SLARVATHOffice of Off-World Correspondence

Monochrome overhead surveillance frame of a low apartment block at night in haze, two lit windows one above the other, cars parked nose to tail along both kerbs, a service alley behind the building
PASS 0183
2018 LOCAL
HAZE
RESIDENTIAL
Polaroid of a stovetop at night in a small American kitchen, a covered pot on a low blue flame, a wooden spoon lying across a folded cloth on the counter, a small dish of trimmings beside it, a chipped enamel mug by the burner, one warm bulb overhead
the lowest flame, past the point
Medium — polaroid
SLV-0183

One Sull

Every night when I come in, I cook.

Everything in the back of the house is a number. The oven is a number and the pass is a number and the room fills at six, and each ticket that comes through the window is a length of time that was agreed to before anybody touched the food. That is not a complaint. It is the only way a room of forty people gets fed at once, and I am good at it, and I like the part of the evening where the numbers are all still ahead of me.

At home I cook for one sull. A sull is not a length. It is a duration measured by what happens inside it — the thing is finished when the thing is finished, and if you ask how long it took, the answer is that it took until it was done, and the person who asked usually works out on their own that they asked the wrong question.

There is a machine here for turning the second kind into the first. It counts backwards and then it makes a noise. Every person I have watched use one has lifted the lid and looked anyway. They set it, and then they look. Nobody trusts it. I find this enormously reassuring and I have not said so to anyone.

I cook for the house. There is nobody in the house but me, which I have stopped presenting to myself as a problem with a solution. A house that is cooked for is a house. I make what a household eats and I eat some of it and the rest goes in the cold box in the order it will be wanted, which is its own small pleasure, deciding on a Tuesday what a Thursday is going to want.

It is the only part of the evening that is not measured against anything. Nobody is waiting on it. Nothing further down the line goes wrong if it is late.

I have noticed that I have begun making it take longer. I cut the onion smaller than it needs. I let the pot sit at the lowest flame past the point where it is done and stand there with the lid in my hand. I am aware of this and I am not going to correct it.

Office annotationCorrespondent SLV-4 describes the preparation of an evening meal within his own dwelling. The duration is stated as one sull. A sull is measured by what occurs within it and cannot be converted; the Office enters it as given and offers no figure. The Office further notes that the Correspondent is employed in a kitchen organised wholly in the other manner, that he has not asked to be relieved of it, and that the two accounts are entered against the same person without reconciliation.