She knew that dress. In the way that a pilot knows his ground control, they’re on the other end and I hope to god they’re right about all this. Lying there, casually on the oak floor, the dross looked is if it was ready, actively engaging out of the corner of her eye as if it would suddenly slide up onto the bed and she would be sucked into its form. Like a movie on cassette rewinding she’d be out the door, down the stairs, in the car, reversing out of the parkade screaming backwards down the freeway.

Though the qualities endowed to this garment were partially due to her rampant imagination one should keep in mind that throughout history there has been extraordinary attributes to quite common artifacts.

It was composed of 100% cotton. Spun from the cotton of Dellstown, a small county in Alabama. It had been part of the yield of the 2001 harvest, a particularly good year as anyone could remember. The people of Dellstown took pride in their cotton and if anyone had asked they would’ve told them as much. Yet, no one asked because no one knew that Alabamans grew cotton anymore or really any Americans for that matter. “They” (being median mass of North American consumers) assumed Bangladesh got their cotton from somewhere else and when would they just get their white discount t-shirt already?

From Dellstown the cotton was sent to a textile factory on the outskirts of Dallas. There it was made into appropriate cloth. The floor manager of the factory was one Nathaniel Parker. The heat in Texas didn’t agree with Nathaniel but he was trying to stick it out. Textile factories were becoming a rare sight in American and Nathaniel thought that if we gave up on textiles then we’d given up on freedom. It also didn’t help that he had criminal charges pending for shoplifting at a local department store. He was caught switching foreign made products with seconds from the factory. It was enough to keep him from leaving the state.

The day the cotton for the dress was being processed through the textile factory Nathaniel had received an unpleasant phone call. His Ford compact was illegally parked and had been towed to the impound lot by a Honda tow truck. Ironies such as this were one thing Nathaniel couldn’t appreciate about life.

As Nathaniel prepared to trudge home in the Texas heat the cotton had been made into cloth, appropriate into suitable coloring and was awaiting shipment. This was a particularly efficient textile factory despite the shortcomings of its individuals.

The garment manufacturer receiving the shipment was A-1 Supreme, a small operation based out of Cleveland, Ohio. The owner, Gladys Benchport was a feisty woman of sixty-two who would often walk about the shop muttering vague threats to no one in particular. In actual fact there was someone in particular: Doris Lynchberry.

Doris and Gladys had been best of friends back in their “golden years” and often talked of making and designing their own clothes. Until the fateful summer of 1968 when, with no word, Doris left. Gladys had tried her apartment, her parents, her part-time job, not a soul knew what had become of Doris.

Five years later she turned up. Doris called her mother from the Cleveland bus depot. In her absence Gladys had gotten married and had started her own company. Wounded by the disappearance of her friend she was unwilling to enter a partnership. Doris was hurt by her former friends grudge. She thought that an appropriate revenge would be the publishing of her story rather than personally telling Gladys where she had been those five years. Her story was picked up by The Cleveland Reader, a tell-all local rag. Though the editors of the Reader denied accusations the layout and design bore a distinctly striking resemblance to Reader’s Digest.

As it turns out Doris had made off with a Mexican witchdoctor, blasting out of town and screaming down the I-90 W. He promised her magic, LSD and a high that wouldn’t quit. In the end the only thing he delivered was a beater jalopy, a few cheap card tricks and some highly motivated sperm. These sperm fertilized an egg that produced a child who would become a man. A man highly interested in the national production of textiles.

With the money she earned from the sale of her bizarre expedition Doris started her own company: Supremely A-1. Needless to say this caused quite a bit of confusion in the yellow pages.

The dress. The dress was to be Gladys supreme triumph. A limited run of an article of clothing to foil the menace of Doris Lynchberry. The dress, though a fine work of a talented seamstress did what clothing does: cycle to a boutique shop, through a closet, back to a consignment shop, through another closet, then to a thrift store.

She found the dress at this thrift store on the backstreets of Burlington, Vermont. Maybe not so coincidentally it was this very day that, upon receiving a letter from www.whosyourmamma.com (a popular genealogy website with an unusually high hits per services used ratio) a distraught Doris Lynchberry drove her Lincoln town car into a pet store. Witnesses confirmed that the accident was a result of Doris’ speed and her efforts to avoid hitting a troupe of Cleveland’s nationally renowned midget barbershop quartet. She succeeded in saving the vocalists as well as freeing a large number of parakeets from the pet store. The coroner ruled the cause of death as heart attack from an acute case of Ornithophobia, the worst in Cleveland’s history.

Gladys attended the funeral for Doris laying the first dress she made on the coffin. Nathaniel, receiving no response from his online query cursed the validity of internet genealogy websites.

That was the day she found the dress. It would not tell her its secrets for it didn’t know them. If she could say anything more about the garment it was that it wanted to be worn. When she slipped it on she didn’t think of Alabama, textiles or Cleveland; but once, she thought she heard parakeets.