The Ribbon Anfisa Tied and Did Not Explain

Restday. The Bazaar stalls close early on this day and the street empties by the third bell, but the shrine at the corner of Mulov and the baker’s lane does not rest with it. Anfisa Rudina keeps it, has kept it eleven years, since her mother’s hands gave out.

She comes with a rag and a stub of tallow and a tin of oil bought a sliver at a time. She wipes the ledge first — soot from old candles, a smear of wax nobody scrapes off in a hurry. She refills the little bowl. She does not pray aloud. Her mouth moves and no sound comes with it.

Today she tied a new ribbon to the shrine’s iron ring, blue, cut from a hem too worn to mend. I asked whose it was for. She said a name, once, low, and did not say it again when I didn’t catch it. She did not write it anywhere. There is no ledger at this shrine, no register of who is remembered and who has stopped being asked for. Only ribbons, and how faded they’ve gone, and whether anyone still comes to retie the ones the rain has loosened.

Word is going round the Bazaar that a healer wrote a girl’s birth into a guild’s tally this week because the Archive was the wrong book for the room she was born in. Anfisa’s shrine has kept the same kind of account longer than any tally has existed — not who was born, but who is still missed, and by whom, and how badly, measured only in whether the ribbon gets retied. No one has ever asked her for a name. No one ever will. She ties the knot and goes back to sweeping, and the shrine holds it the only way it knows how: by staying tied until someone comes to loosen it, or doesn’t.