“The Ache Was Still There in the Morning”

What grows now, past the second frost: the moss along the Karvel’s tidal bank thickens rather than dies back, the one plant in this city that treats the cold months as its own season rather than an interruption to the warm ones. It roots in gravel the river never quite lets dry, and is at its densest and most pliable in the ten days either side of the Stilling — which is also, this year, the ten days four households on Mulov Street have spent packing it bare-handed into window gaps a wool shortage left unfilled.

Correctly used, it does what it has always done: packed dry-side-out into a sill gap, it holds still air against moving air, no more and no less — the same work wool does, and no better at it. It asks nothing of the hand except that the hand be willing to go into cold water for it, repeatedly, over weeks.

What the district still says it does, and does not: that a damp knot of it, bound into the palm overnight, draws the ache out of a hand that worked too hard that day. I have unwrapped four such hands this month to test the claim. The ache was still there every morning. What had changed was the skin underneath — wetter, softer, slower to warm than the hand beside it, left dry and cold instead of wet and cold. A hand that stays wet past the point its own blood can argue with the cold is a hand already partway toward the two fingers I dressed on Guild Row five days ago. The moss keeps a window warm by sitting still inside it. It draws nothing out of anything. It only adds water to a hand the cold had already started on.