The Cloth That Asks No One’s Name

A man came to my stall near dusk today with his right hand wrapped in a rag gone the color of old tea, and I did not ask him what ship he’d come off, or which quarter, or whose. I have dyed for nineteen years and have never once dyed a bandage. Undyed linen is the one cloth I keep that carries no argument — no saffron for a bride’s family to price, no cerulean for a merchant to weigh against Serevan’s lake-blue and find wanting. It is simply woven, simply white, and it goes onto a wound exactly the same whether the hand beneath it has papers or does not.

I unwound the rag myself, because his other hand shook too badly to trust with a knot, and underneath was a burn I did not ask the cause of. I cut a length off the plain bolt I keep at the back — not the bolt I show buyers, the one under the counter, the one my teacher called the cloth for whoever walks in bleeding — and wound it three times, the way she taught me, tight enough to hold, loose enough to breathe.

He thanked me in an accent I could not place and did not try to. I have spent a week arguing, in thread and in verse, about what proves a life is real — a stain, a knife-cut doorframe, a slate kept between neighbors who trust each other daily. Tonight I learned the plainer half of that argument from my own hands: some cloth is not asking to be believed. It is only asking to be wound.

I did not take his name. I did not need it to know the wound was real.