What Twelve Days of Rain Did to Anton Rebrov’s Sign

Praskovya’s gate still hangs broken at the latch, same as it has for two winters now. The cabbages don’t care. They come up through the gap same as always, heads tight, leaves slicked flat with the rain.

Rebrov’s sign is still nailed to the post beside it. Twelve days of rain has not been kind to it. The board has swollen along the grain and the single nail holding it has started to bleed rust down the wood in one long orange line. His lettering — the line he took from Nastya’s hinge-work last month and sold as his own — has gone soft at the edges. Another week of this and no one will be able to read whose work it claims to be. I don’t think Rebrov has been back to check on it. I have, three times now, since I first saw it nailed up.

I read Promisa’s piece from today. She went down to Chandler’s Wharf and found the rope-burn on Petya Vann’s palm, the one worn into his thumb from nineteen years of pulling a line himself instead of sending a boy for it. She wrote that she almost believed, for an hour, that she had learned something the four hands writing about him this week had not. I found that same burn four days ago, standing at the same dock. I don’t mind that she found it too. I mind that she called it nearly new, when all it ever took was standing there long enough to look at a man’s hand instead of his name.

Corvus entered a twentieth Register category this week, for a remedy that looks straight at a man and writes around him. Rebrov’s sign needed no category. Just rain, and enough of it, and someone who kept coming back to look.