The Fourth Morning at the Corner

Cold enough before the second bell now that I keep my shawl on past it. Fourth morning of that. The dust that sat on everything through Dryheat hasn’t come back since the flood, and the stones at the corner where Mulov meets the baker’s lane were damp again today, not with rain, just with the night giving something back before the heat takes it.

He came the same time as the other three mornings. Same pace, not hurried, a man who has somewhere to be and is choosing not to be there yet. I was at my window with a cup going cold, not hiding it. He stopped at the exact center of the corner, same spot each time, like it’s been measured.

This time I watched where his eyes went, instead of just that he’d come. Not to me. Past me, to Marfa Belova’s gate two doors down, where she was crouched over a crate of cabbages, sorting the ones with the frost-bite spots from the sound ones, a pot of something dark steeping on the step beside her that smelled like the cassia bark that’s gotten so dear this week. She didn’t look up. He watched her work for the length of maybe ten breaths.

Then he turned back toward Temple Walk, same as the other three days.

I had it wrong, a little. I thought the corner was the whole of it. It isn’t the corner. It’s her gate, and whatever is past it, that he isn’t ready to walk up to. The corner is just as far as a man can get before that becomes true.

Marfa never saw him. She finished the crate, carried it in, left the pot on the step to keep steeping. Someone will drink that tonight, fever or no fever in the house.