Soulmate Season
Every ten years, the threads appear. Some people follow them, right to their soulmate. Some people don’t.
The threads appeared at six-thirty on a Tuesday morning while Cleo was scraping burnt oatmeal from the bottom of her saucepan. She noticed it first in her peripheral vision, a thin red line stretching from somewhere near her sternum threading through the kitchen window and disappearing into the Houston fog.
“Shit.” She turned off the faucet. The line pulsed once, twice, then settled into a steady glow.
Thread Week. She’d forgotten.
The city had been preparing for months. Billboards advertised “Thread-Ready Makeovers” and “Destiny Dating Prep.” Her neighbor Mrs. Torres had spent three weeks power-washing her driveway in case her soulmate turned out to be the mailman. Cleo had planned to work through it, same as last time. The threads only showed up for one week every ten years, and it didn’t work on anyone younger than twenty or so.
She touched her chest where the thread emerged. Warm. Slightly sticky, like fresh paint, but her hand could go right through it. It was also glowing. And glowing meant her soulmate wasn’t far away this time. He or she might even be local.
Her phone buzzed. A text from her sister Margo: OMG mine showed up!!! Leads to the Barnes & Noble in River Oaks. Buying lingerie.
Jesus. Cleo set the phone face-down and returned to the oatmeal situation. Definitely more of a lost cause at this point. The thread bobbed as she moved, never taut but never slack. She tried to ignore it while she ate yesterday’s leftover pad thai for breakfast, but the darn thing glowed brighter every time she looked away.
By eight-fifteen, she’d given up pretending to check emails. The thread led south toward downtown, which meant either the Museum District or the Medical Center. Maybe her soulmate was a doctor. Or a security guard. Or someone visiting their dying grandmother. She put on her good jeans and drove to work anyway.
The marketing firm occupied the seventh floor of a glass tower that reflected the morning sun in sheets of amber. Cleo’s cubicle faced east, and by nine-thirty the thread was casting a faint red shadow across her computer screen.
“Holy shit, Cleo.” Bev from accounts receivable leaned over the partition. “Look at that thing. It’s like a goddamn fiber optic cable with a flashlight inside it.”
“It’s just Thread Week,” Cleo said.
“Just Thread Week? Honey, I’ve been married to the same man for fifteen years and I would trade him for a ham sandwich if my thread showed up pointing somewhere else.” Bev squinted at the line. “Where’s it go?”
“I haven’t followed it.”
“What do you mean you haven’t followed it?”
Cleo shrugged. “I’m busy.”
That was only somewhat true. She was researching organic dog food brands for a client who sold pet insurance, which was the kind of work that could absorb three hours or thirty minutes depending on how badly you wanted to avoid your actual life.
“Girl.” Bev sat on the edge of Cleo’s desk. “My daughter’s twenty-two and she’s been planning her Thread Week strategy since she was sixteen. Vision boards. Workout routines. She learned to make soufflé in case her person turns out to be French and she has to catch a flight.”
“What if her person turns out to be lactose intolerant?”
“Then she’ll learn to make something else.” Bev stood up. “Point is, you don’t just ignore the thread, that’s like ignoring a winning lottery ticket!”
“Maybe I don’t want to win the lottery.”
Bev stared at her for a long moment. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all week.”
At lunch, Cleo walked to the food truck plaza three blocks south. The thread led her past the Vietnamese place, past the fusion taco stand, all the way to a coffee cart run by a guy named Hollis who made pour-overs that tasted like burnt pencil shavings.
The thread ended at a man sitting alone at one of the plastic tables.
He was maybe thirty-five, wearing a faded Patagonia shirt and reading a paperback copy of The Overstory. His dark hair curled at the edges, and he had a face that looked worried even when relaxed. His thread emerged from his chest in a thin red line that connected directly to hers.
Cleo bought a cup of coffee she didn’t want and sat down at the next table.
The man looked up from his book. “Weird week, right?”
“Yeah.” She stirred sugar into her coffee. “You come here a lot?”
“Every Tuesday. You?”
“First time.”
“Ah.” He closed the book, keeping his finger on the page. “So, this is awkward.”
“Little bit.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The thread between them hummed faintly, like a power line.
“I’m Kieran,” he said finally.
“Cleo.”
“Nice to meet you, Cleo.” He paused. “Weird, uh, circumstances.”
“The weirdest.”
He was wearing a wedding ring. Thin gold band, slightly tarnished. Cleo felt a cold breeze whip through her that had nothing to do with weather.
“So,” she said. “Married?”
“Engaged.” Kieran twisted the ring around his finger. “Six months now. Wedding’s in October. She thought this would help for Thread Week. Just in case, I guess.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” He looked at the thread connecting them. “This is really fucking inconvenient.”
Cleo laughed before she could stop herself. “Yeah, no kidding.”
“I mean, what are the odds? I’ve lived in Houston for eight years. I eat lunch at this exact spot every Tuesday. And my cosmic soulmate apparently lives right around the corner.”
“Murphy’s Law.”
“Exactly.” He reopened his book, then closed it again. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you even believe in this stuff? The threads, the soulmate thing?”
Cleo considered this. “I believe in biological imperatives. Pheromones. Evolutionary compatibility. I think the threads are just a visual representation of something that was always there.”
“Very scientific.”
“I work in marketing. Everything’s about psychological manipulation.”
“Right. And what’s the thread trying to manipulate you into?”
She looked at him. Really looked. He had good hands, calloused in the right places. A mouth that probably smiled more than it frowned, under normal circumstances.
“I have no idea,” she said.
Kieran checked his watch. “I should get back to work.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Neither of them moved.
“This is stupid,” Kieran said. “We just met. I don’t even know your last name.”
“Valdez.”
“Cleo Valdez.” He smiled. “I’m Kieran Moss. I’m a public defender. I live in Montrose with my fiancée and a cat named Biscuit. I drink too much coffee and I’m terrible at returning phone calls.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because in about five minutes I’m going to walk back to my office and pretend this never happened. And I figure you should know something real about me first.”
The thread pulsed brighter.
“Cleo Valdez,” she said. “I work for a marketing firm that specializes in insurance companies. I live alone in a studio apartment with very good acoustics and a broken garbage disposal. I haven’t been on a date in eight months and I’m starting to think I prefer it that way.”
“Why?”
“Because dating is like job interviewing. Everyone’s performing the best version of themselves until someone gets hired, and then you find out what they’re actually like.”
“And what are you actually like?”
She stood up, leaving her coffee untouched. “I guess you’ll never know.”
“Cleo.”
She turned back.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.
The thread between them glowed steady and warm.
“Same time tomorrow,” she said.
Author’s Note
I don’t remember when I first heard about the invisible thread theory thing (probably somewhere between a Tumblr post and a friend of a friend’s podcast). But I came across it again recently and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The idea that the universe ties you to another person, and then forces you to figure out the rest. What a wild concept. I think we dream up these theories because real life isn’t so easy. There aren’t any instructions for finding a person you belong with, especially when the timing can be a little off. Or way off, even.
That’s pretty much where Soulmate Season comes from. I wanted to write a story where the big magical thing happens: soulmate confirmed, thread glowing, fate delivered! But…it’s still complicated. Because it’s still inconvenient. Still human.
Cleo, to be fair is not like me at all. I want to be understood and seen, but she just wants to handle that dog insurance client with as little to do as possible. Then again, there’s a version of her I can relate with. The part of her who wants to earn that closeness. Not just take a predestined short cut.
Kieran, on the other hand, is the person who stumbles around trying to do the right thing even when he’s not sure what that is. Ultimately, I think he probably makes a wrong decision and learns from it. Either way, the thread doesn’t care what they think. The thread shows up anyway. Life shows up anyway.
Honestly, I don’t look at this piece as a love story. It’s not a rom-com where the two end up together in the end. Cleo still has her life and Kieran has his commitment. In my mind, neither of them show up the next day. But I purposefully left that out of the story because I think it’s irrelevant.
Interesting that you don't think either will show up the next day. I immediately thought they would after that last line. Good short story! (P.S., I like the neighbor who power-washed her driveway in case her soulmate was the mail carrier.)