as many times as it takes

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

Another design is using 2 20x25x1 filters, taping them to the sides of the box fan and then to each other so they sort of make a triangle, then cutting cardboard to make a top and bottom to the triangle.

This was discovered as a more effective design during the 2020 US west coast fires.

https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html

Imagine you're a technician at one of the space observatories on Erid. You're not sure why you're still working on documenting the little crackles and hums of space, Erid is dying anyway, but what else are you gonna do?

And then the sensors pick something garbled up. You tinker, find the right wavelength of long-distance radio transmission, and your claws go numb.

"...you...receive... question"

As soon as you frantically report this, everyone tries to keep it contained. But as the nature of eridians goes, a friend of a friend of a colleague calls Adrian. By the time they make it to the observatory, it's painfully clear that voice isn't Rocky, but you'd have to cleave Adrian open to stop them from being in that room.

So, there they are, a dozen high-ranking eridians, a surviving spouse, and a shaking technician. They press play. The message is eerie, some words rising, others falling, some cut a second before their natural conclusion. It is the voice of second engineer rocky, but something else is speaking through him, halting and unnatural, like a body possessed.

"please receive. Is captain of starship "project last hope". Name is Doctor Grace-Full from Sol-3. Already meet Erid Starship at Tau Ceti. Not able help. Apology. But have star-killer predator on starship. Grace-Full try help Erid. Repeat. Have star-killer predat-"

In a parallel universe grace isn't greeted back and he suddenly has to work through the 11 stages of space grief while being asked by the universe and his conscience to be brave once more. He could just orbit Blip A until he also died, choked on grief and loss or he does the right thing and tries to deliver the taumoeba to Erid himself. 4 years in isolation and then what? He approaches an alien planet and - using the translation software - sends garbled messages in a crude imitation of their language, hoping no one blasts him to smithereens.

Insane to the eridian population. Heres a bona fide ALIEN, telling us there is the cure for the dying sun on board. Telling us 23 of ours died by invisible forces, speaking in the voice of one of the crew.

And then what? On the off chance they at least partially believe him, they test the sample taumoeba he sent down and see it kills astrophage...then what? What life could there even be for him on Erid without Rocky's mediation and company?

I'm sure some clever author has already written this. By god I don't want to read it tho ahaha

Starting off my challenge to make 1 zine every week until march, it’s some of my favourite baby birds!

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