The Dry Bridge does not open so much as accumulate. By 10:25 the blankets are already down, weighted at the corners with stones, and on them: medals with ribbons faded to the color of weak tea, cameras missing their lenses, amber beads strung loose like they're still deciding on a necklace to become.
A vendor, maybe sixty, wrapped in a cardigan the color of the sky that morning, pours me coffee from a thermos without being asked. Small cup, no handle, grounds settling at the bottom like sediment in a river. I didn't order it. She didn't offer it, either. It just arrived, the way things do here if you stand still long enough.
I pick up a medal. Hammer and sickle, dulled. I don't know whose chest it hung on, what war or parade or quiet Tuesday it marked. The vendor watches me hold it, says nothing, lets the silence do the explaining. This is the texture of post-Soviet mornings, I think: objects outliving their meanings, still warm from someone's hand.
My own camera stays around my neck, unused for a while. Some mornings you just look. The light is doing something particular through the mist, low and slanted, catching dust off the blankets like it's been waiting all night for an audience. Saudade for a place I've never lived in, a decade I never touched. Funny how that happens. I finish the coffee. Grounds and all, nearly.
