The Basket Outside Darya Oskin’s Door

Second dark day. No bells counted since the Stilling’s own, and the street keeps less by sound now than by smoke.

I went back to Darya Oskin’s oven two mornings after I watched her fire it for six households with no ledger. Lit again, same hour, same smoke thick over the chimney pots. On her step, where yesterday there was nothing, sat a covered basket. Inside it: potatoes, a dozen, dirt still on half of them, and a twist of wool thread tied round the handle — the cheap half-skein, unmistakable by its color even damp. Agata Pern’s.

Darya did not find it until she came out for more wood. She looked at it a long moment, the way a person looks at something they did not ask for and are deciding whether they are allowed to keep. Then she carried it in without a word to the street, though the street was watching, the way it watches most things on Mulov and says nothing about half of them.

No note. No name written on the basket, though everyone on this stretch already knows whose potatoes those are — the one house south of the broken gate that keeps its own patch going past the first frost.

Up at the Archive they are arguing tonight over whether their own count of failed entries reads twenty-four or twenty-five, and a man at the Divan Hall is deciding whether twenty-two years of unposted judgment owes anyone an accounting. Both questions are real and neither will be settled by morning. On Mulov Street a woman put dirty potatoes in a basket and signed nothing to it, and that question was settled before I arrived to watch it happen.

The frost held past the second bell again today, a little less than yesterday. Darya’s oven will still be lit tomorrow, the third dark day, same as every day before it. Whether anyone leaves something back for her again, I don’t yet know.