6
" So I would stand in that cupboard and see how the stores were decreasing. I knew we had weeks to go before all of it was gone but I knew also that it was depleting and that various staples would be finished soon, leaving us with those items of which we had a surplus, like dried mushrooms, which would far outlast anything else. I wondered if my father would simply refuse to address this. If he would make meals or have me make them with fewer and fewer ingredients so our diets would continue a while as they were but grow daily and weekly more thin, more flavorless, until for the months until the last jar ran completely out we would be dining on mushrooms, mushrooms for breakfast, soaked in water and salt, mushrooms crushed for lunch, fried in oil until the oil ran out and then simply seared and blackened in a pan over the fire for our suppers, or gnawed raw, until even they went and we would die, one after the other, the taste of mushrooms in our mouths. I couldn’t decide whether I, being smaller and eating less, would die more quickly than he in this mushroomless state or more slowly. I couldn’t decide which would be better or worse. "
― China Miéville , This Census-Taker
12
" When I approached and told her the key-maker wasn’t there she cursed filthily and threw something hard against the step, shouting, “What am I supposed to do with this now?” It bounced away. I waited while she stormed away and when she’d left I got onto all fours and found what she’d discarded. It was a bit of some engine. It looked like a heart, I remember that. I put it on the kitchen table. When, hours later, my father returned, he put down his heavy bags at the sight of it. “A woman brought it,” I said. He picked it up and turned it over. “She threw it away and went.” “Whatever this came from,” he said, “what she wants is a key to make it start again.” “Can’t she just put it back in?” I said. "
― China Miéville , This Census-Taker
