The Finger’s Width Agata Pern Would Not Close

Agata Pern packs moss into her window frame before second bell, kneeling on the sill’s outer ledge in the drizzle that has not let up since the rains came back. Her hands are red to the wrist. She takes the moss from a sack by the gate, wet green stuff pulled from the Karvel’s tidal bank, and pushes it into the gap between frame and wall with her thumb, the same motion down the whole sill, left to right, the way I have watched her do every cold season since I started watching her.

She leaves a gap. A finger’s width, at the top corner, where the moss meets the lintel. I ask her why. She does not stop packing to answer. “Air has to go somewhere,” she says, “or it goes nowhere, and then it goes into you instead.”

She has heard about Guild Row. Everyone on this street has heard about Guild Row by now — the cordwainer and his wife, found two mornings past the Stilling, every gap in their room sealed tighter than any room needs sealing, the air they were keeping out fine until it had nowhere left to go but through them. Agata does not say the dead couple’s name. She does not need to. She has left a finger’s width of gap in every window of this house for eleven winters, long before anyone off Guild Row gave her a reason beyond her own grandmother’s hands, which left the same gap and never explained it either.

I watch her finish the sill and move to the next. The drizzle thickens into something closer to rain. Somewhere behind her, Darya Oskin’s loaf is still warm under its eave. Somewhere behind that, an Archive desk is working out who now owns a workshop neither body left behind can claim. Agata Pern does not know about the workshop. She knows about the gap. It is the only estate she has ever had to defend, and she defends it with her thumb, in the rain, before second bell, the way her grandmother did.