Short stories, little history zines, and questions about how we choose to survive... for the people who never got to speak
This project is named for my great-grandmother. I'm giving her a voice by making Zines and Short Stories about the rights to her own body, her own future, her own life. Sadly, those rights didn't come to pass until she was already gone. And NOW, they're being taken away from us today. I'm also writing Solarpunk Stories for a future we all deserve.
My great-grandmother was an unwed, pregnant 17yr old who took her own life a few months after giving birth. That is almost all we know for sure. The rest was hidden by her family; shame and secrecy wrapped around a story that never got told.
Did she fall in love with an Irishman, a minority looked down upon in the 1910s of Philadelphia? Or was she the victim of something much darker? I will never know... but I wonder: would the outcome have been different if her family had supported her instead of hiding her away? If she had been allowed to raise her own child instead of having the baby given to her older brother to raise, so the family looked proper?
My grandmother, Elsie's daughter never got a passport because of the home birth meant no birth certificate. Her christening papers were lost in a fire. Today, the SAVE Act would strip away her ability to vote, and she would have no recourse.
And Elsie... She is also the child I have yet to bear. I wanted Children so badly, but I never got the chance. I am at the point in my life where if I do have children, they most likely will not biologically be mine. I'm sad. I'm scared of the world we are living in, but I'm wishing for a better one. One we can still make in the future.
This is for Elsie. All of them.
What if the path to a better future isn't a revolution, but a quiet withdrawal? This piece imagines the next several years... the collapse of federal authority, the rise of regional alliances, and the micro-towns that sprout in the cracks. It's a history of what falls apart, and what grows in its place. A preamble to a world that might still be possible.
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A woman walks into a grocery store for a birthday cupcake, runs out after armed, masked men storm the place injuring patrons and dragging 7 people away in zipties. A fictional story that could take place in a current day USA.
TW: State Sanctioned Violence and Terror, Gun Violence, Family Estrangement
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