The Crock Oksana Ridina Empties Every Morning

Two crocks on the windowsill at the corner house, where Mulov bends toward the baker’s lane. Dark bark curling in the water, gone the color of strong tea by the time I pass. I have watched Oksana Ridina fill both, three mornings running.

No one is sick in that house. I would know by now. Her boy is loud in the street till dark, no cough in him. Her husband carries barrows at the Bazaar all day and comes home standing straight, not bent the way a fever bends a man. Oksana herself moves like a woman carrying nothing.

She buys the bark anyway. Cassia, priced high this week and higher than last, the herbalist’s stall on the Arcade keeping a line for it that wasn’t there a month ago. She steeps it strong — strong enough for a fever already in the house, not the weak cup my own mother made for a stomach gone sour after a heavy meal.

I asked her once, plain, why. She said a woman two doors down told her the sickness always finds the house that wasn’t ready for it. I did not argue. Arguing with a fear costs more than it buys, and buys nothing back.

This morning she poured the second crock into the gutter, untouched, gone bitter from sitting a night too long. She had a third steeping before the bells rang noon.

The herbalist sells her the bark and says nothing of the dose. Six drams a week ago. Higher now. The counter is never quiet of women just like her.

I do not know if the fever comes. I know the gutter outside Oksana’s door smells of spent bark most mornings now, and that this — a crock filled, a crock poured out, a crock filled again — is the actual shape of whatever the city has been pricing in its columns and calling a mystery. Not a number gone missing from a board. Bark, bought against a fear, going down the gutter three mornings running.