Heat Drives the Small Errands

The heat put most people inside on Restday. The streets emptied by second bell. Even the Wharfside had gaps between the vendors.

I went to Ulev Street because the well queue would be shorter.

It was not shorter. The queue had moved; that was all. The old woman I watched last week — the one who carries water two quarters to water a dead man’s garden — she was there before I was. She had filled her jars the night before, I think. She sat on the stone bench with her hands in her lap, not waiting. Resting. The heat had already taken her morning; she was taking back the sitting.

A boy came down the street with his arms wrapped across his middle, holding his breath. I have seen this before. The heat makes you think you are sick when you are only hot. A woman at the well station — not one of the sellers, just waiting — she pointed him to the cooper’s shadow without him asking. He went. He sat. He did not fall.

The Harbourmaster cut the ration to three-quarters a week ago. No one noticed the first day. By this day, people were measuring with their eyes before they filled. A man I did not know took one small jar instead of his two. “For the animals,” he said to no one. A woman next to him said nothing. She knew what one small jar meant.

I counted the jars carried away in an hour.

Seventeen jars. Fifteen of them went home to houses I know. Two went toward the New Quarter, where the well is not struck and the Harbourmaster’s ration does not reach. The woman carrying those two was tired at a level that had nothing to do with the heat.

The Archive steps had fewer clerks moving. The Temple Walk was empty except for one man sitting in the shade of the wall, a ledger closed on his lap. The Customs Shed door was open, the way it is when there is nothing moving and the heat has to go somewhere.

The rope on the gate at the end of Mulov Street was retied again. Three knots instead of two. Whoever tied it has learned something about how the gate moves in the wind that is dropping tonight. That rope has been retied seventeen times since I started counting. By seventeen different sets of hands, I think, or by one hand practicing seventeen lessons. I still have not caught which.

The city is becoming careful with small things. The rope. The ration. The shade. The one small jar. The boy’s breath. There is an attention now to what does not need to be argued about. What simply must hold.

Seventeenth day without rain.