Katya Ties Her Broom the Wrong Way Three Times

The Gazette says the frost reached the Bazaar’s flagstones this morning, a bell earlier than woodsmoke used to beat it there. On Mulov Street we had it yesterday already. I saw it first on the twigs.

Yelena Tarkova cuts her birch in Frostmonth, usually, when the sap sleeps and the wood binds easier. This year the cold beat her calendar by three weeks. She cut early and complained the whole time, because a broom bound off-season loosens faster than one bound on time, whatever hands do the binding.

Her granddaughter Katya is nine, maybe ten. Old enough to hold the twigs steady. Not yet old enough to feel, in her own wrists, the exact turn where the cord has gone tight enough, and one turn more would be too many.

She had tried twice before I sat on the step, and was trying a third time when I arrived. Yelena did not watch the girl’s hands. She watched the finished broom lean against the wall on its own, unsupported, and said only: it falls over. Again.

The second one stood by itself. The third one, corded tighter than the first two, cracked a twig at the base — too much cord, not enough give left in it. Yelena took it apart without a word, drew the cracked twig, fed in a fresh one, and handed the whole thing back.

Katya didn’t ask how long this takes to learn properly. She has watched her grandmother sell brooms off this same step since before she could count the turns of cord herself. Some things in that house don’t get asked; they get watched until they’re understood.

Six brooms, twice-corded, went out before the light went — ordered by a Wharfside household getting ready for the wet months. Katya’s saved third attempt, cracked and mended, wasn’t among them. Yelena kept it by her own door, to sweep her own step with until a better one gets made.

The shrine two doors down was still bare when I passed it. Avdotya’s hour is later than mine. She will have come by before the Bazaar’s own frost burns off, same as she always does, eleven years running, counted or not.