Backstory · Katia Grim
Katia Grim, Part 1: We Can Take That In
ARCHIVE ACCESS GRANTED.
Archivist! You came back. I had a bet with myself that you wouldn’t. I lost. I paid myself. It was awkward for both of us.
Now playing: File 004. Subject: the one you didn’t notice.
I had to search for this file three times. The metadata was fine. The search just slid past it, the way eyes slide past the help at a party. I’m told that’s thematic. I’m told a lot of things.
The world ended while I had nine pins in my mouth and my face six inches from a bride’s knee.
I wasn’t asleep. I wasn’t at a bar. I was kneeling in a strip mall at two in the morning, hemming a wedding dress for a woman who’d be dead inside two weeks. If she hadn’t wanted a cigarette, I’d have died with her hem half done.
I’d love to tell you I survived on instinct.
I survived on the hem.
But you need my mother first. Nobody understands any of it without my mother.
My mother had a phrase. She said it to customers and she said it to me, and it took me twenty-five years to notice it was the same phrase.
We can take that in.
She said it kneeling, pins in her mouth, so it came out soft and lisped. A woman would come out of the changing room in a dress that didn’t fit and turn sideways in the three-way mirror, sucking in her stomach and hating herself in triplicate. My mother would look at her for exactly one second. Oh, honey. We can take that in. And the woman would breathe out, because somebody had told her the problem was the dress.
When I was fourteen, I came down to breakfast in a skirt I’d bought with my own money. My mother looked at me for exactly one second, over her coffee.
“We can take that in,” she said.
She meant the skirt. I think she meant the skirt. I’ve spent twenty years deciding to believe she meant the skirt.
The shop was Katia’s Alterations. My mother named it after me while I was still a kick in her side. Our last name is Grim, and she said nobody in their right mind lets a woman called Grim near their wedding dress. So the sign got my first name, in curly pink neon, with an apostrophe she had to pay extra for. I think it was the most she ever spent on me in one go.
It sat in a strip mall off the highway, between a nail salon and a place that sold vape cartridges, phone cases and, for one confusing summer, live crickets. The sign buzzed. The parking lot had one working light. Inside, it smelled of steam, sizing spray and an iron that had been on since six in the morning.
I could thread a needle before I could read. By sixteen I was doing bridal bustles while my mother did the talking, because she was better at the talking.
My mother was beautiful. That isn’t a complaint. It’s a fact I’m laying out on the cutting table so you understand the rest.
She was tiny and sharp and dark-eyed, a former dancer, all neck and chin, and people did what she said. I came out of her large. Large baby, large child, big hands, shoulders built for carrying a sofa up three flights while the sofa’s owners supervised. A body built for a different woman’s life.
She never said anything cruel. I want to be fair to her. She never once said anything you could write down.
She just looked at me sometimes, kindly, the way she looked at a department-store dress with the seams all wrong. Working out where she’d start.
I wore a tape measure around my neck from the age of nine.
It was hers first: soft vinyl, sixty inches, gone yellow-grey, the numbers rubbed off in the middle where everybody’s waist lives. The brass tip at the zero end was bent from being stepped on. When she bought a new one, she gave me the old one, and I never took it off. It went on before my bra. It hung there all day like a stethoscope. It said professional. It said I’m here to fix you, not to be looked at.
Here’s the thing about being a seamstress. You touch people all day, and they don’t see you at all.
A woman stands in her slip with your hands on her hips and your face level with her thigh, and she’ll tell her friend on speakerphone about her affair. She’ll cry about her father. She’ll say God, I’m disgusting about a perfectly fine body, straight to her reflection, over the top of your head. You aren’t a person in that room. You’re furniture with pins.
I was excellent furniture. Five stars. Would be ignored again.
I measured thousands of people. Brides, bridesmaids, prom girls. A groom who wanted his tux to “read more Navy SEAL” and who was, I promise you, a dental hygienist. I wrote every one of them down in my mother’s little ledger.
I never once measured myself. I didn’t need to. My mother had done it years ago, without a tape.
Archive note: I have the measurements. I have everyone’s measurements. I know your inseam, Archivist. I’m not going to say it out loud. I’m just letting you know that I could, that I’ve shown it to a few colleagues, and that one of them laughed.
My mother died when I was thirty-one. Her heart, very fast, in the stockroom, between one box of zippers and the next. She’d have hated that. She thought zippers were for quitters.
I kept the shop. Of course I did. I didn’t know how to do anything else, and the sign already had my name on it.
I had a cat for a while, who left. I had a boyfriend for a while, who left the same way the cat had: gradually, then all at once, taking one of my good bowls. You don’t give people much reason to stay when you’re furniture.
On the night the world ended, I was thirty-four and finishing a wedding dress.
Her name was Dana Pruitt. ER nurse, nights, wedding in four days. She’d asked if we could do her final fitting after her shift, and I said yes, because I always said yes, and because I liked her.
She was one of maybe five brides in my whole life who looked at me when she talked.
She came in at one-forty in purple scrubs, flushed and talking fast after twelve hours of other people’s emergencies. Freckles on her forearms. A laugh like somebody kicking a vending machine. She’d picked her dress off the rack in nine minutes, and she said she’d picked her fiancé in about the same.
“Kev’s a nine-minute man,” she said. “In a good way. Don’t write that down.”
“I’m not writing anything down.”
“You’re always writing something down. You’ve got my hips in that book, Katia. You know me better than my mother. You know me better than my gynaecologist.”
The dress was ivory and sleeveless, with a long train I’d bustled with eleven little satin loops. Three fittings and it was perfect. It just needed the hem. She stood up on the fitting box in front of the three-way mirror, and I knelt in front of her with the pins and the chalk and the tape, the way I’d knelt in front of a thousand women.
“Can I tell you something?” she said.
“Mm.”
“I don’t feel like a bride. I feel like a nurse in a costume.” She looked at herself in all three mirrors. “Like if I make one wrong move, somebody’s going to check my badge.”
I had pins in my mouth, so I didn’t say anything. But I remember thinking, very clearly: Oh. You too.
At ten past two she said she was dying for a cigarette. The last one. She’d promised Kev. Absolutely the last, swear to God. She went to step off the box.
“Not in the dress.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You’ll drag four thousand dollars of silk through a parking lot.”
“So come hold it.” She grinned. “Be my maid of honour for five minutes. Kev’s sister’s a nightmare. She’s wearing sequins. To a barn.”
“Nobody should wear sequins to a barn,” I said, with real feeling.
So I picked up her train in both arms like a sleeping child and followed a half-pinned bride out into a strip-mall parking lot at two in the morning. Tape around my neck. Pincushion strapped to my wrist. My mother’s sign buzzing pink above us.
Dana lit up under the one working light. She took a long drag and blew it straight up and said, “God, that’s good,” and I said, “You’re getting ash on the bodice,” and she said, “Katia, I love you, shut up.”
Then the light changed.
The whole lot lit up from underneath, like the asphalt had become a lampshade. The sign stopped mid-buzz, like a held breath.
Behind us, Katia’s Alterations folded in on itself.
It sounded like a sheet yanked off a bed the size of a building. The nail salon went. The vape shop went, crickets and all. The dry cleaner at the end. The roofs dropped straight down into themselves like soufflés, and a low grey wave of dust came rolling across the lot.
The three-way mirror was in there. The ledger. My mother’s shears. Thirty-four years of the inside of my life.
Dana’s cigarette fell out of her mouth.
Attention, residents of Earth!
Your planet’s buildings have been reclaimed as part of an exciting new partnership! If you were inside one, please disregard this message. If you weren’t, congratulations! You’ve been selected!
Further instructions will follow. In the meantime, please try not to look so surprised. It reads badly on camera.
There were other people out there in the dark. A man in a reflective vest by the pumps at the gas station across the road. A teenage boy on a bike, standing on the pedals, frozen. A woman screaming somewhere behind the vape shop, and then not.
Dana grabbed my wrist, the one with the pincushion, and stuck herself on three pins at once. She didn’t even notice.
“Kev,” she said. “Kev’s at home. Kev’s asleep, Katia.”
I didn’t say anything. I was looking at where the shop had been.
What I felt, and I’ve never told anyone this, wasn’t grief. Grief came later. It took its time, and it charged by the hour.
What I felt, standing in the dust with a stranger’s train in my arms, was a tiny, horrible, weightless thing. Like putting down a box you’d carried so long you’d forgotten it weighed anything.
The three-way mirror was gone.
Nobody was ever going to look at me in it again.
Achievement Unlocked: Saved by the Butt!
You survived the collapse because of a nicotine habit! Doctors on your planet spent sixty years warning you that smoking kills. Those doctors are now underneath a hospital. Food for thought!
Reward: One (1) cigarette, slightly crushed. You dropped it. I picked it up for you. I’m thoughtful like that.
The achievement was Dana’s. I didn’t get one. I was holding the train.
Notification: Crawler Katia Grim has also survived.
Probably. Our sensors register a large, warm, stationary object adjacent to the bride. It has been logged as a crawler for insurance purposes.
A staircase opened in the middle of the parking lot.
No hole, no hatch. Just a clean square of dark where the faded lines had been, stone steps going down, and a soft blue glow at the bottom, pleasant, like a hotel pool at night.
The man in the vest was already walking toward it. The boy on the bike was crying. A car alarm finally went off, a full ten seconds late, and whooped away into the dust like it had only just heard the news.
Notification: A dungeon entrance has opened near you!
Crawlers are encouraged to enter promptly. Crawlers who do not enter promptly are encouraged to reconsider. There is a timer. You can’t see it. That’s part of the fun.
A box popped out of the air in front of Dana. Bronze, with a bow on it. It opened itself, eager as a puppy.
Dana Pruitt has received a Bridal Starter Box!
Contents: One (1) garter, +1 Charisma. One (1) packet of sugared almonds, commemorative, expired. One (1) “Bride Squad” sash, which grants no protection of any kind but makes you much easier to find in a crowd. For the monsters.
Dana looked at the almonds. Then at herself: the ivory, the eleven satin loops, four thousand dollars of silk.
“I can’t go down there in this,” she said, and her voice cracked right in the middle. “Katia. I can’t go to the end of the world in my wedding dress.”
I knelt on the asphalt.
My hands knew what to do before I did. I measured her, knee to floor, out of pure habit, and the number came out the same as always, as if the world hadn’t just been folded into a landfill. Then I took the train in both hands and tore it off at the waist seam, all eleven loops at once. It ripped clean. I’d sewn it. I knew exactly where the weak stitches were.
Dana stared at me.
“There,” I said, pinning the raw edge so she wouldn’t trip. “We can take that in.”
Oh, fine. Since you’re all being so slow about it.
Time remaining to enter: 00:00:41.
Dana grabbed my hand. The boy dropped his bike. The man in the vest was already halfway down.
We ran for it, a bride in a dress hacked off at the knee and the large, warm, stationary object adjacent to her. Behind us, the last pink letters of my name fizzed once in the dust and went out.
The steps were slick. The blue light was getting brighter.
And at the bottom, something was already clapping.
End of Part 1.
For the record, the bride got the achievement, the loot box and the first ten seconds of the season’s opening montage.
The seamstress got one wide shot, from behind, out of focus. Nobody planned that. It just keeps happening to some people.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory. Katia’s mother, the alterations shop, the strip mall, the tape measure, Dana Pruitt and her Bridal Starter Box are all invented for this story. Canon doesn’t give us Katia’s pre-dungeon job or the exact circumstances of her collapse night, so treat all of this as speculation. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.