Who Sweeps the Shrine at the Foot of Mulov Street

Frost got to the cobbles before the second bell today, same as the Gazette said it would, a thin crust gone soft by the time I crossed it. I went looking for what the cold does to the shrine at the foot of Mulov Street, the one wedged between the cooper’s wall and the ditch nobody has filled in since spring.

Avdotya Krylova was there first, as she always is. She has swept that stone ledge every morning for longer than anyone on the street can date exactly — eleven years, Praskovya says, though Praskovya says that about most things she isn’t sure of. Avdotya uses a broom of birch twigs bound with the same cord, twice mended. She scrapes the frost off the ledge with the broom’s handle, not her hand, because her hand cracks in this weather and she has no time this week for a cracked hand.

The candle stub in the niche was down to a thumb’s width. She didn’t go buy a new one. She went into her own larder and came back with a half-burned stub from her own table, pressed it into the warm wax of the old one, and lit it from a coal carried in a tin cup so the wind wouldn’t take the match.

No one asked her to do any of this. No name is cut anywhere on that stone saying whose work it is. The Gazette this week is full of unsigned corrections — a count fixed overnight, a figure nobody will put a name to. Avdotya has been doing unsigned work on that ledge for eleven years, and the stone has never once asked who did it.