CHAPTER SIX
Feb. 22nd, 2026 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThe first five chapters are here.
CHAPTER SIX
They stashed me in what must once have been a servant’s room back when the mansion was first built in the 1880s, with a steeply sloped ceiling, scarcely big enough to fit a cot. It was oppressively hot. I'd always been a restless sleeper, tossing and turning on the king-sized mattress in my apartment, but here I would wake up in the same position that I'd lain down in. For the first few days, I slept deeply. And I had no dreams.
But you can only sleep 16 hours a day for so long. One afternoon, I woke up sufficiently rested to feel restless, so I wandered down the narrow back stairs. The treads were warped and buckled under my weight.
The stairs led straight down into a kitchen dominated by a massive cast-iron and enamel range; the enamel, once white, was now yellow, as was the ancient hood that loomed over the stove. The hood hadn't worked in many years; I could still smell the faint rancid note of all those decades of congealed grease.
A small group of New World Millennium Kingdom acolytes stood around a scarred pine table, scraping and slicing some kind of root vegetables. I wasn't up on my root vegetables. Turnips? Rutabagas? Who knew?
The acolytes didn't speak. To me or to each other. But one of them cut me a hunk of bread and pushed a bowl of soup at me, root vegetable soup. I was hungry. I ate it all.
Sunlight struggled to make its way in through a row of tall, grimy windows that looked out onto what I imagined had been a kitchen garden back in the day. I pushed my way out a small back door. No one tried to stop me.
The garden was now a weedy half-acre, overgrown with crabgrass and foxtail grasses. In a very real sense, this was the culmination of all my adventures in economic geography with Neal, wasn't it? A knee-high tangle of ragweed and bindweed choked the packed earth of the old paths. Little shamrocky clumps with tiny yellow flowers clustered in the rusted remains of a once-ornamental wrought-iron fence. A clump of rhubarb had held on through all the neglect, not quite a memory, but still a reminder of the way things had been back when the garden fed the house's inhabitants. In what had been the garden's center stood an ancient fountain with a cracked basin. The Ozymandias factor prevailed. Always and forever.
When I went back into the kitchen, Brother Malachi had returned from his daily rounds. He eyed me appraisingly. "You have a new life, you need a new name," he told me. "I've chosen one for you: Sister Beholden. We'll try it out for a few days before your baptism to see if it's apt."
###
In real (ha, ha, ha!) life, I used to make a hundred decisions a day. Choose what time to get up, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, which bill to pay first, which friend to disappoint, which bad habit to pretend I'd break next month.
But as an initiate of the New World Millennium Kingdom, I made no decisions at all.
It was very relaxing.
Rise when it's still dark to a bell rung at one end of the house's crackling intercom system. Twenty minutes of prayer, kneeling on a bare floor, staring at a bare wall. Cold water splash at a communal basin, no mirrors allowed. Breakfast of oatmeal, half an apple, and herbal tea, followed by ten minutes of collective confessionals, structured more along the lines of classic Marxist criticism/self-criticism than cozy Christian spiritual reflection.
The group confessionals could be very amusing. Sister Penury routinely accused herself of all sorts of crimes. She took an elevator when the hard-and-fast rule was to mortify the flesh by walking up the stairs! She served herself a slightly larger portion of lasagne than she served the others!
Sister Penury's most antisocial behavior, though, was a schoolgirl crush on Brother Malachi. The signs were unmistakable: overlong glances, a desperate need to please, spite toward anyone who monopolized his attention for more than two consecutive sentences. Strictly verboten, this: The members of the New World Millennium Kingdom practiced radical celibacy; they lived together as brothers and sisters in a sexless, peaceable kingdom. I had to believe in her former life as a Goldman Sachs trader, Sister Penury had done some serious boinking. Most likely, it had been part of her job description. Try as she might to deny the flesh, the lizard brain remembered. She lusted in her heart after Brother Malachi.
The crush went unacknowledged and unrequited: Brother Malachi, I was quite sure, disliked boinking. Once I got to know him, I recognized that Ted Kaczynski vibe. If only he'd been able to scrape together a down payment on a remote cabin in Montana with no running water or electricity, he'd have had a satisfying life UPS-ing homemade explosives to random strangers. As things stood, Brother Malachi had to let God have all the fun of smiting and slaughtering because he was only the rag-tag prophet of a fringe apocalyptic sect.
"Where's my car?" I asked that first day after breakfast.
"It's safe," Sister Penury smiled.
"They'll be expecting me in the ICU," I said.
"That's been taken care of," Sister Penury said. Still smiling.
I could have left the place at any time. They didn't zip-tie my ankles and wrists or anything. They hadn't chained me to a wall. Only I found I didn't want to leave. There was nothing for me in the outside world. There was nothing for me here, either, but at least I didn't have to pretend to myself that there was.
###
After a few days, Brother Malachi summoned me into his office, a grim little room off the kitchen that had once been a butler's pantry. Pine cupboards that used to hold silver and table linens were now stacked high with crumpled envelopes and pads of unidentifiable forms. There was only one chair in the room behind a folding table, and Brother Malachi sat in it. That meant I had to stand in front of him, a supplicant by default.
"Let the world's money serve God now, Sister Beholden," Brother Malachi said and pushed a bunch of forms and a pen at me.
I recognized the short-term disability insurance claim form and the paperwork to apply for family and medical leave. At the bottom, someone had already filled in the “health‑care provider” section in a spidery hand: DR. ETHAN MALAKOWITZ, M.D., PSYCHIATRY, with an office building address. I knew the address; half the ER attendings ran their side practices out of it. A neat little license number followed.
There was also a form for setting up direct deposit and a smudged printout in an ornate Gothic font entitled "Covenant of Stewardship." I picked that last up off the table and began scanning: "In gratitude for my new life, I place my worldly resources at the disposal of the New World Millennium Kingdom and submit to the Community in the direction and administration of all assets in my name—"
"Do you suspect God of trying to scam you?" Malachi thundered.
I dropped the form and picked up the pen.
###
After that, I was cleared for active service. There was a hierarchy. Like all hierarchies, it existed primarily to make a small world feel big. New recruits were assigned to labor in the garden, a purely symbolic exercise since the New World Millennium Kingdom didn't actually plant anything. For food and other household supplies, we relied on dumpster diving and monthly trips to Walmart. But tugging out crabgrass by its stubborn roots was understood to be a physical counterpart to wrenching out wayward thoughts, the one sustaining the other.
If your jihad on crabgrass, plantain, and the stray clover was relentless enough, you moved ahead into kitchen duty. In the New World Millennium Kingdom, there was no such thing as meals per se; instead, there were canonical offerings: a Morning Measure, a Midday Sustenance, the late afternoon Discipline Hour, and, if God was feeling generous, a thin Evening Portion.
We spent hours peeling and chopping vegetables. We boiled pasta that passed from rigid to rubbery without ever pausing on edible. We simmered beans in gigantic, industrial pots; the whole house stank from our farts, and the house's ancient plumbing system suffered. We washed mountains of mismatched plates and cracked cups in greasy, lukewarm water.
There were other responsibilities to aspire toward, too, of course. Responsibilities that lay outside the house. There was dumpster-diving behind supermarkets and collecting roadside bottles and cans for the deposits. There was walking to the laundromat, two miles there and two miles back, with sixty-pound bags of dirty clothes, a trek that Brother Malachi had dubbed "The Pilgrimage of Purification." There was working prayer tables at hospitals and strip malls. But you didn't qualify for these until you had renounced the world, and you couldn't renounce the world until you'd been baptized, received your new name.
In the evenings, we did Bible studies. Brother Malachi skewed heavily toward the Old Testament, though from time to time, he did make selective raids on Revelation and a few of the more colorful sheep and goats passages from the Gospels.
"Proverbs, chapter twenty‑three, verse two," he'd announce. "Sister Penury, you will read it for us."
A host of invisible seraphim, brandishing bright pink Mylar party balloons, descended from the sky to sprinkle fairy dust on Penury's head. “‘Put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite,’” she intoned.
"Amen," Malachi said.
A synchronized chorus of "Amens" rose from around the table.
I stayed quiet.
Malachi noticed. "What does the outside world try to make us think about appetite, Sister Beholden?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I mean, are you talking end-stage capitalism? Supplier-induced demand? Appetites should be fulfilled. That's how the GDP keeps expanding."
He smiled at me. The mouse was lying down in front of the cat! “Exactly. The world says indulge. The world says, ‘You’ve had a hard shift in the ICU, you deserve a venti caramel abomination.’ The world says, ‘You are owed.’”
He tapped the page with one long finger. “But the Word says, ‘Put a knife to your throat.’ Now—does that mean we're supposed to slit our own throats over a bowl of oatmeal?”
A couple of the acolytes chuckled dutifully.
“No,” said Malachi. “It means we are to be as ruthless with our appetites as a man with a knife is with a rope. Appetite is the rope. The knife is discipline.” He let the image hang there. “You cut the rope, or the rope drags you.”
He gazed down the table, where a plump young man named Brother Asaph sat hunched, hands folded. “Brother Asaph, when you were living in Babylon, what was your favorite meal?”
Asaph looked uncomfortable. “Uh. Baconator combo, supersized.”
I knew exactly what a Baconator combo was. I also knew the precise number of grams of sodium and the approximate number of patients I had admitted with heart failure who’d thought it was a perfectly reasonable dinner four days a week.
“And when the craving came,” Malachi continued, “how many minutes did you spend resisting?”
Asaph stared at the table. “Uh... None?”
“None.” Malachi pounced on the word. “Because appetite was your master. You were the dog, appetite was the leash. You think that leash only pulls you to Wendy’s?” He snapped his fingers. “Today it’s bacon, tomorrow it’s fornication, the next day it’s walking out of the ICU because you’re tired of watching people die.”
The room seemed to tilt. Everyone’s eyes flickered toward me and then away.
Malachi went on, silky. “Appetite is not only for food. Appetite is for comfort. For control. For being seen as a ‘good nurse,’ a ‘good friend,’ a ‘good little citizen of Babylon.’ The knife to the throat is the willingness to say, ‘No more. I would rather die than obey appetite instead of God.’”
He snapped his Bible shut with a little gunshot crack.
“This is why,” he said, “we take only a Morning Measure, a Midday Sustenance, a Discipline Hour, and—if the Lord smiles—an Evening Portion. This is why no one chooses their own plate. This is why Sister Penury confessed to taking an extra spoonful of lasagna.” He nodded approvingly in her direction. “She felt the rope tug at her neck. She reached for the knife.”
Penury’s cheeks glowed with fervent, humiliated pride.
Malachi’s gaze landed on me again. “Some of us are still clinging to appetites the world programmed into us,” he said softly. “Appetite for praise. Appetite for decision‑making. Appetite for the illusion that we keep people alive by our own hands.” His smile sharpened. “Those are the throats that most need the knife.”
He opened the Bible again and slid it toward me so that the single line of Proverbs sat squarely between us.
“Read it again, Sister Beholden,” he said. “And this time, ask yourself which appetites you’re willing to cut. Or else you can't be baptized.”
###
Personally, I didn't care whether I was baptized or not. Oh, I was perfectly willing to humiliate myself for hours pulling crabgrass out by the roots, debase myself in the kitchen washing mountains of greasy plates, but I felt no particular desire to belong, no yearning to merge my identity with the collective.
The Universe evidently wanted me here, and I was just going along with it. My entire life, I'd fought the Universe; now I was resigned to the fact that something bigger than me was running the show. You can spend years lining all your ducks in a row, but then out of nowhere, your husband trades you in for a button-sewing hausfrau, or a Chinese bat virus hitchhikes its way across the planet to ride you like an evil voodoo god. Everything about the New World Millennium Kingdom was ridiculous, and yet here I was. I had faith in something but belief in nothing.
Malachi was bewildered by me. I could tell. None of the usual control techniques worked. Not the carrot (invitations for one-on-one counseling walks), not the stick (threats of punitive fasts). I had become a kind of test for Malachi—though a test of what, I wasn't sure. I was obedient, but I wasn't submissive. Still. He was eager to see me baptized, and ten days after I arrived at the New World Millennium Kingdom's decrepit mansion, he announced that the Lord had revealed to him the appointed time had come: I would be baptized the following evening.
###
They used the cracked fountain in the overgrown garden for baptisms. A pipe connected the fountain to an old well through which running water could be coaxed.
Sister Penury went to some pains to prepare me for the ritual, describe the ordeal, so I wouldn't freak out: "At first, it feels as though you might be drowning. Brother Malachi puts a sacred vestment over your face; the water goes into your throat through that. For a moment, you'll choke and gag, you won't be able to breathe. You'll feel like you're suffocating! And that's the moment your old life leaves you. When you're finally able to breathe again, you'll be filled with the Holy Spirit! Your old reality will fall away."
It sounded like being intubated to me. Or possibly, like being waterboarded.
I should have walked off the property right then and there, right? Sprinted down that driveway, thumbed a ride back to Babylon. But passivity is its own narcotic, so I didn't.
Penury gave me a helpful New Testament passage to think about while I waited. Romans 6:3–4: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.”
But instead, I thought about Debbie Reynolds. I'd been the nurse operating the defibrillator during that final code. The first shock—200 joules—did nothing. The line on the screen stayed straight, the cardiac monitor continued to alarm. "No change," I'd shouted. "Resume compressions."
At 260 joules, Debbie Reynolds' body jackknifed off the hospital bed, then flopped back down, and for three glorious seconds, we had a coarse V-fib squiggle on the screen before she flat-lined again.
By the fourth shock, we'd stopped pretending. We ran the algorithm for the sake of CYA. Every time I said, "Resume compressions," I knew I was participating in an elaborate ruse. The defibrillator might still be firing, but Debbie Reynolds had already been baptized into whatever reality came next.
###
In the Hudson Valley, the summer night is never sudden. Darkness began pooling in the garden's hollows while the sky was still pink; the trees turned to silhouettes before the first dim scattering of stars flickered. Penury had helped me into a white shift, crying a little as though she was dressing me in her own wedding gown.
The pipe from the well shuddered when Brother Asaph cranked its ancient valve. Water filled the fountain's basin in a series of brief gushes, carrying the scent of deep, stale earth. The acolytes, holding hands, formed a circle around me; "Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it," they chanted in unison over and over and over again till the words turned into meaningless singsong.
Malachi was wearing a thrift store suit, the folded cloth resting on his palms like an offering. When he got closer, I saw Penury's sacred vestment was actually a dish towel, the kind you buy for fifty cents at the Dollar Store.
Malachi's eyes locked on to mine. "Do you renounce the world of your own free will? Will you consent to killing Grazia so that Sister Beholden may be born?"
The acolytes' chanting seemed to crescendo and then die away, though I could still hear their voices. When the crescendo effect started again, I realized I was hearing something else through the voices, an approaching siren. Malachi could hear it, too. He started and frowned.
In another second, I made out the crunch of tires on gravel out front, the squeal of a car door opening. Indecipherable squawks from a radio. A familiar voice came through an open window, claiming the last word in an argument that had started inside the police vehicle miles before: “No, officer, what we have is a complaint and probable cause. His public defender can argue voluntariness in front of a judge. But I can tell you one thing: His public defender won't be me."
Red and blue lights were flickering against the mansion's dirty windows. A cop stepped out of the car.
Followed by Neal.
Neal took in the fountain, the dish towel, the hand‑holding acolytes, my off-brand sacrificial virgin outfit. One eyebrow jerked up a millimeter, and the corner of his mouth twitched, like someone trying not to laugh in court. I suddenly saw the whole scene through his eyes—a low‑budget community‑theater Rapture—and I giggled.
Malachi flinched as though someone had slapped him. He regrouped by snarling at the cop. "This is private property."
“We’re here on a welfare check, sir," the cop said. "We have information that a woman is being held here against her will.”
Then two more cop cars zoomed up the driveway, lights ablaze. Doors opened, disgorging more officers and a woman in a neat blue pantsuit whose jacket tried but failed to conceal the bulge of a holster.
"No one is being held against their will," Malachi spat. "Tell them, Sister Beholden."
"Paul Ethan Malkowitz?" the woman in the pantsuit asked. "Detective Ruiz, Ulster County Sheriff’s Office. I have a warrant for your arrest for falsifying business records in the first degree, in connection with fraudulent Family and Medical Leave certifications, in violation of New York Penal Law § 175.10. I’m going to need you to step over here and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Malachi's hands began to shake so violently, he dropped the dish towel. His voice was high and thin. "Falsifying business records? The system abandons people; I give them what they need to endure. That isn’t fraud, it’s ministry.”
“Save it for the arraignment,” Ruiz said. She produced a pair of cuffs from her belt. “Hands behind your back, Dr. Malkowitz.” Then she nodded at one of the officers. "Grab a blanket for her."
One of the cops popped a hood and snagged a comfort kit from the black-and-white's trunk. Neal went over and grabbed a blanket. In another moment, the blanket was around my shoulders, and Neal was hugging me.
Have I mentioned yet that Neal was the best hugger in the world?
Neal was the best hugger in the world.
"How did you know?" I asked.
“Divine revelation,” he said. “Burning bush, booming voice, God spoke. Very Old Testament.” His arms tightened around me. "No, actually, your hospital filed a Family and Medical Leave form signed by Malkowitz claiming you were under his psychiatric care. The name lit up a fraud investigation involving a client of mine who's gotten burned by fake disability forms. Discovery can be useful! The DA’s office looped me in when the warrant came through, and I begged and pleaded and otherwise humiliated myself to be in on the car ride."
"You could have called," I said.
"I did call," Neal said. "It went straight to voicemail. You were too busy joining a death‑by‑dish‑towel cult to pick up the phone."
"It wasn't a death cult," I snapped. "It was a poor life choices cult—"
We were bickering again. Good times! I wanted to cry.
###
Wiltwyck Hospital gave me an extra week off. With pay! They didn’t know (and I wasn’t going to tell them) I’d spent the ten days following Debbie Reynolds’ death at a DIY apocalypse spa specializing in artisanal malnutrition. Nurses were dropping like flies; if the administration didn’t at least pretend to be sympathetic, those nurses would quit, and then the hospital would be stuck shelling out for travelers at twice our salaries. So the hospital pretended that being overcome with grief was a legitimate justification for dereliction of duty. And who knows? Maybe that was true.
I spent that week at Neal's cabin in the Catskills. He gave me a vacuum cleaner to get rid of the ladybugs in the spare bedroom, but not before I spent more than three hours trying to coax them into empty yogurt containers like I was running some kind of underground railroad for insects.
The weather stayed glorious. During the day, I lounged on Neal's front porch, reading "The Name of the Rose." When Neal was around, we hung out in the evenings, counting the fireflies and chatting animatedly about shoes and ships and sealing wax—and death. Neal wasn't always around, though. He had his work as a public defender plus the polycule to attend to—Flavia in the City, with whom he spent most weekends; Mimi, who'd just moved into an old motor lodge just outside Woodstock that some of her friends were refurbishing into the ultimate cannabis spa; Daria, who lived in California, and with whom he mostly communicated over FaceTime.
I could have written a monograph about the ecology of Neal's front porch. The daily Battle of the Birdfeeder, kamikaze bluejays versus goldfinch guerrillas. The breezes playing the windchimes. The way the shadow of the chestnut tree brought the temperature of its side of the porch down ten degrees.
And I perceived what I had never realized before, to wit: that much of Neal's conversation was about death. Had always been about death. He was fascinated by it.
"It is what it is," Neal told me. "You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes you don't, and by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they've changed the rules.
"But in the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets, and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your personal narrative can compare to those stories. So all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is."
"Jesus, you're making my head hurt," I complained. "You spend a lot of time thinking about this shit, about death."
"Oh, only about five hours a day," he said. "The rest of the time, I think about sex. And parking."
It was this conversation I recalled when I drove to Neal's house that afternoon with the chicken salad and roast beef sandwiches from Neal-Palooza to commune with the other sister wives and say goodbye to Daria.
How did people do this survival thing anyway?
It hit me suddenly with the stunning force of a full stop at a hundred miles an hour: Every single fucking one of the eight billion people on this planet has an inner life every bit as complicated as my own. All those auras competing for God's ambient sunlight, twisting upward, a veritable jungle floor of egos straining to flourish and be noticed. Debbie Reynolds. Sister Penury. Brother Malachi. Dr. Pellegrini. Flavia, Daria, Mimi. Neal—
I'm just another frightened mammal scurrying for cover when the dinosaurs' giant feet come crashing through the mud.
How am I going to protect myself?
"Group hug!" squealed Mimi, intercepting me on the way to my Prius. She threw herself on me, soft and plush and comforting. Daria laughed, and then she and Flavia ran down and enveloped me, too. A sudden breeze shook a shower of ballerina flowers from the chestnut tree onto us, and I forgot to notice how long we stood that way.
END PART I
CHAPTER SIX
They stashed me in what must once have been a servant’s room back when the mansion was first built in the 1880s, with a steeply sloped ceiling, scarcely big enough to fit a cot. It was oppressively hot. I'd always been a restless sleeper, tossing and turning on the king-sized mattress in my apartment, but here I would wake up in the same position that I'd lain down in. For the first few days, I slept deeply. And I had no dreams.
But you can only sleep 16 hours a day for so long. One afternoon, I woke up sufficiently rested to feel restless, so I wandered down the narrow back stairs. The treads were warped and buckled under my weight.
The stairs led straight down into a kitchen dominated by a massive cast-iron and enamel range; the enamel, once white, was now yellow, as was the ancient hood that loomed over the stove. The hood hadn't worked in many years; I could still smell the faint rancid note of all those decades of congealed grease.
A small group of New World Millennium Kingdom acolytes stood around a scarred pine table, scraping and slicing some kind of root vegetables. I wasn't up on my root vegetables. Turnips? Rutabagas? Who knew?
The acolytes didn't speak. To me or to each other. But one of them cut me a hunk of bread and pushed a bowl of soup at me, root vegetable soup. I was hungry. I ate it all.
Sunlight struggled to make its way in through a row of tall, grimy windows that looked out onto what I imagined had been a kitchen garden back in the day. I pushed my way out a small back door. No one tried to stop me.
The garden was now a weedy half-acre, overgrown with crabgrass and foxtail grasses. In a very real sense, this was the culmination of all my adventures in economic geography with Neal, wasn't it? A knee-high tangle of ragweed and bindweed choked the packed earth of the old paths. Little shamrocky clumps with tiny yellow flowers clustered in the rusted remains of a once-ornamental wrought-iron fence. A clump of rhubarb had held on through all the neglect, not quite a memory, but still a reminder of the way things had been back when the garden fed the house's inhabitants. In what had been the garden's center stood an ancient fountain with a cracked basin. The Ozymandias factor prevailed. Always and forever.
When I went back into the kitchen, Brother Malachi had returned from his daily rounds. He eyed me appraisingly. "You have a new life, you need a new name," he told me. "I've chosen one for you: Sister Beholden. We'll try it out for a few days before your baptism to see if it's apt."
###
In real (ha, ha, ha!) life, I used to make a hundred decisions a day. Choose what time to get up, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, which bill to pay first, which friend to disappoint, which bad habit to pretend I'd break next month.
But as an initiate of the New World Millennium Kingdom, I made no decisions at all.
It was very relaxing.
Rise when it's still dark to a bell rung at one end of the house's crackling intercom system. Twenty minutes of prayer, kneeling on a bare floor, staring at a bare wall. Cold water splash at a communal basin, no mirrors allowed. Breakfast of oatmeal, half an apple, and herbal tea, followed by ten minutes of collective confessionals, structured more along the lines of classic Marxist criticism/self-criticism than cozy Christian spiritual reflection.
The group confessionals could be very amusing. Sister Penury routinely accused herself of all sorts of crimes. She took an elevator when the hard-and-fast rule was to mortify the flesh by walking up the stairs! She served herself a slightly larger portion of lasagne than she served the others!
Sister Penury's most antisocial behavior, though, was a schoolgirl crush on Brother Malachi. The signs were unmistakable: overlong glances, a desperate need to please, spite toward anyone who monopolized his attention for more than two consecutive sentences. Strictly verboten, this: The members of the New World Millennium Kingdom practiced radical celibacy; they lived together as brothers and sisters in a sexless, peaceable kingdom. I had to believe in her former life as a Goldman Sachs trader, Sister Penury had done some serious boinking. Most likely, it had been part of her job description. Try as she might to deny the flesh, the lizard brain remembered. She lusted in her heart after Brother Malachi.
The crush went unacknowledged and unrequited: Brother Malachi, I was quite sure, disliked boinking. Once I got to know him, I recognized that Ted Kaczynski vibe. If only he'd been able to scrape together a down payment on a remote cabin in Montana with no running water or electricity, he'd have had a satisfying life UPS-ing homemade explosives to random strangers. As things stood, Brother Malachi had to let God have all the fun of smiting and slaughtering because he was only the rag-tag prophet of a fringe apocalyptic sect.
"Where's my car?" I asked that first day after breakfast.
"It's safe," Sister Penury smiled.
"They'll be expecting me in the ICU," I said.
"That's been taken care of," Sister Penury said. Still smiling.
I could have left the place at any time. They didn't zip-tie my ankles and wrists or anything. They hadn't chained me to a wall. Only I found I didn't want to leave. There was nothing for me in the outside world. There was nothing for me here, either, but at least I didn't have to pretend to myself that there was.
###
After a few days, Brother Malachi summoned me into his office, a grim little room off the kitchen that had once been a butler's pantry. Pine cupboards that used to hold silver and table linens were now stacked high with crumpled envelopes and pads of unidentifiable forms. There was only one chair in the room behind a folding table, and Brother Malachi sat in it. That meant I had to stand in front of him, a supplicant by default.
"Let the world's money serve God now, Sister Beholden," Brother Malachi said and pushed a bunch of forms and a pen at me.
I recognized the short-term disability insurance claim form and the paperwork to apply for family and medical leave. At the bottom, someone had already filled in the “health‑care provider” section in a spidery hand: DR. ETHAN MALAKOWITZ, M.D., PSYCHIATRY, with an office building address. I knew the address; half the ER attendings ran their side practices out of it. A neat little license number followed.
There was also a form for setting up direct deposit and a smudged printout in an ornate Gothic font entitled "Covenant of Stewardship." I picked that last up off the table and began scanning: "In gratitude for my new life, I place my worldly resources at the disposal of the New World Millennium Kingdom and submit to the Community in the direction and administration of all assets in my name—"
"Do you suspect God of trying to scam you?" Malachi thundered.
I dropped the form and picked up the pen.
###
After that, I was cleared for active service. There was a hierarchy. Like all hierarchies, it existed primarily to make a small world feel big. New recruits were assigned to labor in the garden, a purely symbolic exercise since the New World Millennium Kingdom didn't actually plant anything. For food and other household supplies, we relied on dumpster diving and monthly trips to Walmart. But tugging out crabgrass by its stubborn roots was understood to be a physical counterpart to wrenching out wayward thoughts, the one sustaining the other.
If your jihad on crabgrass, plantain, and the stray clover was relentless enough, you moved ahead into kitchen duty. In the New World Millennium Kingdom, there was no such thing as meals per se; instead, there were canonical offerings: a Morning Measure, a Midday Sustenance, the late afternoon Discipline Hour, and, if God was feeling generous, a thin Evening Portion.
We spent hours peeling and chopping vegetables. We boiled pasta that passed from rigid to rubbery without ever pausing on edible. We simmered beans in gigantic, industrial pots; the whole house stank from our farts, and the house's ancient plumbing system suffered. We washed mountains of mismatched plates and cracked cups in greasy, lukewarm water.
There were other responsibilities to aspire toward, too, of course. Responsibilities that lay outside the house. There was dumpster-diving behind supermarkets and collecting roadside bottles and cans for the deposits. There was walking to the laundromat, two miles there and two miles back, with sixty-pound bags of dirty clothes, a trek that Brother Malachi had dubbed "The Pilgrimage of Purification." There was working prayer tables at hospitals and strip malls. But you didn't qualify for these until you had renounced the world, and you couldn't renounce the world until you'd been baptized, received your new name.
In the evenings, we did Bible studies. Brother Malachi skewed heavily toward the Old Testament, though from time to time, he did make selective raids on Revelation and a few of the more colorful sheep and goats passages from the Gospels.
"Proverbs, chapter twenty‑three, verse two," he'd announce. "Sister Penury, you will read it for us."
A host of invisible seraphim, brandishing bright pink Mylar party balloons, descended from the sky to sprinkle fairy dust on Penury's head. “‘Put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite,’” she intoned.
"Amen," Malachi said.
A synchronized chorus of "Amens" rose from around the table.
I stayed quiet.
Malachi noticed. "What does the outside world try to make us think about appetite, Sister Beholden?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I mean, are you talking end-stage capitalism? Supplier-induced demand? Appetites should be fulfilled. That's how the GDP keeps expanding."
He smiled at me. The mouse was lying down in front of the cat! “Exactly. The world says indulge. The world says, ‘You’ve had a hard shift in the ICU, you deserve a venti caramel abomination.’ The world says, ‘You are owed.’”
He tapped the page with one long finger. “But the Word says, ‘Put a knife to your throat.’ Now—does that mean we're supposed to slit our own throats over a bowl of oatmeal?”
A couple of the acolytes chuckled dutifully.
“No,” said Malachi. “It means we are to be as ruthless with our appetites as a man with a knife is with a rope. Appetite is the rope. The knife is discipline.” He let the image hang there. “You cut the rope, or the rope drags you.”
He gazed down the table, where a plump young man named Brother Asaph sat hunched, hands folded. “Brother Asaph, when you were living in Babylon, what was your favorite meal?”
Asaph looked uncomfortable. “Uh. Baconator combo, supersized.”
I knew exactly what a Baconator combo was. I also knew the precise number of grams of sodium and the approximate number of patients I had admitted with heart failure who’d thought it was a perfectly reasonable dinner four days a week.
“And when the craving came,” Malachi continued, “how many minutes did you spend resisting?”
Asaph stared at the table. “Uh... None?”
“None.” Malachi pounced on the word. “Because appetite was your master. You were the dog, appetite was the leash. You think that leash only pulls you to Wendy’s?” He snapped his fingers. “Today it’s bacon, tomorrow it’s fornication, the next day it’s walking out of the ICU because you’re tired of watching people die.”
The room seemed to tilt. Everyone’s eyes flickered toward me and then away.
Malachi went on, silky. “Appetite is not only for food. Appetite is for comfort. For control. For being seen as a ‘good nurse,’ a ‘good friend,’ a ‘good little citizen of Babylon.’ The knife to the throat is the willingness to say, ‘No more. I would rather die than obey appetite instead of God.’”
He snapped his Bible shut with a little gunshot crack.
“This is why,” he said, “we take only a Morning Measure, a Midday Sustenance, a Discipline Hour, and—if the Lord smiles—an Evening Portion. This is why no one chooses their own plate. This is why Sister Penury confessed to taking an extra spoonful of lasagna.” He nodded approvingly in her direction. “She felt the rope tug at her neck. She reached for the knife.”
Penury’s cheeks glowed with fervent, humiliated pride.
Malachi’s gaze landed on me again. “Some of us are still clinging to appetites the world programmed into us,” he said softly. “Appetite for praise. Appetite for decision‑making. Appetite for the illusion that we keep people alive by our own hands.” His smile sharpened. “Those are the throats that most need the knife.”
He opened the Bible again and slid it toward me so that the single line of Proverbs sat squarely between us.
“Read it again, Sister Beholden,” he said. “And this time, ask yourself which appetites you’re willing to cut. Or else you can't be baptized.”
###
Personally, I didn't care whether I was baptized or not. Oh, I was perfectly willing to humiliate myself for hours pulling crabgrass out by the roots, debase myself in the kitchen washing mountains of greasy plates, but I felt no particular desire to belong, no yearning to merge my identity with the collective.
The Universe evidently wanted me here, and I was just going along with it. My entire life, I'd fought the Universe; now I was resigned to the fact that something bigger than me was running the show. You can spend years lining all your ducks in a row, but then out of nowhere, your husband trades you in for a button-sewing hausfrau, or a Chinese bat virus hitchhikes its way across the planet to ride you like an evil voodoo god. Everything about the New World Millennium Kingdom was ridiculous, and yet here I was. I had faith in something but belief in nothing.
Malachi was bewildered by me. I could tell. None of the usual control techniques worked. Not the carrot (invitations for one-on-one counseling walks), not the stick (threats of punitive fasts). I had become a kind of test for Malachi—though a test of what, I wasn't sure. I was obedient, but I wasn't submissive. Still. He was eager to see me baptized, and ten days after I arrived at the New World Millennium Kingdom's decrepit mansion, he announced that the Lord had revealed to him the appointed time had come: I would be baptized the following evening.
###
They used the cracked fountain in the overgrown garden for baptisms. A pipe connected the fountain to an old well through which running water could be coaxed.
Sister Penury went to some pains to prepare me for the ritual, describe the ordeal, so I wouldn't freak out: "At first, it feels as though you might be drowning. Brother Malachi puts a sacred vestment over your face; the water goes into your throat through that. For a moment, you'll choke and gag, you won't be able to breathe. You'll feel like you're suffocating! And that's the moment your old life leaves you. When you're finally able to breathe again, you'll be filled with the Holy Spirit! Your old reality will fall away."
It sounded like being intubated to me. Or possibly, like being waterboarded.
I should have walked off the property right then and there, right? Sprinted down that driveway, thumbed a ride back to Babylon. But passivity is its own narcotic, so I didn't.
Penury gave me a helpful New Testament passage to think about while I waited. Romans 6:3–4: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.”
But instead, I thought about Debbie Reynolds. I'd been the nurse operating the defibrillator during that final code. The first shock—200 joules—did nothing. The line on the screen stayed straight, the cardiac monitor continued to alarm. "No change," I'd shouted. "Resume compressions."
At 260 joules, Debbie Reynolds' body jackknifed off the hospital bed, then flopped back down, and for three glorious seconds, we had a coarse V-fib squiggle on the screen before she flat-lined again.
By the fourth shock, we'd stopped pretending. We ran the algorithm for the sake of CYA. Every time I said, "Resume compressions," I knew I was participating in an elaborate ruse. The defibrillator might still be firing, but Debbie Reynolds had already been baptized into whatever reality came next.
###
In the Hudson Valley, the summer night is never sudden. Darkness began pooling in the garden's hollows while the sky was still pink; the trees turned to silhouettes before the first dim scattering of stars flickered. Penury had helped me into a white shift, crying a little as though she was dressing me in her own wedding gown.
The pipe from the well shuddered when Brother Asaph cranked its ancient valve. Water filled the fountain's basin in a series of brief gushes, carrying the scent of deep, stale earth. The acolytes, holding hands, formed a circle around me; "Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it," they chanted in unison over and over and over again till the words turned into meaningless singsong.
Malachi was wearing a thrift store suit, the folded cloth resting on his palms like an offering. When he got closer, I saw Penury's sacred vestment was actually a dish towel, the kind you buy for fifty cents at the Dollar Store.
Malachi's eyes locked on to mine. "Do you renounce the world of your own free will? Will you consent to killing Grazia so that Sister Beholden may be born?"
The acolytes' chanting seemed to crescendo and then die away, though I could still hear their voices. When the crescendo effect started again, I realized I was hearing something else through the voices, an approaching siren. Malachi could hear it, too. He started and frowned.
In another second, I made out the crunch of tires on gravel out front, the squeal of a car door opening. Indecipherable squawks from a radio. A familiar voice came through an open window, claiming the last word in an argument that had started inside the police vehicle miles before: “No, officer, what we have is a complaint and probable cause. His public defender can argue voluntariness in front of a judge. But I can tell you one thing: His public defender won't be me."
Red and blue lights were flickering against the mansion's dirty windows. A cop stepped out of the car.
Followed by Neal.
Neal took in the fountain, the dish towel, the hand‑holding acolytes, my off-brand sacrificial virgin outfit. One eyebrow jerked up a millimeter, and the corner of his mouth twitched, like someone trying not to laugh in court. I suddenly saw the whole scene through his eyes—a low‑budget community‑theater Rapture—and I giggled.
Malachi flinched as though someone had slapped him. He regrouped by snarling at the cop. "This is private property."
“We’re here on a welfare check, sir," the cop said. "We have information that a woman is being held here against her will.”
Then two more cop cars zoomed up the driveway, lights ablaze. Doors opened, disgorging more officers and a woman in a neat blue pantsuit whose jacket tried but failed to conceal the bulge of a holster.
"No one is being held against their will," Malachi spat. "Tell them, Sister Beholden."
"Paul Ethan Malkowitz?" the woman in the pantsuit asked. "Detective Ruiz, Ulster County Sheriff’s Office. I have a warrant for your arrest for falsifying business records in the first degree, in connection with fraudulent Family and Medical Leave certifications, in violation of New York Penal Law § 175.10. I’m going to need you to step over here and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Malachi's hands began to shake so violently, he dropped the dish towel. His voice was high and thin. "Falsifying business records? The system abandons people; I give them what they need to endure. That isn’t fraud, it’s ministry.”
“Save it for the arraignment,” Ruiz said. She produced a pair of cuffs from her belt. “Hands behind your back, Dr. Malkowitz.” Then she nodded at one of the officers. "Grab a blanket for her."
One of the cops popped a hood and snagged a comfort kit from the black-and-white's trunk. Neal went over and grabbed a blanket. In another moment, the blanket was around my shoulders, and Neal was hugging me.
Have I mentioned yet that Neal was the best hugger in the world?
Neal was the best hugger in the world.
"How did you know?" I asked.
“Divine revelation,” he said. “Burning bush, booming voice, God spoke. Very Old Testament.” His arms tightened around me. "No, actually, your hospital filed a Family and Medical Leave form signed by Malkowitz claiming you were under his psychiatric care. The name lit up a fraud investigation involving a client of mine who's gotten burned by fake disability forms. Discovery can be useful! The DA’s office looped me in when the warrant came through, and I begged and pleaded and otherwise humiliated myself to be in on the car ride."
"You could have called," I said.
"I did call," Neal said. "It went straight to voicemail. You were too busy joining a death‑by‑dish‑towel cult to pick up the phone."
"It wasn't a death cult," I snapped. "It was a poor life choices cult—"
We were bickering again. Good times! I wanted to cry.
###
Wiltwyck Hospital gave me an extra week off. With pay! They didn’t know (and I wasn’t going to tell them) I’d spent the ten days following Debbie Reynolds’ death at a DIY apocalypse spa specializing in artisanal malnutrition. Nurses were dropping like flies; if the administration didn’t at least pretend to be sympathetic, those nurses would quit, and then the hospital would be stuck shelling out for travelers at twice our salaries. So the hospital pretended that being overcome with grief was a legitimate justification for dereliction of duty. And who knows? Maybe that was true.
I spent that week at Neal's cabin in the Catskills. He gave me a vacuum cleaner to get rid of the ladybugs in the spare bedroom, but not before I spent more than three hours trying to coax them into empty yogurt containers like I was running some kind of underground railroad for insects.
The weather stayed glorious. During the day, I lounged on Neal's front porch, reading "The Name of the Rose." When Neal was around, we hung out in the evenings, counting the fireflies and chatting animatedly about shoes and ships and sealing wax—and death. Neal wasn't always around, though. He had his work as a public defender plus the polycule to attend to—Flavia in the City, with whom he spent most weekends; Mimi, who'd just moved into an old motor lodge just outside Woodstock that some of her friends were refurbishing into the ultimate cannabis spa; Daria, who lived in California, and with whom he mostly communicated over FaceTime.
I could have written a monograph about the ecology of Neal's front porch. The daily Battle of the Birdfeeder, kamikaze bluejays versus goldfinch guerrillas. The breezes playing the windchimes. The way the shadow of the chestnut tree brought the temperature of its side of the porch down ten degrees.
And I perceived what I had never realized before, to wit: that much of Neal's conversation was about death. Had always been about death. He was fascinated by it.
"It is what it is," Neal told me. "You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes you don't, and by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they've changed the rules.
"But in the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets, and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your personal narrative can compare to those stories. So all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is."
"Jesus, you're making my head hurt," I complained. "You spend a lot of time thinking about this shit, about death."
"Oh, only about five hours a day," he said. "The rest of the time, I think about sex. And parking."
It was this conversation I recalled when I drove to Neal's house that afternoon with the chicken salad and roast beef sandwiches from Neal-Palooza to commune with the other sister wives and say goodbye to Daria.
How did people do this survival thing anyway?
It hit me suddenly with the stunning force of a full stop at a hundred miles an hour: Every single fucking one of the eight billion people on this planet has an inner life every bit as complicated as my own. All those auras competing for God's ambient sunlight, twisting upward, a veritable jungle floor of egos straining to flourish and be noticed. Debbie Reynolds. Sister Penury. Brother Malachi. Dr. Pellegrini. Flavia, Daria, Mimi. Neal—
I'm just another frightened mammal scurrying for cover when the dinosaurs' giant feet come crashing through the mud.
How am I going to protect myself?
"Group hug!" squealed Mimi, intercepting me on the way to my Prius. She threw herself on me, soft and plush and comforting. Daria laughed, and then she and Flavia ran down and enveloped me, too. A sudden breeze shook a shower of ballerina flowers from the chestnut tree onto us, and I forgot to notice how long we stood that way.
END PART I
Six Sentence Sunday
Feb. 23rd, 2026 12:44 amluthienA bit more of this:
A light touch at his elbow had him turning immediately, but he was not greatly surprised to find the Princess Svetlana Vetrova standing behind him and smiling at him impishly. She wore a long, blue pelisse over her gown - to guard against the chill sea winds, Ilya supposed, such as they were in June - and an extravagant poke bonnet, curled plumes cascading along its crown, sat atop her glossy ringlets. She was accompanied by her maid - a dour creature - as propriety demanded whenever the Princess took the air on the deck. Now, the woman waited a few steps away and stared down at the hem of her dress, providing them with the semblance of private speech. Ilya had no doubt that she would, nevertheless, memorise every word that passed between them and report back to Svetlana's mother - at least, she would do so if they conducted their conversation in Russian.
"So, you have not succumbed to the seasickness like your Mama," he said by way of greeting, in French.
~*~
Dance the Eagle to Sleep by Marge Piercy
Feb. 22nd, 2026 09:33 amjames_davis_nicoll
Can America's well-financed, highly-experienced, heavily-armed war machine hope to prevail against a numerically insignificant, poorly-armed, American teen movement?
Dance the Eagle to Sleep by Marge Piercy
Bletchley Park
Feb. 22nd, 2026 02:01 pmnanilaLast weekend, we stayed in a Landmark Trust property a mere half-hour journey to Bletchley Park. We were surprised by nice weather on the Saturday, so we made the trip. Below is an assortment of photos from the selection of buildings we managed to visit over the course of five hours. I don’t think we saw more than a third of it, so we’ll definitely take advantage of the year-long entry that the steep admission price gets you to see the rest.
The dingy basement has had a lick of paint and yet somehow doggedly retains its character.
Listening stations.
Keiki does some Morse code-breaking.
Humuhumu does some Enigma encoding.
A surprisingly dry and sunny day after all the rain we’ve been having.
Daffodils were not quite ready.
The Mansion seemed like it was a bit of all right.
Not so sure the Intelligence Factory needs this.
Humuhumu and I spent quite a while on this interactive exhibit, plotting the locations of various maritime assets and enemies.
Many of the personal testimonials in the exhibition mention how boring and repetitive some of the intelligence work was.
You can see why they resorted to putting frogs in the pneumatic tube system to liven up the day.
The Park is beautifully maintained and the interactive exhibits are well designed and engaging - I’d say from the age of about 10 on up - so well worth a visit. I restrained myself to one book in the gift shop (The Walls Have Ears by Helen Fry) but could easily have brought home a stack.
The dingy basement has had a lick of paint and yet somehow doggedly retains its character.
Listening stations.
Keiki does some Morse code-breaking.
Humuhumu does some Enigma encoding.
A surprisingly dry and sunny day after all the rain we’ve been having.
Daffodils were not quite ready.
The Mansion seemed like it was a bit of all right.
Not so sure the Intelligence Factory needs this.
Humuhumu and I spent quite a while on this interactive exhibit, plotting the locations of various maritime assets and enemies.
Many of the personal testimonials in the exhibition mention how boring and repetitive some of the intelligence work was.
You can see why they resorted to putting frogs in the pneumatic tube system to liven up the day.
The Park is beautifully maintained and the interactive exhibits are well designed and engaging - I’d say from the age of about 10 on up - so well worth a visit. I restrained myself to one book in the gift shop (The Walls Have Ears by Helen Fry) but could easily have brought home a stack.
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2026 12:19 amkallowayOn Wednesday, my father pulled up a flyer on Facebook for a nerd-show next weekend and incredibly nearby. Even though I have a fairly strict no-winter-shows rule because, uh, weather, this is close enough and cheap enough that I figured if I get a table and nothing comes of it, I at least got to hang out with other nerds for a few hours. Anyway, got a table, lol, and will spend some of this weekend/coming week sorting out some stuff to take. This looks like it might become ~monthly and if it takes off and I can maintain a table, it'll really help the clear-out. (The only other table I have booked this year is Semmex and that's not a personal table. I also don't want to spend every weekend this year trying to sell my stuff but I really do need to do the cleanout. Blrgh. Blrrrrgh.)
Finished up the KO GM and it's... okay. Some parts sucked to build but overall it's fine. I was thinking he needed a friend and was looking up other GMs and then suddenly remembered maybe I had one in the back of a cabinet? Sure enough... It is a very old HGUC kit and the nubs have yellowed like I've seen on a lot of old Gundam Wing kits. Since this GM has probably been in the back of the cabinet since being built, I can only assume it's age + plastic quality. Anyway, the GMs can be slightly messy friends, lol.
Going to work on the Destiny Astray today and maybe get the body done this weekend? I'm hopeful. IDK what my next kit will be but it will be Bandai so it at least will go together without extensive modification and/or pain.
Finished up the KO GM and it's... okay. Some parts sucked to build but overall it's fine. I was thinking he needed a friend and was looking up other GMs and then suddenly remembered maybe I had one in the back of a cabinet? Sure enough... It is a very old HGUC kit and the nubs have yellowed like I've seen on a lot of old Gundam Wing kits. Since this GM has probably been in the back of the cabinet since being built, I can only assume it's age + plastic quality. Anyway, the GMs can be slightly messy friends, lol.
Going to work on the Destiny Astray today and maybe get the body done this weekend? I'm hopeful. IDK what my next kit will be but it will be Bandai so it at least will go together without extensive modification and/or pain.
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
today was needed
Feb. 21st, 2026 11:20 pmcornerofmadnessI was going to shop around Jackson but once I got there apparently everyone in a 100 mile radius showed up. It was hilariously crowded so I cut my day in half. I did get to the coffee house and like the jackass I am saw one open table and three people in line so I threw my shit on that table got all comfy then got in line. I wrote. I finish that chapter I've been trying to finish for a month. I started a new story. I might share it tomorrow to see if it feels like it would draw you in.
I couldn't recycle today because it looked like none of the 8 dumpsters had been emptied since I was there last week. People were trying to toss stuff a top the mountains. I noped out of that, hit the library and Kroger (I guess this snow tomorrow is going to be worse than I heard?) which was packed to the gills.
I also managed to hit Tractor Supply. I now own six black ducklings and a dozen of mixed peeps. Okay not really but probably only because I love to travel and can't take care of farm animals. I did get onion sets though and my brush on a stick so I can clean the kitchen floor. This is a Liberman (like my broom) 15$. All the other brands were 40$ and up. I'm like dudes, it's a brush on a stick. I can buy two of this one for one of yours and yours didn't seem considerably better.
There was a handmade lemonade 'food' truck in the parking lot. I got the holy water lemonade (strawberry, peach, something I'm forgetting and blue curacao and I nearly drank it all in one go I ate the lemons in it to. Have I mentioned I love lemons? (bought another half dozen of them today)
I saw a facebook announcement that the Bourbon City steampunk already has their panels filled up and I didn't get an email so I guess I ain't one of them. What sucks is I have the tickets but its on graduation. BUT they're also doing a writing thing so I am going to try that too. Who knows. I might just tell my bosses I have a convention. Do they need to know what kind?
And I am already sending my panel ideas to the Gettysburg steampunk thing. I mean I left it too long on Bourbon but it's early days for Gettysburg.
Science Saturday time
Unprecedented spike in atmospheric methane during the COVID-19 pandemic has a troubling explanation
Astronauts' brains physically shift in their heads during spaceflight
Sleep deprivation harms the gut via the vagus nerve, early study reveals
5,500 years ago, a teenage girl was buried with her father's bones on her chest, new DNA study reveals
Our adorable, noodle-like ancestor had 4 eyes, half-a-billion-year-old fossils reveal
95 million-year-old Spinosaurus had a scimitar-shaped head crest and waded through the Sahara's rivers like a 'hell heron'
Iron Age Surgeons Fixed a Woman’s Shattered Jaw With Primitive Prosthetic—and She Survived
City-size, cold-volcano comet transforms into a glowing 'snail shell' after major explosive outburst
I couldn't recycle today because it looked like none of the 8 dumpsters had been emptied since I was there last week. People were trying to toss stuff a top the mountains. I noped out of that, hit the library and Kroger (I guess this snow tomorrow is going to be worse than I heard?) which was packed to the gills.
I also managed to hit Tractor Supply. I now own six black ducklings and a dozen of mixed peeps. Okay not really but probably only because I love to travel and can't take care of farm animals. I did get onion sets though and my brush on a stick so I can clean the kitchen floor. This is a Liberman (like my broom) 15$. All the other brands were 40$ and up. I'm like dudes, it's a brush on a stick. I can buy two of this one for one of yours and yours didn't seem considerably better.
There was a handmade lemonade 'food' truck in the parking lot. I got the holy water lemonade (strawberry, peach, something I'm forgetting and blue curacao and I nearly drank it all in one go I ate the lemons in it to. Have I mentioned I love lemons? (bought another half dozen of them today)
I saw a facebook announcement that the Bourbon City steampunk already has their panels filled up and I didn't get an email so I guess I ain't one of them. What sucks is I have the tickets but its on graduation. BUT they're also doing a writing thing so I am going to try that too. Who knows. I might just tell my bosses I have a convention. Do they need to know what kind?
And I am already sending my panel ideas to the Gettysburg steampunk thing. I mean I left it too long on Bourbon but it's early days for Gettysburg.
Science Saturday time
Unprecedented spike in atmospheric methane during the COVID-19 pandemic has a troubling explanation
Astronauts' brains physically shift in their heads during spaceflight
Sleep deprivation harms the gut via the vagus nerve, early study reveals
5,500 years ago, a teenage girl was buried with her father's bones on her chest, new DNA study reveals
Our adorable, noodle-like ancestor had 4 eyes, half-a-billion-year-old fossils reveal
95 million-year-old Spinosaurus had a scimitar-shaped head crest and waded through the Sahara's rivers like a 'hell heron'
Iron Age Surgeons Fixed a Woman’s Shattered Jaw With Primitive Prosthetic—and She Survived
City-size, cold-volcano comet transforms into a glowing 'snail shell' after major explosive outburst
Just one thing: 22 February 2026
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:53 pmjazzyjj in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
awesomeersIt's challenge time!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2026 03:51 pmconuly in agonyauntMy daughter “Melody” is in the midst of the terrible twos. Five or more meltdowns per day over normal frustrations/limits are typical. Recently, my mother-in-law, “Darlene” took Melody and my 6-year-old son out to run errands, and true to form, Melody had a blow-up. It was how Darlene handled it that has me seeing red. She told Melody that she was leaving her in the store and that she could find her own way home, and left her screaming on the floor! She then moved off with my son, out of my daughter’s view, and waited for several minutes before coming back for her. I only learned of this later when my son told me what happened.
When I confronted my mother-in-law, she claimed her method was helpful because Melody behaved afterward. And she said Melody was “never in any danger” because she kept her in sight at all times. After this, I no longer feel safe with Darlene going places with the kids without my husband present or me. Sadly, my husband is no help. He agrees that this was a good “lesson” in behaving for our daughter and that his mother used to do it to him and his sister when they were kids! Please tell me I’m right in telling Darlene her days of taking the kids solo are over.
—Pissed
( Read more... )
When I confronted my mother-in-law, she claimed her method was helpful because Melody behaved afterward. And she said Melody was “never in any danger” because she kept her in sight at all times. After this, I no longer feel safe with Darlene going places with the kids without my husband present or me. Sadly, my husband is no help. He agrees that this was a good “lesson” in behaving for our daughter and that his mother used to do it to him and his sister when they were kids! Please tell me I’m right in telling Darlene her days of taking the kids solo are over.
—Pissed
( Read more... )
Watching for Stuff on Sale
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:15 pmdays_unfoldingHmm. Chewy sent me a coupon for $15 off an order of $49 or more. The gate that I want for Zara’s room is $45. Maybe I’ll get it plus some toys. Oliver and Zara were snoozing near each other during my singing lesson. I wonder if I should get a cat tree for there to make it a kitty playground. Hmm. Maybe I should wait until they send another coupon.
I forgot to put the brace on last night. I was already in bed when I remembered, but I just rolled over and went to sleep. I need to put it in my bedroom.
Slept until 11:30 AM. Holy cow. Oliver is on my lap and closed the news that I was looking at on my phone. Pay attention to meeeee!
We have a routine. I go in Zara’s room to get her food dish, and Oliver goes in. I leave him there when I get the dogs in so that he doesn’t run outside. Apparently, I left the piano on last night. Lily is happy to be an only cat for a few minutes. She is showing me her belly. “It’s empty, Mommy. Fill it!”
I got Bella in, but Gracie doesn’t want to come in. Gracie was barking at Oliver, who was lounging in the window in Zara’s room.
Ugh. The grocery delivery guy came while Gracie was still out, so I took the items over the fence. I was bringing groceries in when Bella ran out. Shit. I got a new fresh donut for them and Bella snatched a bite of it. They decided to come back inside to get more. Whew. I’m going to leave the rest of the soda out there until later. I don’t want them to run back out. I fed them and need to feed Oliver and Zara after I rest for a few minutes. Okay, everyone’s inside and fed. Nap time after I take my meds.
Okay, I bought the grass seed and some wildflower seeds. And a book on growing plants from seed.
Now it’s apparently dog wrestling time on the bed. I’m telling them that they had been running around and should be tired. Take a nap! They finally did.
Napped. Patched the hole that Gracie made in the mattress with duct tape and put the new “bed in a bag” on the bed. It’s not bad. We’ll see how long it takes Gracie to destroy it. (I had to hustle to get it done while the dogs were outside. Lily was on the bed, however, and got in the way.) Fed the hordes and am making food for myself.
My dad said to figure out why I'm getting carpal tunnel. I think that I need to move the two-monitor setup for work closer to the center of the desk, but that means that I have to clean off the desk first. I also need to move the power strip under the desk.
Hmm. There is a sale on cedar planters with legs. That would be cheaper than the ones at which I was looking, for which I’d need a fence.
I need to get up early to go get the car's battery fixed. So I need to get to bed soon.
I forgot to put the brace on last night. I was already in bed when I remembered, but I just rolled over and went to sleep. I need to put it in my bedroom.
Slept until 11:30 AM. Holy cow. Oliver is on my lap and closed the news that I was looking at on my phone. Pay attention to meeeee!
We have a routine. I go in Zara’s room to get her food dish, and Oliver goes in. I leave him there when I get the dogs in so that he doesn’t run outside. Apparently, I left the piano on last night. Lily is happy to be an only cat for a few minutes. She is showing me her belly. “It’s empty, Mommy. Fill it!”
I got Bella in, but Gracie doesn’t want to come in. Gracie was barking at Oliver, who was lounging in the window in Zara’s room.
Ugh. The grocery delivery guy came while Gracie was still out, so I took the items over the fence. I was bringing groceries in when Bella ran out. Shit. I got a new fresh donut for them and Bella snatched a bite of it. They decided to come back inside to get more. Whew. I’m going to leave the rest of the soda out there until later. I don’t want them to run back out. I fed them and need to feed Oliver and Zara after I rest for a few minutes. Okay, everyone’s inside and fed. Nap time after I take my meds.
Okay, I bought the grass seed and some wildflower seeds. And a book on growing plants from seed.
Now it’s apparently dog wrestling time on the bed. I’m telling them that they had been running around and should be tired. Take a nap! They finally did.
Napped. Patched the hole that Gracie made in the mattress with duct tape and put the new “bed in a bag” on the bed. It’s not bad. We’ll see how long it takes Gracie to destroy it. (I had to hustle to get it done while the dogs were outside. Lily was on the bed, however, and got in the way.) Fed the hordes and am making food for myself.
My dad said to figure out why I'm getting carpal tunnel. I think that I need to move the two-monitor setup for work closer to the center of the desk, but that means that I have to clean off the desk first. I also need to move the power strip under the desk.
Hmm. There is a sale on cedar planters with legs. That would be cheaper than the ones at which I was looking, for which I’d need a fence.
I need to get up early to go get the car's battery fixed. So I need to get to bed soon.
Anticipatory.
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:42 pmhannahTrying to clear my calendar and hunker down for the next few days in light of the storm had me allowing myself a little bit of panic buying in the form of another bottle of olive oil. It's not on the same level as rescheduling an appointment because I know there's no point trying to get anywhere farther than two blocks, maximum, come Monday, but it helped a bit.
I'm also charging up my devices as something of an insurance policy and made sure to return all my outstanding library checkouts. Again, something that only helped a bit, and still helped. Mostly I'm now waiting for it to arrive so I can finally enjoy the snow. The build-up to it isn't nearly as enjoyable.
I'm also charging up my devices as something of an insurance policy and made sure to return all my outstanding library checkouts. Again, something that only helped a bit, and still helped. Mostly I'm now waiting for it to arrive so I can finally enjoy the snow. The build-up to it isn't nearly as enjoyable.
it would be so fine to see your face at my door
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:15 pmmusesfoolThis afternoon, I made this lemon cake because 1. I had an open container of ricotta I wanted to use up before it spoiled, and 2. I've been looking for a nut-free alternative to my favorite lemon cake since one of my nieces has a tree nut allergy. It turns out I did not have enough ricotta, but I made it up with sour cream, and the cake seems fine. It did stick to the pan in one small spot so I didn't take a picture of it since it had a gash in it, but it tastes great. The trick of adding turbinado sugar to the glaze to make it crunchy is a good one, too.
I also made dressing for coleslaw, which I've never done before - always just bought the pre-made deli version - and it's ok, not great. Not tangy enough, tbh. I wonder if replacing some of the mayo with buttermilk is the way to go. I ate some with a steak I pan-fried for dinner and that was nice. I don't have steak very often, but sometimes it goes on sale and I get it.
We're supposed to be getting between 12"-18" of snow tomorrow/Monday (wait, I just checked, and the current forecast is 39% likelihood of at least 18" if not more, wow), and I'm supposed to go into the office on Tuesday, so I guess we'll see what actually materializes, whether the streets are cleaned, and how I feel on Tuesday morning. Supposedly we're getting a free lunch, but I don't know when the consultant who is supposed to be buying it for our in person meeting is flying in, idk what is going to happen. There was some back and forth on Teams today about the storm and they are notifying everyone to be remote on Monday, which is the smart choice.
Anyway, my menu is not very cozy - I was planning on making that lemony macaroni salad for lunches, and some baked oatmeal with cherries and chocolate chips for breakfast. I do have bread, milk, and eggs, so there could always be French toast! Though I did make that on Wednesday when I realized it was Ash Wednesday (and that I'd completely forgotten Shrove Tuesday). I'll probably have pasta for dinner tomorrow regardless, since it's Sunday.
Today, I watched Batman Ninja, which features the Batfamily time traveling back to feudal Japan (but so much Joker and I am so tired of Joker), and then its sequel, Batman vs. the Yakuza League, which I enjoyed more because it has Wonder Woman in it and she's fantastic as always. It also features ( I guess this is a spoiler ) It was weird to me though that we got 4 Batboys (Jason's feudal Japan headgear is HILARIOUS), but no Cass or Babs at all, and I didn't love the art for Selina. Someday we'll get an animated version of Wayne Family Adventures and the girls and Duke will get their due!
*
I also made dressing for coleslaw, which I've never done before - always just bought the pre-made deli version - and it's ok, not great. Not tangy enough, tbh. I wonder if replacing some of the mayo with buttermilk is the way to go. I ate some with a steak I pan-fried for dinner and that was nice. I don't have steak very often, but sometimes it goes on sale and I get it.
We're supposed to be getting between 12"-18" of snow tomorrow/Monday (wait, I just checked, and the current forecast is 39% likelihood of at least 18" if not more, wow), and I'm supposed to go into the office on Tuesday, so I guess we'll see what actually materializes, whether the streets are cleaned, and how I feel on Tuesday morning. Supposedly we're getting a free lunch, but I don't know when the consultant who is supposed to be buying it for our in person meeting is flying in, idk what is going to happen. There was some back and forth on Teams today about the storm and they are notifying everyone to be remote on Monday, which is the smart choice.
Anyway, my menu is not very cozy - I was planning on making that lemony macaroni salad for lunches, and some baked oatmeal with cherries and chocolate chips for breakfast. I do have bread, milk, and eggs, so there could always be French toast! Though I did make that on Wednesday when I realized it was Ash Wednesday (and that I'd completely forgotten Shrove Tuesday). I'll probably have pasta for dinner tomorrow regardless, since it's Sunday.
Today, I watched Batman Ninja, which features the Batfamily time traveling back to feudal Japan (but so much Joker and I am so tired of Joker), and then its sequel, Batman vs. the Yakuza League, which I enjoyed more because it has Wonder Woman in it and she's fantastic as always. It also features ( I guess this is a spoiler ) It was weird to me though that we got 4 Batboys (Jason's feudal Japan headgear is HILARIOUS), but no Cass or Babs at all, and I didn't love the art for Selina. Someday we'll get an animated version of Wayne Family Adventures and the girls and Duke will get their due!
*
The Friday Five on a Saturday
Feb. 21st, 2026 08:42 pmnanilaWhen did you last…
- Scrounge for change (couch, ashtray, etc.) to make a purchase?
I honestly can't remember. So many places are cashless now that I often don't carry any. It must have been pre-Covid. - Visit a dentist?
Five months ago. My next clean is in March. - Make a needed change to your life?
The most significant recent change was changing to a gym I actually want to use, at the start of the year. I really needed that. I feel so much healthier. - Decide on a complete menu well in advance of the evening meal?
Most nights, tonight included. We have to plan because of the kids. Most days we eat breakfast and supper at home as a family because we have the luxury of schedules that allow us to do so. - Spend part of the day (other than daily hygiene) totally/mostly naked?
No idea. I hardly ever do this. It's flippin’ cold here most of the time. For those who say the UK temperatures are mild, okay, maybe to you, but I spent most of my life in the tropics before I moved here and I wasn't wandering around naked there either.
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2026 12:55 pmmajuFinally, a day when it was mild enough (6°C/42°F) and fine enough for me to go out for a walk, and I managed to get to the post office and mail off my change of voter registration card. I didn't try to get there by the normal (shorter) route that was so deeply under snow last time I tried to go that way; instead I went a longer way around which I hoped would be better cleared, and it was. I was able to get all the way to the post office on completely clear roads and footpaths. It turned out to be about 2 km longer, but that was perfect for a good walk as it was a total of about 5 km/3 miles instead of just over 3 km/2 miles.
Yesterday I was working on a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, one of two puzzles my youngest daughter gave me for Christmas, which I've been wanting to finish so I could send her a photo of it completed. I got nearly to the end and was pushing to get it done when I realised that I only had ten or so pieces left in the box but there were far more than ten spaces left in the puzzle. I worked out that it seemed to be missing at least 50 pieces, which was very unusual and upsetting. I had almost given up on it when this morning, I was looking for something in a box of odds and ends in my room and came across a plastic box of, yes, puzzle pieces, and suddenly I remembered that when I was just getting started on this puzzle I sorted out all the white pieces (there's a lot of snow in this picture) and put them aside, separate from the main box of pieces. Of course I then totally forgot they even existed. Now I'm really looking forward to finishing off this puzzle.
Yesterday I was working on a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, one of two puzzles my youngest daughter gave me for Christmas, which I've been wanting to finish so I could send her a photo of it completed. I got nearly to the end and was pushing to get it done when I realised that I only had ten or so pieces left in the box but there were far more than ten spaces left in the puzzle. I worked out that it seemed to be missing at least 50 pieces, which was very unusual and upsetting. I had almost given up on it when this morning, I was looking for something in a box of odds and ends in my room and came across a plastic box of, yes, puzzle pieces, and suddenly I remembered that when I was just getting started on this puzzle I sorted out all the white pieces (there's a lot of snow in this picture) and put them aside, separate from the main box of pieces. Of course I then totally forgot they even existed. Now I'm really looking forward to finishing off this puzzle.
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2026 11:20 amconuly in agonyauntDear Carolyn: I know you love dogs, but in a reasonable way, so I figure you’re a good person to ask. Is there a “normal” amount of pets for someone to have? I never had dogs or cats growing up and didn’t want them in our home when our children were young.
All my children at times asked for a pet but grew to accept my aversion, except for my youngest daughter. When she used to insist she couldn’t wait to move out and get a pet, I took it with a grain of salt. She did get a dog in the house she shared with friends in college, and her obsession has only grown since then. The last time I saw her, she excitedly told me she’s a foster parent to a litter of puppies now. I’m not sure how that works, but it brings the number of dogs in her house from two to six, and she also has two cats.
I asked if she was going to get kicked out of her house, since her township can’t possibly allow that number of animals in a small home and yard, and she just laughed at me. She apparently doesn’t understand the law or care how this all must affect her neighbors.
Could this possibly be the start of some sort of mental illness? Should I try to intervene further?
( Read more... )
All my children at times asked for a pet but grew to accept my aversion, except for my youngest daughter. When she used to insist she couldn’t wait to move out and get a pet, I took it with a grain of salt. She did get a dog in the house she shared with friends in college, and her obsession has only grown since then. The last time I saw her, she excitedly told me she’s a foster parent to a litter of puppies now. I’m not sure how that works, but it brings the number of dogs in her house from two to six, and she also has two cats.
I asked if she was going to get kicked out of her house, since her township can’t possibly allow that number of animals in a small home and yard, and she just laughed at me. She apparently doesn’t understand the law or care how this all must affect her neighbors.
Could this possibly be the start of some sort of mental illness? Should I try to intervene further?
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2026 10:18 amconuly in agonyauntDear Care and Feeding,
My wife, “Lourdes” and I have a 2-year-old daughter, “Mackenzie.” Mackenzie was a difficult baby (long crying spells, difficult to soothe, hypersensitive to sound, fussy about solid food, etc.), and my wife has a low threshold for frustration. So most of Mackenzie’s care fell to me since Lourdes said she “couldn’t deal with it.” The result has been that our daughter is closer to me than she is to her mother. Well, Lourdes said something disturbing regarding our daughter recently.
Mackenzie had a meltdown when my wife tried to get her dressed for daycare, so Lourdes told me I needed to do it because of her theory that our daughter “hates her” and “the feeling is mutual.” Mackenzie has a routine of putting her clothes on in a specific order. Lourdes is aware of it, but wanted to do it her way, which set her off. Mackenzie has her quirks, and if you work with her (her daycare providers follow them and have reported no issues), everything is fine. The trouble is that my wife is accustomed to people doing things her way, and she does not react well when her expectations are not met. I’m seriously concerned about her relationship with Mackenzie, especially because right after her mother tasked me with dressing her that day, she said, “Mommy is mean.” Lourdes balked when I suggested counseling. How am I supposed to resolve this?
—Daughter Division
( Read more... )
My wife, “Lourdes” and I have a 2-year-old daughter, “Mackenzie.” Mackenzie was a difficult baby (long crying spells, difficult to soothe, hypersensitive to sound, fussy about solid food, etc.), and my wife has a low threshold for frustration. So most of Mackenzie’s care fell to me since Lourdes said she “couldn’t deal with it.” The result has been that our daughter is closer to me than she is to her mother. Well, Lourdes said something disturbing regarding our daughter recently.
Mackenzie had a meltdown when my wife tried to get her dressed for daycare, so Lourdes told me I needed to do it because of her theory that our daughter “hates her” and “the feeling is mutual.” Mackenzie has a routine of putting her clothes on in a specific order. Lourdes is aware of it, but wanted to do it her way, which set her off. Mackenzie has her quirks, and if you work with her (her daycare providers follow them and have reported no issues), everything is fine. The trouble is that my wife is accustomed to people doing things her way, and she does not react well when her expectations are not met. I’m seriously concerned about her relationship with Mackenzie, especially because right after her mother tasked me with dressing her that day, she said, “Mommy is mean.” Lourdes balked when I suggested counseling. How am I supposed to resolve this?
—Daughter Division
( Read more... )
Books Received, February 14 — February 20
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:02 amjames_davis_nicoll
Seven books new to me. four fantasy, one horror, one ostensibly non-fiction, and one romance. Three are series. Yeah, there does seem to be a shortage of science fiction.
I had a bunch of stuff come in just after the cut-off time for these. Next week will look very different.
Books Received, February 14 — February 20
Poll #34247 Books Received, February 14 — February 20
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40
Which of these look interesting?
View Answers
I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder (May 2026)
3 (7.5%)
In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir by Francis Fukuyama (September 2026)
5 (12.5%)
A Divided Duty: An October Daye Novel by Seanan McGuire (September 2026)
14 (35.0%)
Wickhills by Premee Mohamed (September 2026)
16 (40.0%)
Hallowed Bones: A Sons of Salem Novel by Lucy Smoke (October 2026)
2 (5.0%)
Falling for a Villainous Vampire by Charlotte Stein (October 2026)
6 (15.0%)
I Am the Monster Under the Bed: A Novel by Emily Zinnikas (September 2026)
14 (35.0%)
Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)
Cats!
33 (82.5%)
