Seeder, Chapter Four
4. Phlox
West Flat Market is a charming misnomer for a square of empty storefronts: windows boarded or gaping like mouths with broken glass teeth to swallow whatever homeless people or rats want to house themselves inside. Sometimes Phlox sees a family in what was once a dress boutique or a bookstore and imagines they’re shoppers rather than squatters. There’s nothing to be bought or sold, but it doesn’t mean the Market’s empty, especially in the morning. Out front Yuzanov’s bakery — once family-owned, now government-run — a line gathers at dawn and extends until mid-morning when it evaporates, to reconstitute the next day.
For news in Belovode, breadlines are faster than broadsheets. The sheets bring updates from the front, but the updates are the same. We march to glorious victory. The world trembles at the might of the Urizen Dynasty and the proud nation of Lod. They list yesterday’s food shortages, which tracks will be shut off to allow passage for the dynastic carriage that afternoon, and who was arrested last night. To find out what district the pharoahs will sweep this morning, or who’s distilled a batch that will fuck you up without making you shit yourself blind, hop on a West Flat breadline and listen to the thrum and bustle of Belovode, capital of Lod, shot through with train tracks, and orbited by Crown’s ring of metal mansions, but starving throughout its center.
Proper etiquette starts from the line’s head and walk its length to the tail. It takes time, greeting each person, recalling a detail to inquire about — this one’s daughter’s being married, that one’s putting on a gallery show in a basement next week — recognizing and acknowledging the humanity of friends, acquaintances, enemies, and former lovers. The social ritual is glibly called the price of bread. Failure to perform it means weeks of hard glares and silences. The world tries to make Belovodi forget they are human; they must remind one another, and themselves.
Phlox walks the line that begins at Yuzanov’s bakery and snakes around the block. For her trouble and time, she’ll be lucky to get crusts, but she’s here for the pulse of things.
She knows everyone.
The trade unionists work in the munitions factories that line the westside of East Track and traverse Fulcrum to scrounge West Flat for breakfast. When foreign papers run pictures of Belovodi, this is who they portray: men and women who resemble the ingots they work with, stocky builds, hair flaming red and skin olive from the blood of West Plains auroch-riders in their veins. They’re the signifier of Lodian fortitude, adorning posters rallying citizens to the defense of the fatherland, but they’re a dying breed. Their numbers dwindle, and their children skirt factory work to fuck around with art students and weekend revolutionaries, who lick wolfish lips when a thick steak of fresh factory meat wanders into a loft party. The unions’ strength is flagging in the city; their clout is under the clay domes of Chud in the south, city of mines and choking dust. The men don’t acknowledge Phlox. Her pale skin is a sign of academic blood, her clothes scream leftist alignment. The women see something in Phlox: a door that opens outward. They look at her with desire, or look away in fear.
The Loyalists on the line are aloof or impatient. They check wrists where watches used to be, expecting the Urizens to show up any minute to announce an end to scarcity. They wait for bread and deliverance. They’re the brass; they run shops, or hold shares in factories. They own something. When the war is over, they assume they’ll be restored to comfort, and the war will be over any day. They’re here because bread is bread, and they have no time to use the ovens in the houses they bought in Lodeston and North Wedge. They nod and call Phlox Citizen. The edge in their voices indicate resentment that the term encompasses her too.
Dotted along the line are the rabble Phlox counts herself among. Last year, Urizen spoke against Belovode’s aimless youth, calling them the Fresh Scum, a term they happily adopted. The Fresh Scum embraces factions within factions, from the moderate Artists to End the War to “radical” groups like Decolonize Now. All groups have Gardeners in their ranks, but no one knows where to place them; and their affiliation is suspect. They’re something between a cult and a philosophical aberration, tolerated because their desired ends align with most groups on the left. Phlox found an old paperback once, a novel about revolution where the real power was held by women knitting in the back of council meetings. The scarves they knit bore the names of those bound for the revolution’s blade. Those who know Phlox from committee meetings call her Walker, because of their shared direction and her mistrust of the trains. Ones who know her better call her by her name. They clap her hand, pull her tight. They bow slightly and whisper appelations.
Disciple. Seedcrafter. Witch.
Phlox takes her place at the end of the line, among the Fresh Scum and the unionists and the brass; components of Belovode’s citizenry, united in hunger, waiting in hopes of a loaf of bread.
