The Tailor of Gloomwick shuffled toward his shop door early that Monday morning and raised the shade. A line of customers stretched away from the building and terminated halfway down the length of East Quagmire Street. Granted, some of them were waiting to pick up repairs and return their locum animorum, or temporary hearts, but the sheer number of people gave him pause all the same.
       His shoulders drooped, weariness settling over him like a heavy yoke. He adjusted his spectacles on his nose, flicked open the lock, and greeted the foremost customers with a strained smile. "Come in," he said. "Everyone is welcome."
       A broad-shouldered woman at the head of the line swept past him, determined to arrive at the counter before the rest of the townspeople crowding in behind her. "I was here first!" she shrilled, holding a gloved finger in the air.
       The Tailor stepped behind the counter and removed a well-worn ledger from the shelf underneath. He wore a blue denim apron over his brown woolen vest and trousers. The white sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows, revealing sinewy forearms.
       He gripped the lead pencil tightly to ease the shaking of his hand. It wouldn't do for the customers to witness the shattered state of his nerves; it would only diminish their confidence in his ability to mend their hearts, which was his particular skill and calling. His vocation, as he preferred to think of it. The detrimental changes the work had wrought on him over time seemed less odious that way.
       "Your name, please?"
       "Tabatha Walsh."
       The Tailor wrote down her name in the ledger at the head of the day's page. "Manner of complaint?"
       Her ruddy cheeks paled. Lips atremble, she twisted her hands together, glancing skyward to blink back a sudden onslaught of glistening tears. "My Eddie, he...h-he...why he's left me and--"
       The Tailor flicked as though at an invisible fly, silencing her before she spilled a list of unnecessary details. "Lost love," he muttered as he scribbled the words next to her name.
       On the wall behind him, a variety of iron keys hung from dozens of shiny brass hooks. "How old are you, Madame?"
       "Forty-seven," the woman replied.
       The Tailor examined the rows of keys along the wall, stopped at a row marked 'female, 47 years,' and plucked a key from the hook. Then he bent down under the counter and, from the lower shelves, procured a muscular apparatus, carmine colored, and about the same weight as a fattened chicken. He spun the madame around, unbuttoned a flap on the back of her dress, and twisted the key in the lock on her skin. He removed her heart, replaced it with the temporary locum animus, and returned the key to the brass hook on the wall.
       "Oh, thank you," she gushed, but the Tailor waved her away. At this rate, he'd be lucky if he made it into his workshop by eleven o'clock. He must keep these folks moving if he expected to get any serious work done today.
       "Check back in a week," he said, though, in reality, he knew it would be closer to three or four. Increasingly more people were hurting these days, and his backlog was growing dramatically. Though he hated to admit it, he was struggling to keep up. He'd run out of holding chambers to house the damaged hearts and had resorted to piling them in the tall closet on the other side of the thin curtain separating the shop floor from his private workspace.
       "Next, please." He gestured to the second customer in line, a dejected man in tattered overalls with a noticeable limp.
       "William Goffin," the man said. "I'm thirty-eight years old, and my pa disowned me 'cuz I can't plow the fields." His eyes spilt over with tears. "Lost half my leg in an accident." He fingered the brim of his hat, nervous.
       The Tailor scribbled down the man's name and made the appropriate exchange. The people's hearts were in horrific shape. How many more anxious customers waited in line, the long-held burden of their various griefs written in plain sight by the shadows under their eyes, the worry creasing their brows?
       The longer the list of entries grew, the more prone to making mistakes he became. Past a certain point, the voices of the people sounded far away, as if they shouted at him from the opposite end of a long tunnel, darker than the blackest night.
       The Tailor distributed a locum animus to the next-to-last customer in line, a young man named Louis. As he searched under the counter for another, his fingers brushed up against the cold hard bars of the empty shelf.
       He straightened slowly, horrified with himself for not anticipating his predicament sooner. "I'm sorry," he said to the sullen customer scowling before him. Mr. Burkett was the last one in line. "You'll have to come back another day. I'm out of locum animorum at the moment."
       Mr. Burkett slammed a fist on the counter, jowls shaking. His cheeks flushed dark red, and spittle flew from his lips when he spoke. "What do you mean, you're out of locum animorum? You're the only Tailor in Gloomwick! We rely on you; we trust you to do what's right when it comes to our hearts. I don't believe this."
       The man swung around in search of other people to join in his rant and caught sight of Louis, who had paused, hesitant, by the door.
       Louis stood with his hand on the knob. Curls the color of newly threshed wheat stuck out from under his tweed newsboy cap. His gaze darted back and forth between Mr. Burkett and the Tailor.
       The boy's frightened, the Tailor thought. Frightened and unsure. He'd toiled over enough hearts to identify individual feelings as they arose and blossomed to life across a person's face, most often in their eyes. He doesn't want to get swept up into an argument, but he'll stick up for what he believes if put to the test.
       Secretly, the Tailor was glad Louis had gotten the last of today's locum animorum. Mr. Burkett was a regular customer, and each time he returned, his heart was harder than before. The Tailor had been required to deviate from his usual methods of sewing and mending and use a mason's tool to break through its stone casing a month ago. The task had been hard-going, tedious, the organ threatening to crumble into a million pieces at the slightest slip of his instrument.
       "I'm sorry," the Tailor mumbled. "I simply cannot help you today."
       "This is ridiculous," Mr. Burkett whined. "You've never turned me away before, Tailor. Never." He lunged across the counter and jabbed a meaty finger into the Tailor's chest. "When you get more locum animorum, I'd better be first on the list for repairs," he hissed.
       Slowly, the Tailor closed the ledger and replaced it on the shelf below the counter. His tremors had begun in earnest. To hide them, he held his hands behind his back. "It's first come, first served, but I can offer you a discount. Ten percent off your next order to make up for the delay."
       "Ten percent? That's it? That's all you can offer me for this wretched inconvenience? I'm disappointed in you, Tailor...."
       The tirade continued, but the Tailor tuned it out. A darkness had settled at the corners of his consciousness, as often happened when he was overwhelmed, burdened not only by the maladies of the hearts he labored over, hour after hour, but also by the misconceptions, the accusations, and the murderous arguments the townsfolk were liable to stir up against him these days.
       "...mark my words...your business will suffer the same as I have...you can count on it...."
       It wasn't like it used to be. He used to be respected, revered even, for the precision labor of his craft. Now he felt like an assembly line worker, expected to pump out fully-functioning, healed hearts at an alarming rate.
       "... you're a disgrace to Gloomwick...."
       "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to lea--" The Tailor stumbled as he turned away; he gripped the counter for support. Bright specks floated across his vision, his head spun, and his knees wobbled. This was no way to end the morning, not with the amount of work he faced. He must recover himself; he must get to his workshop. He hadn't any time to waste.
       A soothing grip on his arm steadied him, and a pleasant voice spoke beside his ear. "Mr. Tailor, sir? Are you all right? Please, have a seat. Let me take care of this for you."
       It was Louis; God bless the lad.
       The Tailor took a seat on the stool behind the counter and watched as Louis brokered with Mr. Burkett.
       "I'll give you my locum animus," Louis said, "in exchange for you apologizing to the Tailor. He's done nothing wrong, can't you see that?"
       Mr. Burkett fumed, grumbled out a poor excuse for an apology, and in the end, grudgingly accepted the locum animus. With the Tailor's help, Louis took back his own damaged heart. The bell above the door jingled as Mr. Burkett saw himself out.
       "Thank you for that," the Tailor said. "I wasn't feeling myself there for a moment."
       Louis removed his hat and wiped his head, his eyebrows furrowed in concern. He set his hat aside. "If you don't mind my saying so, sir, it looks like you could use some help."
       "I'll be fine," the Tailor grunted. He didn't need help; he needed to get to work, and the sooner, the better. He swept aside the thin curtain to his workspace, hobbled through, and placed the stone-cold heart of Mr. Burkett into the tall closet with all the other hearts.
        Louis followed behind him. "Sir?"
       "Please, call me Tailor." He sneaked a glance at the boy, whose attention was fixed in the center of the room where the wooden pedestals stood. Each was topped by a glass hemisphere that housed individual hearts in various states of disrepair. Stray threads dangled from pieces that were stuck through with numerous pins holding them loosely in place.
       "My goodness." Louis approached one of the domes cautiously and ran his fingers over the glass, mesmerized by the sight of the fractured heart. "How does this happen? Do you sew the hearts back together yourself?"
       Though inwardly flattered, the Tailor was mentally calculating the number of new orders he had received.
       He busied himself at his workbench and arranged his tools on the tray: forceps, needles of varying sizes, golden thread, and his most prized instrument of all, his divining scissors. With their inspired tips, he could ferret out even the most deeply rooted pains the human heart suffered, nip out the affected tissue, and close the wound with needle and thread.
       The pains traversed their way through his scissors into his flesh and seeded in his own heart, as emotions always require a place to root, but it was a burden the Tailor willed himself to bear as a necessary part of his vocation.
       The accumulation of injuries was the source of his tremors, he knew, as well as his all too frequent blackouts. Though his practical nature warned him that he had limits and he should pay attention to them, his empathy compelled him to endure the various agonies. When the townspeople begged him for relief, he couldn't say no. Who else would help them? They had no other recourse for their heartache than him.
       The boy's questions continued, but the Tailor had no time to answer them. Before long, the severity of his tremors would increase, making it impossible for him to continue laboring that day. He set the tray on the stand next to his stool and removed the glass hemisphere from the nearest wooden pedestal.
       He adjusted his spectacles and picked up his instruments.
       "Tailor?"
       The Tailor paused, forceps in one hand, divining scissors in the other. He lowered his chin to focus on Louis. "Yes?"
       "I'd like to stay and help in whatever way I can."
       "I appreciate that, but you should go now. I have work to do."
       The shadows under Louis's eyes deepened. He had, after all, given up his locum animus and taken on his old burden again in the scuffle with Mr. Burkett. "Please. It's the least I can do. The people of Gloomwick may not appreciate what you do, but I can see it's a lot. More than they, or I, ever imagined, actually."
       The Tailor was tempted. Louis had an easy way about him, a natural kindness that swelled from him like a refreshing underground spring, but he had never considered taking on an apprentice a day in his life. He had long since accepted the burden of his craft as a solitary one and wasn't willing that another should have to bear the emotional consequences. For that reason, he had never considered marriage either, assuring his lonely existence.
       "Thank you," he said, "but as you can see, I don't have time to teach anyone right now."
       Louis made no response. Instead, he bowed his head and retreated through the curtain to the shop.
       The bell above the door tinkled, and for the first time that morning, the Tailor was surrounded by silence. He set down his instruments, hurried to the front entrance, and lowered the shade so the shop would appear closed. If someone came to pick up a repair and, in exchange, return their locum animus, he would oblige them.
       He couldn't afford to take on any more new customers, though. Not today. Perhaps not ever. The ledger was full. The orders overflowing his closet were enough to last him weeks, if not months.
       If he listened long enough, he could hear them: the various groans and sighs emanating from the collection of hearts populating his workshop. Most days, he could block out their complaints by concentrating on his work. On other days the memory of them haunted him throughout the night.
       He approached the workshop slowly. Every joint in his fingers ached as he brushed the few scant hairs on the top of his head to one side. When he eased forward, his knees cracked, making a dry, popping sound.
       The Tailor refused to pay attention to the tiredness that overcame him as he passed the tall closet. He would start with the three hearts under the glass hemispheres, then move on to the next three, proceeding through the orders one by one, like he always did.
       The divining scissors operated like magic the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon. He snipped and patched, tucked and sutured until he had mended the first dozen. By the second dozen, the tremor in his hands had started, winding its way up his arms until he could no longer direct the scissors to the appropriate tissue.
       He persisted anyway and jumped when the blade severed the delicate skin between his thumb and forefinger. "Ouch!" he yowled. Blood dripped from his hand onto the floor. At the same time, the bell on the front door jingled.
       Quick footsteps thudded on the floorboards, and after a brief pause, Louis peered around the curtain. He paled at the sight of the blood trailing down the Tailor's arm.
       "What happened?" he asked. The older man's knees sagged underneath him, and Louis darted forward, catching the Tailor under the arms. "I only came back to get my hat, but I'm glad I did. Are you okay? Let's see that wound."
       He prised open the Tailor's fingers and winced. "Ooph." Louis reached for a kerchief from his back pocket and bound the Tailor's hand tightly.
       "Thank you," the Tailor said. He leaned against the nearest wooden pedestal and sighed. He pressed the fingers of his good hand into his eyes, forcing back his frustration at having been so careless.
       The tremors would be the death of him if he wasn't careful. Yet what other option did he have? He was the Tailor of Gloomwick, mender of broken hearts. His work must continue.
       "Louis," he said.
       The boy had a dexterity about him and a quickness of spirit the Tailor admired. Maybe he'd been managing alone long enough. What harm would there be in letting the boy help in small ways around the shop?
       "Would you like a job here? Temporarily, of course, until my hand heals."
       Louis's smile touched his eyes. They lit up, blue as a cloudless summer sky.

       A month later, the Tailor still faced a considerable backlog, but Louis's quiet presence around the shop, cleaning, restocking supplies and generally making himself useful in whatever manner required, had become a source of comfort to him. The boy had insisted on learning how to take orders so the Tailor could focus on his repairs in the mornings. Louis had a particular knack for dealing with the customers that the Tailor respected. When the boy distributed the locum animorum, fully stocked now at the shop, folks went away with a smile on their face and a spring in their step that hadn't been there before.
       The Tailor appreciated the boy's company as much as his help. Perhaps he had been lonelier than he realized. Though it half frightened him to admit it, Louis was capable and eager to learn.
       He'd meant to fix the boy's heart before now. Louis was more than deserving, but every time the Tailor had determined to ask him, a fresh wave of orders arrived. One of these days, he would simply have to carve out the time and offer the boy a free repair.
       The Tailor pushed his spectacles up his nose and examined the specimen before him. Mr. Burkett's heart always presented him with a challenge, but perhaps never one so great as today. The belligerent man had returned twice in the span of a month for repairs that shouldn't have to be made more than once in a heart's lifetime.
       Layers of stone twined along the great vessels and extended deep into the muscular walls of the ventricles, beading along the strings of chordae tendineae attached to the leaflets of the valves.
       The Tailor had the sinking feeling that to strip the delicate vessel walls and chordae of stone might require a finer touch than he now possessed. The delicate structures were liable to disintegrate with even the slightest tremor.
       Yet now was not the time to doubt his ability or the steadiness of his hands. He must act decisively, but also gently, as a puff of breath distributes the feathered seeds of the dandelion without destroying them.
       From the corner of his eye, he detected movement, a slight flutter of the curtain. Louis had slipped inside his workshop, a curious habit the boy had developed over the last few weeks, observing the Tailor at his labors when he didn't think the Tailor could see him.
       The Tailor hid a smile, then picked up his forceps and the smallest rasp in his collection of files. He held up the rasp and examined the pattern of diamond dust that coated the surface.
       "With a touch as light as a dragonfly's wing, I can perform miracles with you," he said, fully aware that, from the shadows, Louis hung on his every word.
       Though foreign to him, it secretly gave the Tailor no end of delight that someone cared about his work as much as he did and desired to know about his equipment, his techniques, and the process behind his craft.
       He leveled the rasp over the most heavily beaded chordae and, using the forceps to steady the string, began to file away the stone.
       Louis circled him as he labored.
       "If I'm not careful, the rasp will act as a blade, and I'll sever the chordae in half. It's all in the grip, you see, the amount of pressure you apply to the instrument, not how hard you act to repair the tissue."
       If he listened close enough, he could hear Louis's question amid the silence. How do you know how much pressure to apply?
       "The pressure will depend on the tissue you are trying to restore. Start gently and proceed from there as you gauge the response. The instrument is doing the work, not you. You must always remember that."
       The instrument is the conduit, then?
       "Ultimately, I am the conduit, via the instrument. I use the tool to prise the disease away from the tissue, and I take the damaged emotion into myself."
       At what point do the emotions overcome you to the extent you cannot continue?
       "When I first started mending hearts, I quickly became overwhelmed. I absorbed the emotions inside myself as if they were my own. I carried the hurts as if they were my personal responsibility and burden to deal with."
       His fingers trembled, slipped on the rasp, and pop! A stringy mass of ruptured chordae dangled from the tip of his forceps. The Tailor looked on in horror.
       Quickly, he reached for his needle and golden thread to repair the tissue before it contracted. It was moments like these, when he sensed the decline in his reflexes, his dulled senses, and the lack of precision in his fine motor coordination that he panicked.
       When he let down his guard, the emotions from the hearts came flooding in. The troublesome voices of the various agonies jeered in his head, and darkness clouded the edges of his vision.
       He struggled amidst the fog in his mind, determined to suture the ruptured chordae, to act as a funnel for Mr. Burkett's anger, to allow the heat of the man's wrath to pass through his own heart and be released.
       "Don't hold onto the emotions; that's the key. Do you understand? If you hold on, their hurts will rob you of your last breath and kill you."
       He sensed, though he could not see, the sweetness of Louis's presence behind him. His needle moved back and forth mechanically, repairing the damaged chordae.
       This was the most important, the most valuable lesson the Tailor had ever learned. He must get the words out while he still had sense left in him to do so and to finish the work he had started on Mr. Burkett's heart.
       "Listen to me. Do you hear me? This is most important of all, the dearest thing I can teach you. Never doubt yourself or your abilities. You are stronger than you imagine and more resilient than anyone will ever tell you. A channel is not the same as a holding tank. The power to heal is not the same as holding on. Healing means letting go. That is the true work of a Tailor. Allowing a heart to let go of what it was never meant to carry."
       The Tailor set down his instruments, having slaved feverishly to remove the final fragments of stone from Mr. Burkett's heart. His shoulders sagged, and his bones ached to the marrow. His breath sank heavy in his chest as if he were trying to breathe through lungs filled with mud. Weariness filled him to his core, and darkness threatened to flood his vision. He felt dazed.
       "Mr. Tailor, sir, are you all right?"
       Louis's voice came to him from far away; the Tailor felt as if he were floating on air. The stool no longer rested underneath him and his fingers no longer gripped the cool metal instruments. To open his eyelids required more energy than he had at the moment, so he rested behind the curtain of darkness amidst his thoughts.
       "This is it," he said to himself. "The one job I'll never recover from. I successfully allowed Mr. Burkett's anger to pass through me and demonstrated to Louis how important it is to let go, but what will he think of me now? He's not a stupid lad. He can see the price I've paid over the years. Tremendous amounts of energy are required to deflect the worst of the pain, and even still, the business takes a terrible toll."
       He felt his body being gently lifted, briefly shaken, then settled onto softness. Perhaps he was dying.
       The thoughts continued. Louis had not only been a comfort, but he'd also brought the Tailor hope, though he hadn't admitted it to himself until now. He'd never dared to believe someone would be interested in his craft. Louis's curiosity and his affability, combined with a sensible amount of restraint, made him an ideal replacement.
       "Why would he want to take my place when this is the result?" the Tailor chastised himself, lingering in the darkness. "I was right to keep the burden to myself this long. The price is too steep."
       Then he felt it. A slow, mechanical tick.
       The shadow before his eyes lightened, and slowly, the Tailor roused. He pressed his fingers to his chest and felt the steady thrumming beat just under the surface of his skin. From the cot in the corner where he lay, he squinted through rheumy eyes at Louis, perched on a stool.
       Hunched over the first of the wooden pedestals with the glass hemisphere removed, the boy was hard at work on an old, tattered heart.
       The Tailor's first thought was that he had left a bit of stone unaccounted for inside Mr. Burkett's heart, but no, he had removed every last inch before the exhaustion had seized him. He squinted harder; Mr. Burkett's heart had been moved to the side, along with the other repaired hearts ready to be returned to their rightful owners.
       Good God. The heart on the pedestal was his! Louis had taken it upon himself to fix his old, broken heart, burdened by the years of his craft.
       The chamber walls sagged limply from the supporting muscles; the entire structure bruised and battered as if it had lived through the worst hailstorm, the kind that would destroy an entire season's crop.
       He tried to sit up but, in his profound weakness, realized he could not. His mind raced to make sense of the details. He had collapsed from exhaustion, or his heart had finally given out on him. Either way, Louis had managed to extract it and replace it with...what?
       A locum animus.
       That explained the mechanical beat, the forced regularity.
       Sweat dripped from the boy's brow and soaked through his shirt. His hands wove back and forth, the divining scissors in one hand, forceps in the other. A needle threaded with a golden suture lay at his side.
       He whispered to himself as he probed the insides of one chamber with the divining scissors, taking deliberate care not to snip too soon or remove too much living tissue. "I must not doubt myself," he said. "If the Tailor says there isn't a heart in the world that can't be mended, then he deserves every chance I can give him."
       "Louis," the Tailor wheezed. "What are you doing?"
       The boy glanced at him over his shoulder, instruments frozen in his grasp, his cheeks flushed red from concentration. "You're awake," he said, smiling. "I'm repairing your heart. After yours, I'll move on to the others so you can rest."
       The Tailor forced himself to try to sit up, to get out of the cot so he could return to work. The boy couldn't handle all the repairs by himself, no matter how clever he was.
       Louis set down the tools, hopped off the stool, and gently insisted the Tailor remain quiet. "Please, sir, you've faithfully served Gloomwick all your life. It's time you rest. You can direct me from here. Let me be your hands while you teach me."
       The Tailor lay back against the pillow. In all his years of living in Gloomwick and repairing peoples' hearts, not one had shown him the kindness or compassion Louis had. It was enough to bring tears to his eyes. In young Louis, he'd discovered there was one other empathic heart like his.
       "I will on one condition," he said.
       What's that, sir?" Louis asked.
       "We repair your heart next," the Tailor said in a tone that brooked no argument. "There's no truer way to master the art of healing than to heal oneself."