It's Still Life

Episode 10: Liturgy for the Saturday Market
Valence, 1836: Where hunger measures every stranger

I. The Root

The people of Valence
are rooted in hunger —

missed meals,
children whose ribs
learn to count themselves
before they learn their letters.

This hunger speaks.
And calculates.

Every loaf
a fraction.
Every coin
a remainder.
Every stranger
a divisor

in an equation
already too tight.

Hunger empties the belly
and narrows the heart.

The heart of Valence
is a needle’s eye.

II. The Spread of Scarcity

Strangers mean
the spread is thinner.

Not summer jam on bread,
there is no jam.

This is survival’s arithmetic:
employment for a foreigner
is bread removed
from a local mouth.

Another language
in the market
becomes a theft of silence.

A different coat.
A different gait.
A different way
of meeting the eye.

Evidence.

This is profiling
before the word existed —

the foreign curl
of a vowel,
the nervous fold
of a hand.

The way a stranger walks
as if expecting
to be stopped.

They are not wrong
to watch.

Only wrong
about who is dangerous.

III. The Arithmetic of Flight

Brigid and Felreil flee
because guilt
is irrelevant.

Flight is arithmetic.

Distance to the next town.
Patience of the gendarmes.
The angle of light
on a wanted poster.

How to buy bread
without speaking.

How much of themselves
must disappear
to keep the rest alive.

This is the cold math
of survival

where there is no room
for another mouth.

IV. The Passing Through

It is an art:

moving like water,
leaving no mark
on the stones crossed.

But the town remembers
the price of bread
last winter.

The stranger
who bought the last loaf.

Foreign syllables
that landed
without apology.

Passing through
is arithmetic:

the odds of being seen,
being stopped,

that fraction of a second
between foreign
and arrested.

V. For the Unnoticed

Pity the hungry town
and its narrowing heart.

May it find bread
before it finds enemies.

Pity those
passing through.

May their foreignness
go unnoticed.

Watch the police
who watch for vigilance.

See them
before they see you.

Know the grammar
of survival:

the cold path
that keeps you moving,
keeps you quiet,

in a world
with no room
for another mouth.

Flight is freedom,

the freedom to choose
which hunger survives.