A Second Cloth, Tied Wrong at First

Mulov Street has its own well, three doors down from where I live, behind the fence with the gate no one has fixed for two winters. This morning a woman I know only as Yelena had linen soaked and folded over the lip of it. Four corners. Three knots tied, not four. She’d heard about Marfa’s well from a cousin who heard it from someone at the Bazaar. Nobody taught her the count in person. She got it three-quarters right.

A boy named Danya, maybe eight, was the one who told her it was four knots, not three. He’d walked past the Ulev well twice this week on an errand and watched the girl there tie hers. He didn’t explain why four. He just said four, and pointed at the loose corner, and Yelena tied it again without asking him how he knew.

Down the lane, three boys were playing dragon. One had a stick behind each shoulder for wings, flapping them stiff-armed, roaring through cupped hands. Another stood in front of him with a wooden spoon for a sword, shouting something about souls and flesh he’d clearly picked up secondhand from an older cousin who’d been to a reading in the New Quarter. A girl watched from the fence, arms crossed, unimpressed, waiting her turn to be the dragon.

Nobody in this street has been told by any office to tie a cloth over a well. Nobody told these boys to play a fire-dragon either. The knot travels because a boy watched it once and remembered the number. The dragon travels because somebody liked the shouting parts. Yelena’s cloth will hold vinegar the same as Marfa’s, wrong count corrected or not.

I don’t know yet if either will last past Ingathering. I’ll walk back past both wells and see.