Stitching Woman of Krevėnai
In the village of Krevėnai, there was an old tale parents used to whisper to misbehaving children. A tale of Siuvėja, the Stitching Woman. No one alive had ever seen her, but the stories claimed she once wandered from house to house during wartime, stitching mouths shut with black thread to keep secrets from spilling.
Most thought it was just a story until the summer of the long drought. The air turned dry as old parchment. Fields yellowed to dust. Flies swarmed the few animals still standing. Wells that had run cold for generations gaped empty, their stones hot to the touch. It was then the dreams began.
Children woke screaming in the deep hours, trembling and unable to explain the dread that clung to them. But over days, the stories began to match. A woman in a dark shawl had visited them in their sleep. Her face was always hidden, her voice always the same: a rasp like thread slipping through fabric.
“What will you give to be spared?”
At first, parents chalked it up to shared hysteria. Heat could make the mind see strange things. But when little Tomas Petraitis stopped speaking altogether, worry began to seep into their bones. The boy was not fevered. His eyes were wide and watchful, his lips pressed tight. When his mother tried to coax a word from him, he turned his head and stared at the wall.
Then they saw the thread.
Fine, black stitches ran across his lips. Neat, perfect loops, as if done by a seamstress’s steady hand. Yet there were no punctures, no blood. The flesh was unbroken, but the stitches were real, binding him shut. No one could cut them; the thread would tighten like a living thing, burning the skin without breaking. Within a week, five more children were silent. The older villagers began to murmur a name they had not spoken in decades. Siuvėja.
One mother, desperate to understand, dug through her family’s heirlooms until she found an old oval mirror, its frame carved with protective symbols. It was said to reveal what the naked eye could not. That night, she placed it on her daughter’s dresser and kept vigil by the bed. The candle burned low. The shadows thickened. And in the glass, she saw her.
A shawled figure, taller than she should be, her head bent toward the sleeping child. Long fingers hovered above the girl’s mouth, black thread pulled taut between them. The woman’s hands worked the needle with impossible speed, yet her body did not move.
The mother spun around, heart hammering. The bed was empty but for her daughter. No sign of anyone else. Yet when she looked back to the mirror, the Stitching Woman was still there, half-turned now, and though her face was still hidden, the mother felt those unseen eyes settle on her.
The villagers gathered at the chapel the next morning. Some clutched rosaries. Others wept openly, begging the priest to drive the thing away. He listened in silence, pale and shaking, until finally he confessed what he had sworn never to say.
Siuvėja was no myth. She had been called to Krevėnai by the village elders during the war, when enemy patrols marched close and betrayal could mean the slaughter of everyone. She was summoned to bind the mouths of those who could not be trusted. Traitors, informants, even children who might speak out of turn.
The priest’s voice faltered as he told them that bargains with her were never one-sided. Once invited, she was never truly gone. She lingered, waiting for a time when hunger, desperation, or fear would open the door again. And in a season of drought, when the earth cracked and the people prayed for anything that might save them, someone had done it. He would not say who.
That night, the silence in Krevėnai was worse than the heat. No crickets. No wind in the grass. Only the occasional creak of a door and, faintly, the sound of thread being pulled through cloth. By the next dawn, three more children had stopped speaking.
And though the priest tried to assure them that faith would protect their souls, no one could shake the feeling that they were all simply waiting for the Stitching Woman to decide she needed more mouths closed — not just the children’s, but theirs.
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