---

Stitch

By Kathleen Schaefer

Dalia doesn’t like how the stale hospital air pricks at her cheeks, and Aden doesn’t understand why no one else notices. He snatches his newborn daughter back from his husband.

“There you are,” he says, adjusting Dalia’s blanket to shield her face. “You need to keep her comfortable.” He holds Dalia to his chest and finds she likes the beat of his heart.

“She wasn’t even fussing,” says Garret, and only then does Aden realize that maybe new fathers don’t always know that their daughter’s left foot itches (he massages it beneath the swaddling blanket) or that a buildup of gas from her last feeding pushes against her stomach.

There’s something in Aden’s head. His daughter’s mind is in his head. Or rather, there’s a knot through which he slips in and out of his daughter’s thoughts.

“A mind stitch,” the nurse diagnoses by shining a flashlight in Aden’s eyes. His daughter’s pupils contract in response — a two-way bond, Dalia watching the world through his eyes.

The nurse pulls her away from him. “Mind melds with children. That’s wrong. Illegal and wrong.” She holds her hand over the infant’s head like a shield. An ineffective one, as Aden still feels the blanket slip from around Dalia’s face, exposing her once more to the stinging air.

“Wrong?” The nurse blocks him from comforting his child, and Aden’s throat constricts in anger — an anger he knows how to contain, but his daughter does not. Dalia screams, bellowing fury on his behalf.

He is supposed to protect his child from his pain and fears, not reflect them back to her. Aden leans on the wall, closing his eyes against his tiny daughter’s all-encompassing rage. Garret squeezes his hand.

---

Dr. Vega introduces herself as the resident expert on stitches and mind melds. She’s soon digressing about melded dual-perspective memories and stitch-induced facial expression mimicry, neither of which mean anything to Aden. But she dismisses the nurse and places Dalia back into his arms. Anger spent, Dalia softens, warm and sleepy against Aden’s chest.

“Is it illegal or not?” Garret asks.

“’Illegal’ is not the word I’d choose,” says Dr. Vega. She wears an unassuming white jacket but pairs it with a neon-pink hair tie. Aden resists an urge to reach for the bright splash of color, an instinct he thinks comes from Dalia, who openly stares at the newcomer. “Stitches are a natural type of bonding requiring an intense emotional connection. We see them often in new parents.”

“What word would you choose?” Garrett asks.

“Undesirable, I think,” Dr. Vega says. Aden probes the contours of the stitch, trying to find the barriers between his feelings and his daughter’s. “The legal argument against them concerns the child’s privacy and their inability to agree to what could be construed as an invasion of their innermost thoughts. But from the medical standpoint, it’s not good developmentally to latch an infant’s brain so closely to an adult’s.”

Garret offers a finger to Dalia, who wraps her hand around it. “She’s not going to develop right?”

“No, no,” said Dr. Vega. “Sure, there’ve been some cases where the child struggles to communicate except through the stitch. But that won’t happen. We’d force a split long before it gets to that point.”

“So it can split,” said Garret. “How do we do that?”

“What are you going to do to her?” Aden asks. He imagines shared lobotomies on his and his daughter’s tiny head, then remembering that Dalia can see his thoughts, tries to picture kittens and lambs and anything other than her head getting sawed open.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Dr. Vega assures him. “Most splits happen naturally at the first feeling of conflict — you’re arguing over who should do the dishes, and the brain, trying to register both sides of the disagreement, splits the stitch as a protective instinct.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Aden asks. Dalia’s mind fuzzes with a nonverbal comfort in his arms. Having felt his daughter’s thoughts, he can’t imagine his brain, even unconsciously, choosing never to experience that again.

“If it doesn’t split on its own, we’ll manufacture a moment of discord, maybe with a couple sessions if it doesn’t stick,” she says. “But it probably won’t come to that. Put yourself on first diaper duty. Getting both sides of that particular exchange will break you.”

---

It doesn’t break him.

“We should call Dr. Vega,” Garret says. “Get the split. Get it over with.”

But Dalia reaches for his mind the moment she wakes from her nap. She fusses until she hears Aden’s thoughts, calming her into a lull. He doesn’t know how to be a father without the stitch: he’s learned just one way to tell his daughter he’ll keep her safe, and he can’t tear that from her.

So instead of calling, he synchronizes his sleeping with the baby lest he keep her up worrying about climate change, rent hikes, and other non-infant-friendly concerns. He tries but sometimes fails to mute his criticisms during Garret’s shifts with Dalia. He reminds himself to eat a handful of cashews instead of snapping that the baby is obviously hungry and why aren’t you feeding her?

Her first word is “daddy”. She doesn’t say it, exactly, but Aden hears it through the stitch.

“I don’t think telepathy counts as talking,” Garret says.

“It’s a form of communication,” Aden counters. “Though it’s been that from the beginning. She knows how to tell me she wants to be held or needs a bottle. It’s like passing me the image of a face or the feeling of being in my arms or the taste of milk —”

“Gross.”

“It’s the most amazing thing in the world.”

“Sure,” says Garret. “But remember what Dr. Vega warned us about. She needs to learn to talk to people besides you.”

Garret takes his daughter from Aden, and she cries at their separation. Her obvious preference for Aden upsets him, even if he doesn’t mention it much. Aden comforts his daughter through the stitch until she settles into Garret’s arms.

“She’ll be just fine,” says Aden. “Better than fine.”

---

Aden snatches a quarter out of Dalia’s hand before it reaches her mouth. He steels himself for the pulsing sadness and confusion that feeds through the stitch, but this time he gets anger. He did not think his daughter could hate him until it burns through her mind, and then his mind, an echoing of rage bouncing between their heads.

Then silence.

Not silence, she is still screaming, but Aden feels nothing. He reaches for the stitch knotted in the back of his brain, and it’s gone.

He steps back from the crying child, alien, like staring at a dismembered arm, a piece of him that is no longer him. Then he pulls her to his chest and cradles her until her screams give out. When she nestles into his elbow, the stitch reknits and they both reach for the knot, inhaling the comfort of each other’s presence.

“Each day you keep this up, you just make it harder,” Garret says. “Force the split now, before anyone else has to get involved. Before we get in trouble.”

“I can’t. I can’t push her away like that. It’d destroy me.” It might destroy her, too, but he won’t verbalize that fear, lest it becomes reality.

“You aren’t losing her. She’ll be right here.”

Aden wanders into Dalia’s vibrant dreamscape, reassuring himself that she is still there.

At the pediatrician’s office, the doctor looks over their file and asks about the stitch. At the question, Dalia switches from giggles to anxious fussing, and the doctor frowns.

“It split the second day,” Garret lies while Aden tries to control his thoughts.

---

Dr. Vega calls, asking for a meeting with Aden and Dalia to check on her progress.

“I can’t go. You take her. Please? You have to.”

Garret’s tired compassion has run out. “She requested you.”

Aden tries to split with Dalia the morning before their appointment. They’ve done it a dozen or more times now — tension from public temper tantrums, once an almost-conscious silent treatment on Dalia’s end when she didn’t want to wear shoes, even a purposeful break Aden made when he needed a moment with his husband. But each time he scoops his child back into his arms and she curls around him, the stitch returns. He confiscates her favorite train set and dresses her in scratchy clothes, but she’s still in his head when he unbuckles the car seat and carries her into the office.

“You must excuse me one test,” Dr. Vega says, after the dispense of greetings and handshakes and cooing over Dalia. She retrieves a small needle and pricks the back of Aden’s hand. Aden flinches. Dalia bawls.

“Ah,” Dr. Vega says. “That’s what I thought.”

Aden wants to reach for his daughter, both physically and through his stitch, but he restrains himself, waiting on the doctor’s judgment.

“There, there now, sweet,” the doctor says, smoothing out Dalia’s hair. “No more.”

“I can’t do it,” says Aden. “We’re part of each other. Taking that away would hurt her more than a stitch ever could.”

Dr. Vega frowns. “I had a twelve-year-old patient who’d never gone to school and hadn’t spoken a single word because he was so reliant on his stitched parent. Another who still can’t bond with anyone except through a stitch, including his own father. It’s what happens when babies get fed the thoughts of an adult instead of forming their own minds and memories. I know exactly how much harm a stitch can do.”

“But Dalia’s not like that.”

“Not yet,” says Dr. Vega. “Luckily.” And without letting Aden argue any further, she says, “I’ll get you two scheduled in.”

---

Dr. Vega comes to their house to perform the split. “It’s more comfortable in your own environment, this late in the process,” she says. She comments no further on the offence of keeping an infant tethered to an adult mind.

Even after hearing the process explained three times, Aden half expects Dr. Vega’s briefcase to reveal an array of sharp tools and invasive metallic instruments. Instead, it’s filled with stuffed animals, plastic noisemakers, and board books with smiling infant faces.

Aden picks out a green plushie bird and hands it to his daughter, relishing the last moments of knowing       exactly what she wants. Then, at Dr. Vega’s command, he takes it out of her arms.

“Now walk to the other side of the room. Don’t look at her. That’s it. You’re doing great.”

He submerses himself in her feelings of anger. It’s ok, he’s done this before, felt her fury when he’s plucked her away from the street or held her back from the kitchen knives. That was parenting. But this is betrayal. And betrayal is going to be the last feeling he gets through the stitch.

He reaches the opposite end of the room and the stitch splits.

“Now come back to her,” Dr. Vega says. She can read the split on Aden’s face without him relaying that information. “Go ahead, pick her up.”

The stitch reforms before they even touch. He leans into their shared comfort, the feeling of holding and being held, savoring each second even though every stitch means he’ll have to force a split again.

“Ok, put her down. Try again.”

By the fourth iteration, she’s screaming inside his head for him to stop, anticipating the split before it comes. They’re both crying as he rips them into two separate people and she reaches out, knitting them whole again. And again.

The fifth time, she speaks. “Daddy! Daddy!” Except it’s not in his head. Actual words.

“Her first word,” Aden says. He should be excited. But of course he’s not. He’s forced her into this. She shouldn’t need to call for him.

“This is good,” Dr. Vega says while Dalia presses against Aden’s chest. “Kids like her, they’re perfectly capable of talking, but they’ve learned to use the stitch as a crutch. We’re just giving her a little nudge out of the nest. In few weeks, you’re going to have a very chatty little girl.”

They start again.

Dalia screams, and Aden can feel the air burning through her tiny lungs. “I can’t do this. I won’t do this,” he says.

Dr. Vega waves for Garret, who waits outside to give them space. He comes in and takes Dalia as Aden collapses into the couch. He reaches through the stitch to calm Dalia — a parental instinct — but she recoils at his thoughts. Aden pulls away, leaving just enough awareness to feel Garret rubbing her back, soothing the pain Aden caused.

“I’m hurting her.”

“It’s temporary. She’s young — you’ll bond with her again without the stitch.”

“It won’t be anything near what we have now.” If she ever forgives his betrayal, because he wasn’t going to forgive himself.

“So you think what Garret and Dalia share is somehow less than what you have with her?”

“No,” says Aden, because that is the only acceptable answer, even if Garret will never understand the exquisite tenderness of two minds coexisting as one.

“Then let’s get back to work.”

When Aden doesn’t stand up, Dr. Vega says, “I am required to report uncooperative parents who are still stitched to their children. It’s an ugly process. No one wants that.”

Aden goes outside and retrieves his daughter from Garret. He has no more emotions left to bleed through to Dalia’s mind. He sets her on the floor, hands her the plushie, then breaks the stitch on his own. He walks away from his daughter without having to feel her betrayal or fear or pain. When she reaches for him again, he shoves the stitch away and it doesn’t come back.

“Call me if it forms again,” Dr. Vega says, handing him a business card. “The moment it does. We try to be understanding in this line of work, but I’ve seen kids taken from parents who hide a stitch.”

---

Aden logs twelve-hour days at the office, saying it’s best to distance himself from Dalia. Just for now. Garret tolerates the behavior for a little while, sometimes even relishing his promotion to the better father. Dalia’s now-verbal cries for Daddy address him more often than Aden.

But Garret explains, with diminishing patience, that he did not sign up for this job alone. That he is able to handle parenting without a stitch, and Aden can too. So Aden pulls his daughter onto his lap with her favorite sing-songy book about counting kittens. Dalia grasps for him and he pushes her out of his head. What Garret cannot understand is that Aden is not learning how to be a father without a stitch. He’s learning how to be a father who keeps a wall between himself and his daughter.

He manages the balance for a few weeks, until he takes Dalia to the downtown park. The sun is bright and inviting, and she wobbles through the weedy flowers, holding Aden’s hand for support. And he misses sharing that joy of exploration, the all-encompassing newness of his mundane world. So when she hugs herself around his leg and gasps at a birdsong, the stitch reforms. Maybe there was a moment when he could have stopped it, when he could have forced the practiced distance. But he didn’t, and now he smells the cut grass from the nose of his knee-high daughter while she cries Daddy! Daddy! in her head. They hold each other close.

He vows to keep their bond a secret this time, a promise that withstands exactly one day of Garret’s scrutiny.

“You’re stitched again.”

“Ok,” Aden says, winding into a speech he’s rewritten in his head dozens of times. “We were at the park and —”

“Split it.”

“I can’t.”

Garret closes the door to Dalia’s bedroom, where they’ve set her down for a nap. “You’re going to break it, and you’re going to break it now,” says Garret, “because you and I are about to fight and I don’t need our daughter overhearing.”

Aden forces a split. It’s unnatural how easily he can now hew their minds apart.

“I know it hurts,” says Garret. “More than I can possibly understand. Maybe Dr. Vega can recommend a good therapist for you. But this? Secretly holding a stitch when we know they’ll take Dalia when they catch you? I won’t risk it.”

“It’s better this time. We won’t get caught. I can force a split whenever I need to.”

“I caught you.”

“Sure, but you’re my husband.”

“And if I catch you again, I will take Dalia and leave.”

“I — what?”

Garret sinks into their couch. “I don’t want to, Aden. I want our family, more than anything. But god, I’m so afraid. This is the option you’re giving me.”

“No. I don’t buy your threats,” said Aden. “You’re going to pull Dalia out of a perfectly happy family because you’re jealous of my connection with her?”

“Because services will take her! Do you not listen to Dr. Vega? If I hide your stitch, I’m just as culpable as you, and we’ll both lose her.”

“Ok, but they wouldn’t —”

“They would. Promise now or we leave.”

Garret is crying now, and Aden is only a little better at holding back tears. “Ok,” he says. “I promise.”

When Dalia wakes, she reaches out to him, but Aden pulls away before their minds knit. Two individuals. And this time it sticks.

---

Dalia flourishes.

“It’s the age. Kids just start talking at some point,” says Garret. “That doesn’t mean you were holding her back. Don’t blame everything on the stitch.”

He’s become nicer these days, more understanding, more reassuring. He never mentions leaving again. That’s not their future.

Dalia’s wobbles transform into confident steps then giddy races through the park, daring her fathers to come catch her. Garret becomes the dad of extra treats and exciting adventures while Aden offers warm hugs and comforting words. He relearns how to hold her, heart open, and push away the knot tying their minds without pushing away her.

She has memories, though. Things Aden didn’t think babies could remember, but she was an infant tied to an adult’s mind, and maybe that does scramble kids’ brains. Sometimes, when he steps away from her, he thinks her body still braces in a subconscious anticipation of their splitting. Or maybe he just imagines it — it’s been years since he’s truly known what’s inside her head.

“I had a dream,” Dalia says over cornflakes with two splashes of milk and not a bit more. “I was playing outside, but I was also you, looking down at me. Isn’t that weird?

“Very weird, sweet pea.” He never speaks about the stitch. With enough silence, it never existed. He kisses the top of her head and walks her to the school bus.

---

Dr. Vega says she’s not sure if some people are predisposed to stitches or if getting the first one habituates your mind to create more. Either way, it’s not uncommon for people who’ve formed stitches before to create new ones. She says this intending it as a comfort when Aden calls her for the first time in years. Dalia has a new stitch.

The connection is with a child this time, a girl from school. The doctor deems it much more suitable and therefore permitted to progress naturally. The girls share chocolate milk and swap cookies and pretend the jungle gym is a pirate ship. And now they know all each other’s secrets.

Within a week, Dalia cries that today Mae wanted to play soccer with the other kids, and no it didn’t matter that she didn’t actually say that or that she did play pirates instead. Then Mae learns Dalia can’t sleep without her door open to keep away the monsters, which Aden assures her is prudent and not childish, no matter what Mae thinks.

“Stitches aren’t forever,” Aden says, pulling her into a hug. “You can break them, if you want. She’s got to be mad at you, just for a little bit, then you get in her head while she’s angry, and it splits.”

“How do you know?” Dalia asks, scrubbing her tears. “Do you get stitches too?”

Aden almost waves her off with a “Dads know everything,” stock response, but instead says, “I used to. Years ago.”

A few more weeks, and Mae tires of hearing Dalia’s thoughts. When Dalia accuses Mae of avoiding her, their stitch splits along with their friendship.

“I have this memory,” Dalia says, curled into Aden’s shoulder. “I’m just a baby, and you’re singing to me and everything is warm. Except, I don’t remember it as me. I remember it as you.”

This is what he is supposed to be afraid of. The muddling of memories, a child exposed to the mind of an adult. But his child has a memory of him loving her, and he’d rather she recalled a thousand of those moments and never that day in their living room where he kept shoving her away as she screamed for him to come back.

Aden pulls his daughter to his chest and hums a wordless lullaby. The beginning of a stitch itches in his mind and he pushes it away with years of reflex. But this time it pushes back, folding minds together with its own agency. Dalia stares up at him, eyes still puffy from the tears shed over her friend. And when the stitch nudges him again, he surrenders.

 

 

---

Host Commentary

First up, though, a big conversation, that we’ll be having through the end of the year—so let’s start at the start. PodCastle is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, which also publishes Escape Pod, PseudoPod, Cast of Wonders and CatsCast. Although we’re all separate editorially, all the business stuff is shared under that Escape Artists mothership, led by Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner, and with a whole bunch of people dedicated to EA roles rather than anything magazine specific—so contracts, accounts, admin… and if you were listening earlier this year, you’ll remember that Escape Artists finally—after many moons of pursuit—attained non-profit status in the US, becoming a 501(c)3 registered charity. There’s been a whole bunch of work furiously progressing behind the scenes in the time since, and here’s where we really start to talk about it with you, our audience: we are holding our first ever end-of-year fundraiser.

We have always been a donation-supported venture, for going on twenty whole years, which on the internet is about Three Ages of Man—the first episode of Escape Pod was accessible to the public before Facebook was. Being a registered charity, though, greatly increases the resources we have access to and the ways in which our community can support us. Escape Artists can accept gifts from employee and workplace giving programs, stock donations, gifts from Donor Advised Funds, foundations, and corporate philanthropy. If your tax-affairs live in the US, your donations may be counted as a charitable deduction. And, now that we’re a registered non-profit, we get discounted rates on payment processing and administrative fees from donation processing platforms, and discount rates on the admin platforms we use to steer this ship, so your gift will go even farther than it did before.

I don’t want to throw too much at you today when I’ll be talking about this from now until the end of the year, as will the other four casts, so I’ll cap this today by simply saying: we are only here because you enable us to be. We can’t do what we do without income to cover the outgoings, because that’s the world and the system we live in. We’ll talk more about ways you can donate and what that means in the coming weeks, but if you’re already convinced—either by what I’ve just said or by the 800-plus episodes before today, or the 2000-plus episodes from our sisters—you can sign up to donate regularly at

Oh, a also worth mentioning—we’re open to short story submissions this month, through till midnight UK time on the 30th November! This is a general submissions window, all are welcome, general rules apply—if you want to know the details, and you should always check them before submitting anywhere, go to

and click Submissions then Guidelines.

And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and although you may not want to hear it, it truly is for the best for everyone…

---

…aaaaand welcome back. That was STITCH by KATHLEEN SCHAEFER, and if you enjoyed that, well, here’s a thing: as best I can make out, this is arguably her first published story—and the argument is only because she also has a story in Apex’s new anthology, ROBOTIC AMBITIONS, which is also out today, so maybe pick a copy of that up to read her story “Insatiable Life”, alongside stories by other PodCastle authors Leah Ning, Lavie Tidhar, Renan Bernardo, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Somtu Ihezue, and many other excellent names. What a day to have—congratulations, Kathleen!

That one hit me like a punch to the solar plexus, frankly. I spend a lot of time thinking about parenting—particularly with two neurodivergent kids, where a lot of the standard parenting advice really does not work—and it often involves a lot of difficult choices and, distressingly, having to be the adult in the room. Aden here wants the comfort and the privilege of the stitch, that incredible shared bond and intimacy with Dalia, but struggles to set that desire against the ways it will distort Dalia and inhibit her development. The nice thing is not always the good thing, when it comes to parenting—there are two layers to the phrase “a spoiled child”, after all, where indulging them without limits will do damage to their mental and emotional model of the world

And in my years of working with kids in education, I’ve seen what happens when people prioritise trying to be friends with their kid over being a parent to their kid. Being a parent necessarily involves sacrificing not only your own comfort but sometimes also your child’s, in a way a friend wouldn’t, by making them do something they don’t want to do—homework, perhaps, or a family visit, or medical treatment… and it involves boundaries that don’t exist between friends: keeping things from them because you shouldn’t burden them with your own troubles, not sharing thoughts and experiences because they wouldn’t be appropriate to their level of understanding, not relying on them in the way we would a friend. I’ve seen what it does to kids when their parents fail on all those fronts, and it can only be summarised as “damage”.

As much as I want to freeze my kids in time and keep them as they are now forever—funny, adorable, ignorant to the sometimes crushing weight of suffering and struggle in the world—there’s also a part of me that can’t wait until they are grown adults, and my work as a parent in shaping them is complete, and we can just be friends. But that can’t be now, not yet—while I must be kind, and considerate, and caring, primarily I must do all that as a parent, not a friend, and shield them from aspects of myself and my life while they’re not emotionally ready to comprehend them.

And so I don’t know how you took the ending, here, as Aden allows that stitch to be remade at the first time Dalia consciously asked, but for me it wasn’t positive—it was surrendering to his own immediate desires despite knowing the potential long-term costs; it was failing his willpower, failing to maintain the boundary that Dalia still needed. He let his want for that intimate connection to Dalia override Dalia’s needs of him as a parent. It is an understatement to say that being a parent is not easy—in fact, I think it may be the hardest thing there is, because no matter how hard you try, you will still always fall short somehow, someway, and feel like you could have done more. But so long as you’re still striving, still putting their needs before your wants, still working on ways to be better for them—I think you’re doing alright, friend.

---

As part of our 15th anniversary celebrations, we’re asking you to send in your favourite stories from our archive. This week, Melody is recommending episode 356 by Tina Connolly, ” Super-Baby-Moms Group Saves the Day”, saying: “I love how the actual/original super is the one who is completely overlooked, and how she keeps creating that which she needs. It speaks to me as someone who will probably never live in the limelight, but is always hoping to make the world better for those who come after me”. Thank you, Melody!