The banner's fade line

A Vacation Bible School volunteer unrolls the felt banner every June, matching pinholes to memory rather than measurement, since the backing board it once hung from was replaced years ago and the new one takes the pins in slightly different places. The banner itself is burgundy felt, a yard and a half by two, appliqued with a dove and a sunburst cut from lighter felt and stitched down by hand in thread that has faded to three distinct shades depending on which decade's spool supplied it. Felt does not fray at the edges the way woven cloth does, which is likely the entire reason this medium survived long enough to become a tradition rather than a phase; the dove's wing shows the only real wear, rubbed pale by forty years of thumbs checking whether it was hung straight. Storage between Junes happens in a cardboard tube in the choir robe closet, rolled rather than folded, an instruction handwritten on the tube itself in a hand nobody currently on staff recognizes. The sunburst rays, originally twelve, now number ten, two lost to a mishap involving a rolling cart that nobody witnessed and everyone has a theory about. Under fluorescent light the burgundy reads almost brown; under the basement's one window it turns properly red for about forty minutes some afternoons, a color nobody on the current staff has ever stayed late enough to see.

Sig. Lundqvist