earth.

Neda narrowed her eyes and stroked them with one finger.

The stitches were as cold as Tanas’s lips had been the day before. Her chest drew tight.

Little Neda kicked at the air.

“You’re tickling me, Mama!”

“Time you were out of this water, my little one.” Young Neda snatched up the girl, lifted her from the tub, and wrapped her in the linen waiting beside them. She rubbed her dry in haste, her heart clenched hard with fear, and looked about her.

The sun was sinking westward, and the well cast its shadow all the way to the gate.

Neda brought her grey gaze back to the child wrapped in white linen.

The girl’s shadow sat meek and short at her feet, as though it were noon.

Young Neda gathered her into her arms, carried her towards the house, and left her to dress. Then she went to her mother by the hearth. Old Neda was just building up the fire to boil the hen whose feet stuck out of the cauldron.

“What did you sew into her heel?” Young Neda’s voice thinned with alarm.

“Her shadow,” Old Neda said without looking up from the trivet. “You remember what happened last autumn, don’t you?”

Young Neda remembered. For three days and three nights Little Neda had burned with fever in her arms. When the fever broke, her mother had walked all the way to the monastery to light a candle to Saint Petka in gratitude for the healing.

“It happens every Saint Petka’s Day. I heard her spinning beneath the window and counting who she’d take before spring,” Old Neda went on. “She spoke our little Neda’s name as well. When that happened, I thought on what was to be done, and I took the thread for the dead. Sewed Little Neda’s shadow to her heel with it, so she couldn’t follow after Saint Petka.”

“And there was I going off to light candles…” Young Neda covered her mouth with one hand.

“You do what you reckon must be done.” Granny Neda laid aside the poker. “Saint Petka… she has another name. Your grandmother Neda called her Mokosh. She spins the life of every soul. She is the one who says whose name must go. That’s why we are all Nedas. When she says ‘Neda,’ the eldest is the one to go. That is the order of things. But last autumn that one said ‘Little Neda,’ not ‘Neda.’”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Young Neda sagged against the wall. Her knees had gone weak.

“And what would you have done?” Old Neda frowned. “Let the little one burn to death? I think not. This autumn Petka kept one name upon her lips all through the night, over and over till the cocks began to crow: Little Neda, Little Neda…”

Neda glanced towards the door, behind which the child was clattering about as she dressed.

“You know the thread is given us to stitch shut the mouths of the dead, and I used it to hold a living soul here. Till I give back what I took, no fleece will be given us.”

Young Neda stared at her mother’s hands.

She did not know whether to kiss them or turn her back upon her.

“But Neda is my child, Mother!”

“Yours she may be. But her name belongs to us.”

“And what are we to do about Tanas?”

Old Neda rose. Her troubled eyes met her daughter’s, grey as a dove’s.

“I know what must be done. When I stitched my mother’s mouth, I left a span more thread than was needed. She was my mother, after all…”

“But when you pull it out…” Young Neda did not finish.

Her mother nodded.

“She’ll speak.”

***

Old Neda and Young Neda set off for the graveyard upon the hill after midnight. The moon gave them enough light that they did not stumble in the dark.

Everything could be heard - far away and close at hand - without fog to swallow the words. A door slamming down in the hamlet, a dog giving a bark, and Young Neda would hold her breath, so loud did every sound seem.

Every noise used to sink into the fog.

So did every name called aloud.

But now there was no fog.

Great-grandmother Neda’s grave had sunk beneath the hawthorn at the edge of the cemetery. Old Neda knelt, moved aside the rusted grave lamp, and dug her fingers into the soil.

A span down, her nails caught on something.

The girdle-cord.

Old Neda wound the thread around one finger and pulled. Little by little it began to come free of the earth, grey and caked with mud, and the old woman wound it onto the spindle.

Then the thread suddenly drew taut and would come no farther.

Neda braced one knee against the grave earth and pulled harder.

Something crackled beneath her knee - the sound stitches make when a seam is ripped open.

The thread gave.

Neda toppled onto one hip.

The grave sank by a handspan.

From the hollow came a rush of air, foul and cold, darting upward to lick at Young Neda’s ankles.

She stepped back in haste.

Old Neda stood and wound the thread around the spindle. The fingers gripping it were trembling.

“My mother will keep quiet tonight,” she said softly. “Tomorrow she’ll begin to call. Whatever you hear, Neda, don’t answer it. You know whose name she’ll call first.”

Young Neda nodded.

In the morning they stitched Tanas’s mouth shut the rest of the way, and at the burial they buried the end of his girdle-cord beneath his grave lamp.

***

On the second night, the call was not long in coming. It drifted down from the graveyard hill, high and drawn out.

“Lit-tle Ne-daaa…”

Young Neda rose onto one elbow. She knew the voice, though she had not heard it since she was six. It was the very voice Grandmother Neda had used to call her home when she stood waiting on the threshold with a slice of bread spread with lard and dusted with red pepper for her dinner.

“Little Nedaaa… my sweet great-grandchild, come here, I’ve something to tell you…”

The words came sailing through the night chill as far as the pear tree. In the neighbouring yard, a dog began to howl.

Little Neda woke and sat up in bed. Her eyes glimmered in the darkness. She smiled.

“Mama… Great-granny is calling me!”

Young Neda sat upright with her, seized her into her arms, and held her tight. Behind them Old Neda rose from her bedding.

“Shh. That is not your great-grandmother! She’s not calling you, my little one.”

“She is! She told me so! It’s me she wants!”

The child drew breath to answer the call. Young Neda clapped a hand over her mouth.

The little girl twisted like a fish cast upon dry land in her mother’s arms, and when she saw she would not be released, she bit into her mother’s palm.

Her teeth sank into the hand covering her lips. Young Neda groaned with pain but would not let the child wrench herself free.

Blood ran down the little girl’s chin, down her mother’s wrist, and dripped upon the child’s shift.

The voice beneath the window ceased its singing call. It changed. Became dry and low. Lashed against the glass.

“Neda, girl! Daughter! She is mine, Neda! Give her to me!”

The old woman rose from her bedding. She took the bare distaff from the corner and walked past mother and child. At the door she turned. Moonlight through the window fell across a face gone white as bone.

“I am the one in debt, my dear daughter. Not Little Neda.”

“Don’t, Mother!” Young Neda sobbed.

But her mother reached out and opened the door.

Cold flooded the little room.

The old woman planted the distaff in the spinning stool beside the porch door, just as she had done on the eve of Saint Petka’s Day, and stepped barefoot into the fine frost.

“Here I am, Mother!” she called towards the pear tree. “I am Neda, the eldest! Take me instead of my granddaughter!”

“Ne-e-e-daaa…”

The voice outside rose in a long wail in answer, and Old Neda felt needles prick all down her back. She clenched her fists.

The dog howling outside fell silent.

Young Neda felt her daughter swallow beneath the palm still clamped over her mouth.

The old woman walked to the gate, stepped out onto the road, and took the path towards the hill without once looking back. Her white shift dimmed farther and farther into the darkness until at last it vanished into the gloom.

The little girl had loosened her jaw and was breathing in broken gasps into the hollow of her mother’s hand, but Young Neda still dared not let her go.

She lifted her eyes towards the open door. And in that very moment a thick grey veil of fog rose above the river, laid itself across the path, and swallowed it whole.

***

Come morning, not even the well in the yard could be seen from the window. Everything lay drowned beneath fleeces of fog.

Young Neda opened the door. The distaff planted in the spinning stool sagged beneath the weight of a grey, cold fleece.

They found Old Neda stretched upon her back across the sunken earth of her mother’s grave, her mouth open.

“Why is Granny lying here?” Little Neda asked, clutching at her mother’s skirt.

Young Neda did not answer.

At home she sat upon the porch, drew the first strand from the fog-fleece between her fingers, and set the spindle turning.

At that very moment she pricked up her ears. Somewhere in the fog, humming alongside her own, another spindle was turning. A woman’s voice let the words fall one by one like a song. Name after name floated through the fog and faded.

Young Neda listened closely, twisting the thread between her fingers, until the voice fell suddenly silent. The name Neda had not been among those spoken.

That evening Young Neda stitched her mother’s mouth shut with the first thread she had ever spun herself, tiny stitch beside tiny stitch. There was enough left for the girdle-cord. She tied it around her mother’s waist and pulled the knot tight.

The seam in her daughter’s little heel never faded. It remained as it was - grey and rough. In the evenings, her mother would tuck the felt mat beneath the child’s feet so she would not have to look at it.

Now she was the eldest Neda in the house.

And all the fog was hers.

©Elissa Hess, 2026

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