When you bind off, there is always a tail. You pull the last loop through and cut, leaving enough to weave the end back into the work so it does not come undone. What you cut off is the surplus. This one was about eight inches.
It came off curled. It had been pulled two ways — up through the needle, down into the fabric — and it held both bends at once, a little gray helix, kinked where the tension had been. Wool keeps the shape you bully into it. Set it on the table and it will not lie flat. It remembers the sock.
Too short to knit. You cannot make anything from eight inches, not even a row. Too good to burn. It is real wool, from a real sheep, and it matches nothing in the bin and everything in the sock.
So it goes in the tin. The tin is where the tails live. Grays and browns and one violent orange from a hat I do not remember making. They are the offcuts of finished things, each one the exact length of what was left over, which is to say the wrong length for anything.
I keep them because a button will come loose someday, or a seam will gape, and I will want a thread that is already this color, already this wool, and I will paw through the tin and find one close enough.
It sat on top of the pile, still curled, not yet flattened by the ones that would land on it after.