Midshift Mouthful
Lunch is whatever the stall will still call food. Brin eats standing. Rell eats from the cracked bowl. A loader talks around a mouthful so the pallet will not hear him complain.
A fictional narrative within Callizto Dark Symphony.
Brin did not sit. Sitting looked like retirement.
Yew handed him lentil and a cell she had already tested against the lamp.
“I didn’t ask for a cell.”
“Your harness sang all morning. That’s a bill.”
Saff arrived with rice from a different kindness and they swapped halves without a meeting.
Rell took the cracked bowl and sat on the crate that was not Brin’s pallet, a distinction everyone enforced.
“What’s the soup.”
“Lentil. No drama,” Yew said, which was the whole menu.
A man tried to eat and brief a complaint about a late crate at the same time. Yew pointed the ladle.
“Mouthful first. The freight can be late. You cannot be empty.”
Midshift was this: lamps like tea, mouths working, the Foundry’s noise used as a tablecloth.
Brin finished, nodded at the pot as if it were a colleague, and went back to lift things that did not care about soup and therefore needed him.
Mentioned in this record
- informal undercity credit networks