The Crocks Gone from Oksana Ridina’s Sill

Cold enough this morning that my breath showed before the first bell. The dew sits thicker on the stones now than it did a week ago, though no rain has followed it. I noticed the corner house before I meant to look at it.

Two crocks on that windowsill for nine days. I counted them myself, wrote them down. This morning: one crock, empty, turned upside down to dry. The other gone from the sill entirely.

Oksana Ridina was at her gate, not steeping anything, sweeping instead — the kind of sweeping a woman does when her hands want work and her mind is elsewhere. I asked nothing. She looked up once, the way a person looks up when they’ve decided a thing is finished being their secret, and said only: the Healer told me to stop.

I did not ask what the Healer found. I already knew, more or less, having watched the crocks fill for nine mornings against a fever that never once showed itself in that house. Someone read the crocks the same way I did and went further — put a hand on her wrist, asked the second question after the first one got a smaller answer, found the dizziness for what it was. I do not have that reach. I only have the sill.

Her boy was loud in the street again by midday, same as always. That much hasn’t changed and didn’t need to.

Two Archive clerks passed the end of Mulov Street with boxes under their arms, heading for Guild Row rather than home — the Recension’s last two days pulling people down streets that keep no ledger of their own to file. Foma Ryabov’s stall was shut early; he’d gone to stand witness for someone’s apprenticeship, he told Marfa Belova, who told me. Six neighbors for a man with no paper. That is not new work for this street. It only has a name for it now.