Who Gets the Restday Flowers at Mulov’s Bend

Two shrines stand at the bend where Mulov Street turns toward the baker’s lane. Neither is large. Both are stone, waist-high, the kind built by whoever owned the corner plot two generations back and never taken down because nobody could say whose job it was to take them down.

The first gets flowers every Restday morning, without fail, for as long as I have been watching this corner. Marfa Belova brings them before first bell, before the Hanging Dew has thickened, whatever is left over from what she grows or what she can cut from someone’s hedge without asking. Marigold most weeks. Chicory when the marigold is spent. Once, in Coldmonth, a fistful of dried lavender because nothing else stood a chance against the frost. She does not linger. She sets the stems in the stone bowl, straightens what’s crooked, and goes on to the well.

The second shrine, ten paces further, gets nothing. Not neglect exactly — someone sweeps the leaves off its base most weeks, the stone is not fouled, no one has let it go to ruin. It is simply never given flowers. I asked Marfa once, plainly, why one and not the other. She said the first was her mother-in-law’s people’s shrine, and the second belonged to a family that left the quarter before Marfa’s own children were born, and nobody left to bring them anything, and it did not feel right for her to start now, this many years on, as though she could stand in for a family she never met.

No clerk assigned her that rule. No notice was posted. She has never written it down, and today, this Restday, with the Archive Steps finally quiet again after the Recension, she did exactly what she has done every Restday I have watched her: flowers for the one, none for the other, the sweeping the same for both.

I mean to see whether the second shrine ever gets a flower again, or whether the rule holds simply because nobody has yet had a reason strong enough to break it.