SLARVATHOffice of Off-World Correspondence

Monochrome overhead surveillance frame of a supermarket parking lot at night, cars in two rows, roof units on the store, a lit entrance canopy
PASS 0177
2018 LOCAL
CLEAR
RETAIL
Polaroid of an open kitchen cupboard in a small American apartment under one warm bulb, the front shelf holding a week's shopping — a lemon, a flat tin, a paper sack of flour, a carton of salt, a bag of rice — with a row of glass jars and bottles pushed to the back behind them, and a chipped enamel mug on the counter below
the back row does not move
Medium — polaroid
SLV-0177

The Choosing

At home a house is provisioned. Somebody whose work it is brings what the house needs, in the amount the house needs, and what arrives is what there is. I had been here eleven days before I understood that the whole of it — the choosing, the carrying, the deciding how much — had been handed to me along with the key.

The food hall has four kinds of salt.

I go on the evening I am paid, after the kitchen closes, when the aisles are being mopped and the lights over the empty end are already off. I have been shopping the way I do everything else here, which is to say I have been recording. I buy one of a thing to find out what the thing is. I have brought home a lemon on its own. I have brought home a tin of small fish packed flat in oil, which turned out to be eight fish, all facing the same way. Nothing I carried in last week made a meal with anything else I carried in last week. I ate very strangely and I learned a great deal.

Here is what I cannot get used to. In the morning the shelf is full again. I take a thing off it and by the next evening the gap has closed, and nothing I did cost anybody anything. I keep watching for the place where it runs out.

We have a word, sennek, for the last of a thing. It is not a quantity. It is a condition of the house: a house that has a sennek has not run out, and a house that has used it has, and the difference between those two houses is not the food.

I will not take the last one. I have tried. There were two jars of the red paste and I took one, and the following week there was one, and I stood there long enough that a person came and asked if I was all right. I bought flour instead. I have flour.

There is a sennek of everything in my cupboard now. The last of the rice, the last of the oil, the last inch of the vinegar, all of it at the back where I can see it, none of it going anywhere. I am aware that the shop opens at six and that it is four streets away. I have stopped pretending this is about the shop.

Office annotationCorrespondent SLV-4 refers to a retail grocery and to the provisioning of his own household. Eleven of your days is 11.79 turns. The Office observes that sennek is a condition of a household and not a class of goods, that no schedule exists against which it might be declared, and that the Correspondent has been advised of this before. The items described have been entered as provisions. The Office has not entered the one that was not purchased.