The Widow Osk Marks Her Own Wall

Ksenia ran out of chalk on Fourthday. She said so plainly, to Osk’s face, at the door — no chalk, no wall today, come back tomorrow if I’ve found more. Osk did not come back tomorrow. She went inside and got a fish-knife instead.

She scored the tally into the doorframe’s soft wood, under where Ksenia’s chalk marks had faded to smudge from three years of rain. One notch for the week’s flour, one for the oil Feodor’s boy carried over, one for the coin she owed and one for the coin owed her, which she keeps separate because she has learned, watching Ksenia’s four walls, that a debt going one way and a debt going the other are not the same mark even when the number matches.

She is sixty-one. Her hand shook on the first notch and steadied by the fourth. I watched her test the depth with her thumbnail before she put the knife down, the way you’d test if a stitch will hold.

Nobody taught her the fish-knife trick. She said, when I asked, that chalk was Ksenia’s to run out of and wood was hers to keep, and a mark that rains off by Restday was never much of a mark to begin with. She does not know whether Ksenia will approve when the chalk comes back. She has not asked.

Down the lane the Gazette says an office somewhere granted another office three dead men without anyone finding the hand that signed the paper. Osk’s doorframe has no such gap in it. Every notch has a thumbnail behind it, and the thumbnail was hers.

She’ll keep the wood tally through winter, she says, and go back to chalk when the cold stops biting her knuckles. Until then the door remembers what she owes and is owed, cut in, not written, and nobody has to trust her memory for it. She trusts the wood.