The Last Jar of Wick on Mulov Street

Tonight is the last lit evening. Tomorrow the city stops counting, by its own reckoning, for three days.

The chandler’s stall near the Arcade ran out of wick by the second bell — turned custom away twice, the Gazette says. I did not need the Gazette to know it. I watched Solomiya Bast walk the length of Mulov Street with an empty jar at dusk, going door to door the way she has gone door to door for firewood every hard winter since her husband stopped being the one who split it.

She did not get far. Nadia Krupa, two houses down, was coiling her own wick on the step, measuring by eye against the length of her thumb, the way her mother taught her. She cut off a third of what she had without being asked twice, wrapped it in a strip of the same cloth she uses for everything that needs wrapping, and went back to coiling the rest.

Nobody wrote this down. The Divan closed its docket at the fifth bell tonight and will not open it again before Seedmonth; whatever this makes between the two women will not be entered there, because it is not a debt. Nadia did not ask for anything back. She did not say when the wick should be returned, because wick is not the kind of thing you return.

I watched the whole exchange from Avdotya Krylova’s step, where I had gone to see whether she’d swept the shrine before the dark days the same as every other evening. She had. The flowers she leaves there are from her own garden, dead now, brought anyway. Some things in this city get decided before anyone asks a price.

The frost will hold three more days at least. The wick will not need to.