Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Fear of Being Measured
A tailor who has measured every customer in the town for forty years begins to dread the tape across his own shoulders, and when a new apprentice finally takes his measurements, the figures on the card do not match the body he has been carrying.
- perspective: first
I have been a tailor in the high street for forty-one years, and I have measured more people than I can count. Their shoulders and waists, the length of their arms from the nape to the wrist. The tape tells you everything, if you are patient with it. A man who stoops, a woman who carries her weight on one hip, a boy who will grow an inch by Christmas. I know the figures the way a priest knows his prayers. I can look at a stranger across a room and tell you their chest measure within half an inch.
Six months ago I began to dread the tape.
It was nothing dramatic. I was measuring a young bride for her wedding suit, and I reached round to note the length of her back, and I felt the tape pull at my own shoulders as I drew it across, the cold metal pressing against a place on my spine I had not felt for years. I dropped the tape. I apologised and picked it up and went on. But my hands had begun to shake, and the bride looked at me with a little frown, and I knew I had seen something in her face that I did not want to see.
Her face was the face of someone measuring me.
After that I could not stop noticing. The old man who came in for his trousers, looking at my hands. The schoolboy with his new blazer, staring at my waist as if he had a figure in his head and was trying to match it. The women who came in with their daughters, their eyes travelling over my shoulders and down to my knees, quick and assessing, like shopkeepers checking a bolt of cloth. They did not say anything. They never do. But I knew they were all working out the same sum, and that it did not come out right.
I did not sleep well. I began to wake at night and reach for the tape measure on the bedside table, and hold it across my chest, and read the figure, and find that it had changed. My chest measure in the morning was always a little larger than the night before. My sleeve length had grown. My inside leg had shortened by half an inch. And each morning, when I looked in the glass, the man looking back at me seemed a little more like someone I had made in my head, a version of myself I had cut for the shop window and never wore.
In the autumn I took on an apprentice, a quiet girl named Hannah from the village, who was good with a needle and had a steady eye. I asked her to measure me. I could not do it myself. My hands would not stop shaking.
She took the tape and came round behind me. I felt the cold metal settle across my shoulders, and I held my breath while she read the figures aloud and wrote them on the card in neat pencil. Chest, forty. Waist, thirty-two. Shoulder, eighteen and a half. Then she stopped.
"That's not right," she said quietly.
I asked her what she meant. She turned the card toward me. The figures were all wrong. They were not my measurements, the ones I had carried for forty-one years. They were the measurements of a man I had never met, shorter in the back, broader across the chest, with a long narrow hand and a stoop in his shoulders that I did not recognise. They were, I realised with a jolt that went through my whole body, the measurements of the man I had been measuring in the glass every morning.
Hannah looked at me. "Mr. Hale, who is it you're making the suit for?"
I did not answer her. I took the card from her hand, and I wrote underneath the figures, in my own neat hand, the name of the man they belonged to, which I had been too frightened to say for six months.
Then I put the tape measure back on the bedside table and went to bed, and I did not reach for it in the night, and in the morning the card was still on the counter, with the name written under the figures, and the figures had come right at last.