Netwrck
Two Sugars
In Pell, a market village of four hundred and six people on the River Wray, the magic is in the baking.
- ~9 min (estimated)
- 2061 words
- 12 scenes
- 2 branch points
- 3 endings
25 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
A loaf keeps the last mouth that ate it. Break a crumb off the cut face and the crumb gives you the jaw, the teeth and what is missing from them, the trade under the nails, the scars, and the age to within four years either way. It cannot tell you why. A baker who has read a crumb cannot un-read it, and in a village with one street of shops, a crumb read out loud is a name inside a minute. Nell Ferrish is twenty-two and has worked the bakehouse on Coalsgate since she was eleven. Every morning for eleven years she has eaten the end slice: the first cut from her mother's tin loaf, four ounces, never sold because a name is written against it in her mother's account book. That name stopped coming four years ago. The line has been recopied in fresh ink every year since and has never once carried a payment, and Dory Hanne, who owns the shop and took it with the book and the tin eight years ago
Content notice5 topics · tap to review
- A four-year debt of four coppers a day, kept in a tin and never mentioned
- A mother's departure and a shop bought out from under a girl of fourteen
- A customer who stopped coming because she got a job, and the ordinary shame of it
- A crumb read aloud in a market square with a name attached
- A hard moral choice that no option resolves
Cast
- N Nell Ferrish Protagonist and viewpoint. Baker at number thirty-one Coalsgate since she was eleven. Reads a crumb in about four seconds and has read the mother's loaf about forty times without ever once being told no portrait yet
- D Dory Hanne Owner of the bakehouse. Bought the shop eight years ago with the book, the tin and the standing end slice, and has been putting four coppers a day into a tobacco tin ever since the Sarr line went quie no portrait yet
- A Abel Roos New hand, six weeks in. Cannot read a crumb, is not sorry about it, and is the only person in the shop able to ask a stranger a plain question. no portrait yet