30,000+; June 23 2019

I don’t work, anymore. I’m just not physically and mentally capable of working anymore, between various illnesses. My partner, however, works to keep us afloat.

She works at a heavily understaffed tailoring chain, one of three regulars. She’s the only one who’s constantly put on shift who isn’t considered a full-time employee. Her coworkers have a cap on how many hours they’re allowed to work, but never fear, for they can just over-burden my partner for lesser pay!

If she doesn’t go in for a shift, the store doesn’t open. It doesn’t matter if she’s sick or if we’re desperately trying to coordinate schedules to find a place to live. Her weeks are packed. When she comes home, she’s utterly drained. She doesn’t have a whole lot of time or energy to take care of our child.

Now, this doesn’t bother me any. For as busy as she is, my partner does a fantastic job with our kid. She can make her laugh like nobody else can, and the two of them playing together might have literally melted my heart at some point. I’ll have to check with my family doctor, get an echocardiogram or something.

That doesn’t mean this is fair. If she doesn’t have time for her baby, and she doesn’t have time for herself, who exactly is my partner living for? It’s not me. We don’t get much time together, either! When she comes home and has the reserves to play with our daughter, that’s my time to sit down and collect myself. I have my own shit to do, but I can barely get to it. I haven’t worked on my novels, be it writing, revising, querying. The thing I want to make a career out of comes in last in the priority race.

So, my partner’s life is work. Everything in our family revolves around that schedule. She’s overworked, overstressed, and not even paid enough to keep us living comfortably. We don’t just scrape by – we dig into credit to survive and cross our fingers. We amass more and more debt, and lose more and more time.

That’s just the way the world works, isn’t it?

It doesn’t have to work that way. It really doesn’t. Initiatives (that are constantly shut down) to ensure everybody is given a living wage would honest-to-god change the entire system. There was a fantastic idea we attempted to get our votes in on, to give everyone a lump sum of something like 30,000 dollars to live on unconditionally? The theory is that people will work better and healthier if they’re not being bogged down to the breaking point.

But, see, the people whose lives that would completely turn around just don’t count as ‘people’. Quality of life is apparently only for the elite. In working herself to the bone for an unfair wage, my partner will never be in a position to help me help us get ahead.

We’re so tired. Everyone I know is so tired.

Luckily, it doesn’t take too terribly long to write one paragraph of a story. So, here we go!

I could hear incessant, gut-turning bellowing from the local fauna as a pack of bark-hounds sprung upon their prey. Even the lightest steps made too loud of a crunch on the thick greenery, but they weren’t likely to come after me if I was careful. Stooping, I grabbed my pack to secure it on my back and around my waist.

“Two days worth of travel until you reach the Humming Settlement,” murmured the goddess Netteri, a serene voice cuddling up to my eardrum.

“I know.”

“Those bark-hounds have probably acquired a taste for human flesh since -”

“I know.” Since they’d caught up the rest of my travelling party and shredded them like petals going through a wood chipper.