From the Office
11 September 2026
The counter is open
Discount Indulgences begins its public work. The catalogue is limited, the authority is unspecified, and the till is not, at present, receiving.
Be it known that the Office of Temporal Offerings has set out a stall under the name Discount Indulgences.
We sell remissions for faults of a petty kind. The dishes. The reply sent too widely. The biscuit. We do not sell peace with one’s maker, whoever that may be, and we do not sell the washing of the dishes themselves.
The papers are written in the old language because the old language is what the public expects of an indulgence, and because it is harder to ask a straight question of a sentence that begins Be it known. Photographs of those papers will be hung in the catalogue when they exist. Until then, the prose is the product.
As to the authority under which we operate: it is presently in force. Further particulars have been requested. Further particulars have not arrived. We remain, in the meantime, open, marked down, and unable to complete a checkout, which we consider a kind of honesty.