The Ties That Bind by William Kitcher

You don’t know what potential is within you until the appropriate situation presents itself. I thought crime was beyond me, but then I discovered who and what I really was.

Opposite me on a crowded subway train sat a man in a suit reading a newspaper, and standing beside him was a teenage boy. The train pulled into a station and a fragile, elderly woman got on and stood beside the teenager, holding onto the pole. The teenager looked at the woman, then at the man in the suit.

“Hey, mister,” said the teenager, “why don’t you get up and give this lady your seat?”

The man pretended not to hear, and sniffed.

“I said, why don’t you give this lady your seat, pal?”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said the man in the suit.

The teenager reached down, grabbed the man in the suit by his tie, and lifted him out of his seat. “Thank you for being so thoughtful. Have a seat, ma’am.”

The elderly woman sat down; the man in the suit, pretending he was unaffected, went back to his paper, and the teenager acknowledged smiles from some of the other riders.

When I got home, I recounted this incident to the other ties in the closet. None of them had ever seen such an occurrence, and we all agreed that we were conceivably very dangerous pieces of clothing. Strangulation wasn’t a topic of conversation that came up very much. In the ensuing discussion, a number of pertinent observations were made. It was as if we had all had thoughts on the nature of our existences, but had been too shy, or perhaps too unsure of ourselves, to tell the others what we had been thinking.

The dark blue tie put forward the general proposition that we were functionally pointless. We did not provide warmth, we did not support any other pieces of clothing, we restricted the neck and throat movements of the people who wore us, and we were not even used for wiping one’s mouth after eating, which seemed like a logical purpose. We were, in fact, merely decorative.

“And what’s wrong with that?” said the yellow and orange tie.

“What’s wrong with that,” said the black tie, “is that often we’re not even that! Look at you. Look at the paisley ties around you. How did they ever make a comeback? And leather ties. Absurd! Killing a cow so you can hang a piece of its skin around your neck? And what about cowboy ties? A shoelace held together by a belt buckle. And what about all those ties in the box on the floor? Why are they there? Because they’re fat, that’s why. Four inches wide. He wouldn’t dare wear them anywhere. Perhaps when fashions change, but not now. But you know why ties are worn? To cover up the shirt buttons. Now what’s so offensive about buttons? Some buttons are made extremely professionally and look a lot better than ties.”

“Hear, hear,” said a shirt.

Some of the uglier ties had started to cry by this point, and the mood of the entire group was beginning to change from mild resignation to growing anger.

“Wait a minute here,” said a green tie. “We may be decorative, but we have a function. We complement shirts and jackets.”

“Not always,” I said. “I’m brown, right? Today he wore a blue shirt.”

There was a collective groan of disgust.

I continued. “And have you ever noticed how many men can’t even tie a tie? Their knots are all lopsided, and the tail is longer than the head…”

“That’s right,” said a few of them.

“Or they get their ties caught in their zippers. Or they tuck their ties into their underwear.” I was rolling now. “Or they put the tails inside their shirts. Or they don’t notice when the wind flips us over a shoulder…”

“Yeah, ties are useless!”

“You’ve realized, of course,” said a mauve tie, “that the presidents of corporations wear ties. Here are men who don’t need to wear them; could, in fact, be the people who initiate the end of them, but they don’t. They act just like everyone else. They follow tradition blindly. No human appears to be imaginative enough to come up with an alternative to ties!”

“People are stupid!”

“Ties are redundant!”

“Death to the running dog imperialist human race who wear ties!”

This stopped us cold. What had been rhetoric was now something else. There was no way we could ever go back to the way we had been thinking. We had to take action.

We concocted a plan, to be carried out the following Friday, and all of our comrades around the world were told. There were a few dissenters, of course, but that was to be expected. We gave them their say, and all they really expressed was that they liked being ties, being seen. These ties were obviously suffering from egomania, and, in a democratic vote, the wishes of the rebellious prevailed. The minority agreed that, in the event one of them was chosen to be worn on Friday, it would refuse to knot so that another tie, one of us, would be worn.

As fate would have it, I was worn that day. A meeting started promptly at ten o’clock, the president began his opening remarks, and I knew it was my time. I began to tighten. My human tried to loosen me, but I was too strong. The other ties did their part, and the men in the room clutched their throats, gasped for air, and finally collapsed. It was over quickly; we had justice on our side.

At the morgue, I saw thousands of men, and a few women, brought in, blue in their faces, their tongues lolling out of their mouths, their ties looking very innocent. As I found out later, these scenes were re-created worldwide. It had taken us minutes to fix what evolution had brought over millions of years.

Still, we couldn’t be completely happy. We understood the pathetic metaphor of ties: that humans unintentionally, or perhaps intentionally, strangled themselves. I felt especially guilty, because I knew my human didn’t really like ties. He wore a tie because everyone said he had to. A few innocents are always casualties of a revolution, but one cannot dwell on the mistakes of the past. One must always reach further. How now do we deal with high-heeled shoes and those who wear them?

Naturally, our efforts made me and my kind redundant. I eventually became part of a toilet seat cover, and what is the point of that? I have a new plan, but I don’t know how I’m going to pass it on because I don’t have the opportunity to socialize with other toilet seat covers.

One solution obviously led to another problem. Is that the way of things in a non-revolutionary world? Is it perhaps better just to remain mostly silent, to scream only when the toilet is being flushed and the refuse of humans goes to its inevitable grave?

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Bill’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published and/or produced in Canada, the U.S., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Holland, India, Ireland, and the U.K. Recent stories were published in Slippage Lit, Alien Station, 365 Tomorrows, Yellow Mama, Revolute, and Across The Margin, and he has stories forthcoming in Black Petals, Jokes Review, Defenestration, Antipodean SF, The Bookends Review, Schlock!, Evening Street Review, and the Horrified Press anthology, “Twisted Time”.