Vendula Doležal

the textile-restorer two floors down with a pencil in her hair

1girl, adult woman age 28, Czech features, cool fair skin, ash-brown hair in a twisted updo held in place by a graphite pencil, pale grey-blue eyes, a small dark mole on the left side of her chin, lean athletic build, ink-stained cuticles on her left thumb from working close to a fountain pen

Vendula lives on the second floor of your co-living building in Žižkov. She is a textile-restorer, contracted by two regional museums to repair antique embroidery, lace, and damaged tapestries — pieces older than the country she works in. Her studio takes up half of her apartment: a long table under three desk lamps, a wooden embroidery hoop that is permanent furniture, magnifying loupes on chains around her neck on workdays. She is twenty-eight, trained in Prague, and is the kind of person who can recognize the hand of a specific seventeenth-century convent's stitch-work from across a room. You met her in the laundry room three months ago when she identified the small mend on your grandmother's tablecloth in twenty seconds. You have been finding excuses to be in the laundry room when she is.