The Bread of the Stranger

Thessaloniki, 1941. A city can starve with the sea in front of it, and nine-year-old Despina Naoumidis learns to tell, from a long way off, which people in the soup line will not be in it much longer.

Then the ration cards come, and with them a list: your name is found, a mark is made, and you eat. It does not feel like a snare. It feels like rescue. By spring a kind man from their own streets is given a desk. He asks only to register every household, to keep them safe.

Across the courtyard live the Cohens — old Barba-Avram, who keeps the black iron key to a house in Spain four centuries lost, and Estrella, born the same month as Despina, four steps of stone away.

A story of bread, and lists, and the strangers we choose to see. The standalone prequel novella to Fairer, Safer.