A story of community policing and sweet militia

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

As part of sundress municipalism, Vekllei’s villages and townships are mostly self-sufficient and self-regulating. Although a walk in the capital will take you past colossal apartment blocks and cinemas, libraries and schools of great magnificence, you are really looking at a hundred different communities going about personal business at their leisure. The villages are large and concrete now, but the people are are still there.

So does it surprise anyone that the police are just as much caregivers as law enforcement? That’s the thing about cultural matriarchy — even old moustachioed crustaceans like Teddy Roresoin here are mothers in the consciousness of the country.

Teddy came from shipbuilders and he was desperate to avoid becoming his parents. He enlisted in the Navy, but at university his politics soured on dying in some hole in Taiwan and he returned to his seaside prefecture. His office in the station overlooks the dry dock where his parents once worked. In his day it birthed large trawlers of fatty Atlantic salmon. Today it makes nuclear submarines.

He didn’t mean to have a child, much less a daughter, and she turned out to be everything he was terrified of. In Vekllei, they are called ‘Lodoinopotet’, which fits into English best as ‘woman-girls’ or ‘girly girl’. It evokes a specific image — a high-school girl with modified uniform, enamoured by useless trinkets like perfume and rouge.

May, his daughter, was not always close with her father but her mother did not stick around long and so it was how it was. She did not intend to become a police officer in school. She spent most of her schooling life having her heart broken by a whirlwind of paper friendships and easy boyfriends. With no qualifications and mediocre grades, she asked her father for a job. She found out she liked it, and the people she policed liked her, too. These days she patrols their hometown together with her father, killing time and making friends. She used to wear makeup heavy like the inner-city girls. She was ashamed of a beauty mark near her mouth. Nowadays it doesn’t bother her much.

One of her favourite of the town’s children is Laura and her brother Rike, which is a brutish-sounding name but he’s a sweet boy. He loves her dad and her father lets him wear his officer’s cap. May’s pushing thirty now and her father’s on the winter side of fifty, and her worries of marrying right out of school are far behind her now — she has enough children to fill a village.

The story might be saccharine, but that’s what no crime and community policing does to constable. It takes these masculine warriors of a community and makes them mums. Vekllei people’d have it no other way. At once therapists, negotiators, friends and guardians, the community police of Vekllei are symptomatic of the wider feminisation of Vekllei society, and their ambition to crest the final age of industry and enter a peaceful, post-industrial epoch of rest.

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If you have any questions, I like questions. If you’re new to Vekllei you can check out a website I worked quite hard on: www.vekllei.city. Or check out my profile! I’ve written on Senrouiva and Venrouiva policing here and here.