ONEAnyone who has hiked through time knows Pocket.
It’s the town travelers first reach after they stumble away from their hometime. It’s the place a traveler must — with only one known exception — pass through on their way to any other when.
Once in Pocket, you simply cannot miss the temporal cobblers, where they repair the tattered soles of time boots, or the Inn of All Ways, where you can get a hot meal, a cold shower — and a reality check to expand realities. There’s the wordhouse, to help with the polyglot needs of a traveler, and at the edge of town, a small shop containing a storm of fabrics and racks of precisely crafted garments from every era.
A shop called Costumes for Time Travelers.
It can be hard to put a pin in the moment a story begins. Calisto, who works at the costume shop, has a talent for pins and where to put them — and if you asked them, they would say this story began when their grandmother took out her time boots.
“What are you doing with those?” Calisto had never seen the boots out of their blue velvet shoebox, perched on the windowsill like an old pet taking a nap.
“Keep working on that ruff.” Grandmother polished with industrious circles. The leather inched from dun brown to wildflower honey. “This next traveler means to leave for the Elizabethan era as soon as possible.”
Calisto’s worktable held a pile of unfinished ruffs, hose, and undergarments. Elizabethans needed a whole netherworld of undergarments. It took many painstaking stitches in a monstrous pair of trunk hose — puffy short pants with silk panels to be lengthened or shortened with a dramatic flourish — before they realized:
Their grandmother had not answered their question.
She was not usually slippery.
Calisto tried a direct approach. “Are you planning to put those boots on your feet?”
Mena — their grandmother’s gifted name, short for Philomena — tucked away her polishing cloth, only to take out a tin of wax and start buffing. The boots glowed in the strong lamplight. Calisto had trimmed the wicks well, one of many thankless jobs around the shop. Some jobs they loved, others were tolerated, and a few already seemed too tedious to repeat for the rest of their life. But Mena came from a time without lightbulbs and couldn’t ignore their chittering buzz or unnatural glare. And so, the lamps must be lit.
Though Pocket brought together influences from all over the timelands, Mena ran Costumes for Time Travelers like a tailor’s shop in the Quattrocento. The only variations were those that allowed her to properly construct later garments, such as the gleaming sewing machines in the back. Calisto followed Mena’s lead, because the costume shop was their favorite place in Pocket, and Pocket was their whole world. Something about seeing those time boots out of their box made that world wobble on its axis.
“I might lace these up again,” Mena admitted.
“When, exactly, would you be going?” Calisto asked. Mena didn’t talk about traveling, and she didn’t yearn for retirement. The only time Calisto brought it up, Mena spat over both shoulders and warded herself against the evil eye.
Now she shrugged and simply said, “I might go home.”
“You live behind the shop,” Calisto pointed out. “You barely need to put on slippers to get here. You don’t need time boots to get home.”
Mena shook her salt-white curls. “Maybe I’m going farther.”
She was a masterful tailor, but the list of things she didn’t do unscrolled endlessly: leaving the shop before the lamps burned down, talking about a decision instead of doing whatever she deemed necessary, using the word maybe.
“Is this about your fabrics?” Calisto asked. Mena often grumbled that the swatches, yards, and bolts brought in by travelers, often by her own commission, weren’t up to standards. She steamed wrinkles out of raw silk while threatening to hike into the wilds of time herself in order to hunt down quality.
“If you need something from out there” — Calisto gestured at all the time the valley was separated from —“I’ll go to the Inn of All Ways and hire a traveler to bring it to our door.”
“This is not a matter of fabric, I’m afraid to say.”
Mena sighed. The polishing and waxing was now complete. She flipped the boots and checked the soles, which glimmered with the dark-oil rainbow sheen of all time boots. To anyone else, these would show no wear. Mena traced the smooth heel where she’d always rocked back before stepping into the mists of time. She found a hairline crack where she’d tripped while carrying eight heavy rolls of Yun brocade, its hand-shuttled silver and gold threads woven into silk, colors as soft as sunrise.
A glorious trip to China long, long before her own birth.
When Mena first acquired time boots, she’d hiked regularly. How else was she supposed to get what she needed for a tailoring business encompassing all of human history? Working cleverly with what she could carry, she’d hand-sewn and sold her wares at a stall in the all-weather market. Later, she began to dream of a sturdy and dependable shop where travelers would come to fill their needs. There had never been a costume shop like it, and Mena named three rules to guide her:
Everything correct to the era, down to the finest detail.
Everything beautiful.
Everything bespoke.
Once she had the loyalty of a fleet of travelers, she didn’t need to strap on her own time boots. She could stay in her beloved shop and touch the marvelous fabrics of the timelands. She stopped traveling altogether right around the arrival of her first grandchild. Which had been a bit of a surprise, given that she’d never had any children to begin with.
Now that grandchild was staring her down with sharp grey eyes.
“It’s time that I go back to when I came from,” Mena admitted.
Calisto turned their stare mutely, mutinously, to a pair of Elizabethan slippers.
“You saw me tear out the seams on that churidar I was working on the other day.”
“I . . . might have heard a stitch or two popping.”
“I was distracted by thoughts of my hometime,” Mena said. Calisto might not have believed their grandmother, except that when she blinked, her eyes unfocused, thoughts turning to elsewhen.
They set their work aside. “What kind of thoughts?”
Grandmother never talked about her hometime. Even if Calisto didn’t like where this conversation had started, they were curious to see how far it would carry them into Mena’s unknown past. “Everyone talks about the Rinascimento as this wonderful time for the mind. Art, science. Everything changing, everything new, but it was not so wonderful for the nose. In my little town of Chieti, I could not escape it: most things smelled vile. Pigs, eels, people using the street as a personal toilet . . .”
“That’s how you ruined a churidar?” Calisto asked. “Thinking of your odorous hometime?”
“I did not ruin anything, and quiet. There is more. The air on the mountains was different, better than in town, brisker than Pocket. In autumn, it bore the bristle of spice. We would go out on the mountain at dawn to search for saffron in the heart of pale purple crocuses. Each flower holds delicate threads, red and gold. We picked enough tiny threads to fill great baskets. We were meant to sell this entire harvest to noble families and traveling merchants, but I always kept a pocketful to scatter into our broth. That smell means home.”
“We can get saffron here,” Calisto reminded her. “Nori uses it in her rice.”
“I know this,” Mena said, waving off Calisto’s words with the boots.
“Do you want me to get you some?”
“It’s not the same thing.” The words were sharp enough, but Mena’s gaze stayed glassy. “Maybe I will go back and pick crocuses again.”
Calisto had never seen Mena act nostalgic. It sent them spinning toward their own strongest memories, wondering what could make them feel the same way, when they were as old as their grandmother.
A memory caught — the first time they’d run through the racks at the costume shop. They had been little, exploring with their siblings, curious about every corner of Pocket. Mena must have been busy, not able to keep an eye on the back. When they all slipped away to play a hiding game, Calisto vanished best and got lost in the forest of fabrics. They could still remember the grassy sweetness of a linen tunic, the musk of a woolen sweater, the dense spice of denim. But pigs? Eels? Broth that made you want to leave your calling, grandchild, and cozy town to go traipsing to the fifteenth century? If that was what nostalgia was like, people in the timelands could keep it.
“I thought you were a tailor, not a saffron hunter.”
Mena shrugged. “Threads are threads.”
“So that’s where you learned to do . . . this?” Calisto motioned to the shop.
Mena smiled, wrinkles buckling. “I learned most of it by stealing the knowledge from my seven brothers,” she said, as if those were people Calisto had ever heard about. “They became tailors when the art was new. I wanted to join them, but they had cruel rules about women in those days. In many, many days. So I lurked, and I taught myself. I might have stayed in the shadows of those mountains and my brothers forever, but a kind stranger told me that I was good enough to set up my own shop. I started over the mountains with a pack of fabrics, buttons, patterns . . . and I ended up here.”
The shop’s bell rang as the door opened.
Calisto snatched their work up, pretending to be interested in the trunk hose. The traveler who walked in was the worst kind of impatient. He’d come in for measurements and spent the whole session twitching and sighing as Calisto stretched the tape over different planes of his body. Already, he was doing it again. Calisto briefly considered making his Elizabethan undergarments a size too tight — but Mena would notice.
Assuming Mena was still here.
“Calisto, why don’t you head home?” Mena asked. “It’s been a long night.”
That was code for there’s fancy stitching I want to do all by myself. Calisto had been helping in the shop long enough to know that there were some things Mena would never trust anyone else with, not when she had so much knowledge stored in her own hands.
What if she did leave? What if picking a crocus was more important than everything she’d built in Pocket? Would Calisto see Mena again? Traveling on a whim was dangerous. Calisto’s mind staggered under the weight of morbid options.
“Is everything finished?” the traveler asked, tapping a toe on the floorboards. “I have something urgent in 1593.”
“1593 will be there when we’re done,” Calisto muttered. Travelers could hike into Pocket from anywhen and hike out to nearly anywhen. But life in Pocket’s valley moved at its own pace, and never at the frantic behest of travelers who acted like their trip through time was the most important one.
That was the catch about time traveling. People could start to think time belonged to them. That it made sense and would follow order. Those were the travelers who hiked into the Neolithic and never came back.
“Your pieces are nearly ready.” Mena beckoned him toward the fitting room. “Whatever has worth takes time.”
“Good night, Grandmother,” Calisto called out.
“Good night, Calisto,” she answered in a muffled tone, her mouth filled with pins.
The traveler switched from huffing to hmmming when Mena showed him the doublet. Even half-finished, her work was legendary.
Calisto couldn’t imagine why their grandmother wanted to go back to a place where her talents had been untended, her brilliance held back. It made no sense. Surely Mena would see that in the morning.
Still — to be safe — Calisto stole the boots off the counter and left out the back.
Copyright © 2025 by A. R. Capetta. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
