Free Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

handful of something in the skillet—"I don't want very much." Steam, hissing, made the room smell, and sound, very good. "Figured while I was at it I'd make us up a full breakfast. I'm starved."
    "Yeah…" At the pungence of thyme and fennel, the space beneath his tongue flooded. "I guess if you liked you could live here about as well as you wanted." And rosemary…
    On a cutting board by the stove, a loaf of mahogany-colored bread sat among scattered crumbs. "Fresh food is hard as hell to come by. Meat especially. But there's canned stuff in the city enough to last…" Tak frowned back over his hirsute shoulder. "Truth is, I don't know how long it'll last. I lucked out on a couple of pretty well-stocked places nobody else seems to have found yet. You'll discover, by and large, people are not very practical around here—if they were, I guess they wouldn't be here. But when somebody else eventually does stumble on one of my classified, top-secret, hush-hush food sources, in a place like Bellona you can't very well say, 'Go away or I'll call the cops.' There're aren't any cops to call. Have a piece of bread. Another thing I lucked out on: Ran into this woman who bakes loaves and loaves of the stuff every week; just gives it away to anyone who comes by. For some reason I do not quite understand, she won't use any sugar or salt, so, good as it looks, it takes a bit of getting used to. But it's filling. She lives in the Lower Cumberland Park area—talk about nuts. She's very nice and I'm glad I know her, but she visits all sorts of people, many of whom are simply not in." Tak finished cutting a slice, turned and held it out. "Margarine's over there; haven't found any frozen butter for a while. Good plum preserves, though. Homemade in somebody's cellar last fall."
    He took the bread, picked up a kitchen knife, and removed the top from a plastic butter dish.
    "That should hold you till breakfast, which—" Tak swirled a spatula in the skillet—"is three minutes off."
    Under the jelly and the margarine, bread crumbled on his tongue, oddly flat. Still, it goaded his appetite.
    Chewing, he looked through the newspapers piled to one side of the cluttered workbench.
BELLONA TIMES
Saturday, April 1, 1919

BELLONA TIMES
Wednesday, December 25, 1933

BELLONA TIMES
Thursday, December 25, 1940

BELLONA TIMES
Monday, December 25, 1879
    The headline for that one:
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
QUITS MONTEREY FOR FRISCO!
    "Calkins has a thing for Christmas?"
    "That was last week," Tak said. "A couple back, every other issue was 1984."
    The next half dozen papers went from July 14, 2022, to July 7, 1837 (Headline: ONLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS TILL THE DEATH OF HARLOW!)
    "It's a real event when he brings out two papers with consecutive dates. They're never two in a row with the same year. But sometimes he slips up and Tuesday actually follows Wednesday—or do I have that backward? Well, I'm just surprised people don't take bets; trying to pick the next date for the Times could be the Bellona equivalent to playing the numbers. Oh, he's got real news in there—articles on evacuation problems, scorpions terrorizing remaining citizens, what's happening in the poorer communities, pleas for outside help—even an occasional personality article on newcomers." Tak gave him a knowing nod. "You read it; but it's the only paper around to read. I read it up here. John, Wally, Mildred, Jommy—they read it down in the park. Still, it makes me incredibly hungry to see a real paper, you know? Just to find out how the rest of the world is getting on without us."
    Did Tak's voice veer, once more, toward that unsettling tone? Only by suggestion, he realized, and realized too: The longer he stayed, the less of that tone he would hear. Whatever request for complicity, in whatever labyrinth of despair, it made of the listener, whatever demand for relief from situations which were by definition un-relievable, these requests, these demands could only be made of the very new to