Aurora Borealis!?

[LJ Idol Season 20] Week 4: Complimentary Issues

2026-10-30T02:44:16Z

I haven't subscribed to a print magazine in over a decade. I still get them, though. A long time ago, I used to have a lot of frequent flyer miles, but never enough on any singular airline to earn any kind of travel award. So I'd just redeem them for magazine subscriptions. Over time, as print media waned in its popularity, some of the magazines folded and moved strictly online. When they did, my remaining subscriptions were rolled over to other "similar" publications. This happened repeatedly, much like replenishing holy water by topping off the vessel with tap water and allowing the remaining blessed water to sanctify the rest.

The magazines just continue coming, even though I've never signed up for them.

I keep them all, though. Craft supplies, I tell myself, as I jam issues of Travel + Leisure and Inc. and Vanity Fair into an already overfilled drawer. I haven't decoupaged or made a collage in years and my Girl Scout leadership days are on hiatus here in the desert, but I know all too well the feeling of needing something recently tossed out in the Monday recycling. So into the hutch drawer they go. I'll need to start in on another drawer soon.

I'm rifling through the mail on my way back from the box. Another magazine, but it's not one I recognize.

To be fair, I rarely recognize any of them over time. They're just bulky things that take up space in the box. And my hutch, as it would seem.

But this one is different.

Sin Eaters Digest.

I bring it in the house, to the kitchen island where I sort the two weeks' worth of mail that I left to fill our spot in the cluster box up the block. Credit card offers go in the recycle pile. Pay stubs from the side hustle that I can't seem to figure out how to make wholly paperless go into the keep pile. (Keep where? Another overstuffed drawer? Yes, the answer is always yes. Unopened, into a drawer. I already saw it online.) Mail to be opened and reviewed, those go into their own pile. Magazines off to the side.

Except this one.

I flip it over, then flip through it.

Sin Eaters Digest?

The headlining articles are:

"Fashion at the Feast."

"Current Standards for Compensation: We Ask 100 Sin Eaters What They Accept."

"Is Modern Therapy Co-Opting Sin Eating?"

I set the magazine down and pick up my phone - the Google Machine, as we're wont to call it in our house. I search the term and gain the context I'm so sorely missing.

I'm still on my phone, the magazine beside me on the couch, when my husband returns from work. By the time he heads out to the gym after dinner, I've read it from cover to cover. I've read a Wikipedia article about sin eating. I've read an AMA Reddit thread. I've read an article in Psychology Today about how social media content managers are developing PTSD and are being likened to modern-day sin eaters.

I've also learned that Psychology Today still has a print publication. Who knows how long it'll be before it shows up in my mailbox?

I go to bed that night still thinking about it.

It keeps me awake.

I'm a little angry about that. Perimenopause already steals enough sleep from me. I don't need one more thing.

I didn't subscribe to this.

But why does it resonate?

The issues keep coming. It seems like it's a weekly digest. Even if I don't physically go down to get the mail, I still have the USPS Informed Delivery app on my phone. I can see the headlining articles in the post office's scans of the covers.

"Today's Hottest New Sin Eating Musical Acts: We Build You a Brand New Playlist!"

"Embracing the Outcast Life."

"Vote for the Sexiest Sin Eater of 2026!"

"The Ethical Complications of Ambulance Chasing Sin Eaters."

"Crossing Party Lines - Would You Eat the Sins of Your Political Foes?"

"How to Brine Your Thanksgiving Turkey in the Sins of the Departed."

"Tips for Training Your Sin Eating Pooch."

"Mercury in Retrograde: The Best Time for Vicious Vittles?"

"Big Sin - Is a Brand Deal Right for You?"

"The Case for AI in Sin Eating."

Before I realize it, I've been getting copies of Sin Eaters Digest for six months. I've absolutely had to start a new drawer, but these ones get their own. It seems weird to stack them on top of Florence Pugh on the cover of Vanity Fair.

An issue arrives one day that misses the Informed Delivery scan. It happens. I was actually kind of surprised I was seeing them on the scans at all - usually magazines don't come through. I pull it out of the mailbox along with a Valpak and another pay stub that I can't seem to get to go paperless. On my way back to the house, I check out the headlining articles.

"Eldest Daughters: Natural Born Sin Eaters?"

I actually stop in my tracks, which sucks because I've stopped right by the house with the giant dog that hops on top of the brick wall and barks at me. He doesn't miss his cue. One day, he'll make it over the top. Today is not that day, but he perches there, barking in short spurts and then just staring at me. It breaks my sudden concentration.

"It's cool, homie," I tell him. "I'm leaving."

Back at the house, I sit down on the couch with the stack of mail and look at the headlining article again.

"Eldest Daughters: Natural Born Sin Eaters?"

This whole time that I've been transfixed by this magazine, I've only fleetingly wondered who it was for. Each time it arrives, there's no pre-printed address and bulk postage. Yet, it has to be the postal carrier depositing it into my box. The USPS scanning it at the distribution center. I know things can make it through if they're somehow coded properly. I always just assumed it was a renewal of a folded magazine that also was a renewal of a folded magazine. I'd briefly considered that it could have been for a previous tenant of our rental house. We still get their mail sometimes. There was that time I got the former occupant's butt-lifting leggings dropped off on my porch.

There's a reasonable explanation. There must be.

Right?

"Eldest Daughters: Natural Born Sin Eaters?"

Has the call been coming from inside the house the whole time?

The glaring metaphor is not lost on me now, though I clearly had to have it spoon-fed to me over the past few months. Maybe it's been years of the universe trying to scream a message at me that I should've been able to hear. It's my eyesight that's shitty, it's never been my ears. I can hear the bees in the tall grass of the backyard and I can hear the hum of electronics from the room over.

I'm the sin eater.

I've always been the sin eater.

When my younger sister was being my younger sister with all her transgressions and moral failings, I was expected to uphold my standing as the "good" one. The one no one worried about. The "easy" one that kept quiet and read books. Sit still, don't make a fuss.

When life threw me curveballs, asking for exactly the help I needed was seen as an offense. I should shoulder the weight quietly and never burden anyone else. I should eat the trauma and ingest it silently, without complaint. They weren't equipped to deal with me and I should accept that. With grace.

Be useful. Be helpful. Be kind, unfailingly so, even at your own soul's expense.

A quote from The Stand whizzes across my plane of consciousness: "It tastes terrible, so eat your pie. You can have seconds, even thirds. Eat your pie, Frannie, eat every bite."

Take your mother's generational trauma by the forkful. She doesn't mean it. It's her first time being human. She's doing her best. She'll never tell you her trauma and she'll never overtly lay it out on the table like dessert, like Frannie's pie, but it will be unprocessed and it will be passed along to you in oblique ways that sound like flat excuses when you speak them aloud.

The sin eater is the outcast, isolated. You'll spend your childhood both over- and under-mothered at the same time. Stay home, keep quiet, be good. It builds a weird wall between you and the rest of the world. You'll get called smart, but not street smart. Book smart, they mean, but unable to pick up on the complexities of humans.

Carry the labor alone. Know what they want before they ask for it. Behave like a well-adjusted grown-up even though you're still a child. Your behavior can't be tolerated because they have to tolerate everyone else's. There's no space for you unless you're making life easier.

Eat the pie.

Digest the sins.

Make it nice for the people.

I look down at the magazine again. I haven't even opened it this time.

I was the sin eater. I always have been.

I didn't subscribe to this, I remember.

This doesn't have to be mine.

This issue goes in the recycling. I empty the special drawer I freed up just for them.

Then they stop coming.

I don't miss them.

My chest feels lighter over time, as though I've released a breath I never knew I was holding.

The dog never makes it over the top of the wall and the other magazines keep coming. Country Living and Women's Health make their way into the mix. I refill the emptied drawer.

Maybe someday I'll decoupage again and I'll have a really great stash of magazines to rifle through, my good paper scissors in one hand and a bottle of Mod Podge in front of the other.

I didn't subscribe to these ones, either, but I don't mind the space they take up.

comments

[LJ Idol Season 20] Week 2: Vampire Load - Clean me up if I electrocute myself.

2026-10-06T18:33:19Z

The dining room table was strewn with papers, kitchen implements, small boxes of random tidbits, discarded coins collected from throughout the house, and all other manner of miscellanea. She'd done her best to organize things into piles that made sense in her jumbled brain - little doom piles that threatened to become invisible over time if she didn't make a very concerted effort to purposely look at them. Then she'd cleared a space in the middle of the chaos large enough for her laptop, space for her to move her wireless mouse around, and a little spot on the left for a drink and maybe a snack.

She had homework.

Two papers due Friday, a load of dry reading that tempted her with sleep, and - most pressing at the moment - three discussion board posts and two replies each. One of them had to be cited properly. One of them had to be at least 1000 words.

All the while, she was wading through a lake of grief. It was like the reservoir back home when it would refill before the summer boating season - so slow, so imperceptible that you didn't quite realize it was happening. Small surface ripples were the only giveaway, lapping first at her ankles, then at her calves, now up to her waist in sorrow, anger, exhaustion, and the slightest hint of loneliness.

She sat down in front of the laptop and sighed heavily. The Wi-Fi out here would be a hindrance. This would take longer than it should - time she didn't have. She closed her eyes, rested her elbows on the table and planted her forehead on the heels of her hands. She knew she'd have a headache before she went to bed, whenever that would be.

Would she sleep?

Probably.

Would she sleep well?

Debatable.

She is 41 years old. It's the summer of 2020 and both of her in-laws have passed away within months of each other. She's unemployed for the first time in 25 years. Neither of these two things are related to the COVID crisis, but COVID is absolutely fucking up everything about those things. Her daughter is 16 and being...well...16 and navigating a changed world landscape that's mucking up her high school and teenaged years. Her husband is on short-term disability after nearly lopping his thumb off at work. She's trying to find work, finish her degree, manage her in-laws' estate, and make room for the grief that threatens to rise higher with a rogue tide, swallowing her whole.

She's got years of experience being the eldest daughter, so she's pretty sure she knows how to hold the reservoir at bay: start swimming and never stop. Like the movie said, she just had to keep swimming. She would endure. After all, if she didn't, who else would?

She had help, of course, but no one was coming along to take the full load off of her. She was the coordinator, the project planner, the organizer, the keeper of all the scraps of knowledge and memory. Her husband could only do so much - he was physically limited while his injury healed. His physical therapy appointments, twice a week, were near their home - three hours away from his parents' place near the coast.

She kept getting told by well-meaning friends that it must be so nice that her husband was an only child and there were no siblings to in-fight with. She disagreed. She wished there was someone else, just one someone else, that could at least help him navigate the bottom of this deep well of sadness he found himself stuck at. There was one helpful aunt and uncle who did what they could from the island they lived on up north, a ferry and half a day's drive in one direction. Otherwise his extended family mostly hunkered back in the shadows, three hours away and blaming a pandemic they didn't wholly believe in for their unwillingness to travel or help or breathe the same air.

So there she was, coordinating what assistance she could get from her own family and often spending days at a time in this ghostly shell of a home that she needed to empty and get ready to sell.

She rubbed her eyes and picked her head back up.

She had homework. The homework was a non-negotiable.

She always joked that she'd sleep when she was dead.

Now, she was running on a vampire load. A ghost current, if you will. The switch was turned off, but the lights were still flickering, draining from a source that was on overload or something so close to it that it didn't matter what she called it.

Could she say she'd sleep when she was undead? The lore of vampires had changed too much over time. Did vampires actually sleep? Dracula had a coffin, right? Lestat slept underground in New Orleans for 55 years, but was it really sleep or more of a healing process? Dirt bandages for bloodsuckers?

She looked out the window at the green of the forest behind her in-laws' property. They were less than an hour from Forks here. She decided to go with the local "legends" and figured that if Edward was out there in the tall pines, he wasn't worried about sleeping. He didn't have a box full of dirt from wherever he was from.

And she was getting loopy.

She shook her head a little, tried to clear her mind.

Her dad was, among other things, an electrician. He was like his brothers in his brilliance and recklessness - he'd once fixed a shorted out bathroom fan at her house without turning off the power. "If I electrocute myself, clean me up before you call the ambulance," he'd told her.

She knew because he'd taught her, that a vampire load could only be resolved by first turning off the electricity at the source. She could hear his voice in her head telling her to go to the breaker box, flip switches, pull the lever. He never took his own advice.

The analogy was there and she wasn't stupid enough to miss it. She needed to unplug. She wasn't resting, she was just depleting further and further. The computer in her brain was running a frozen, high-drain background process that wasn't releasing no matter how many times she tried to Ctrl-Alt-Del.

She'd been out here for three days alone and she'd been in her head too long. Her husband would join her tomorrow for the weekend and they'd go home on Sunday. The ocean wasn't far and they'd go eat fish and chips on the beach. She just had to get through today. The discussion posts, the citations, some dinner, and then more digging and sorting through fifty years of a life together.

Just keep swimming.

Release the vampire load.

Move along.

comments

[LJ Idol Season 20] Week 1: Open Topic - Ghost of a girl

2026-09-17T18:08:26Z

There's a memory I have that is mine, but it doesn't make any sense.

I am between the ages of 8-11. I can't be sure, exactly, but that time period seems about right. I'm small, but not too small. It's before puberty makes me chubby. It's when I still run outside and play in the mud, before all I want to do is hide inside with books and I'm worried about what other people will think of me.

I'm sitting at a table in a woman's living room, but it might also be her dining room table. She lives in an apartment. Apartments fascinate me because I've never lived in one and I won't live in one until I'm in my 20's. This apartment may be on a golf course overlooking a water feature. It might also overlook Surprise Lake. I remember water and green outside the sliding glass door that led to her balcony. I have the foggy recollection of this apartment being in Milton, which was just up the hill from where we lived when I was that age. Surprise Lake Village was at the top of Jovita Hill where there was a Pay 'N Save and a video store and a Ben Franklin crafts. All of those things seem adjacent to the memory, like they existed around the space where I was.

Sometimes when we'd go up Jovita Boulevard, leading from our home in the country valley to the services we needed at the top of the hill, my mom would remind us that one of the Green River Killer's victims was found there. It's the reason we weren't allowed to camp in the back yard. Sometimes I wonder if I should have known this. But I am a child of the 80s and of Western Washington, and we are in the golden age of serial killers and missing children. There's a McGruff House sign on our window designating us as a safe place for kids outrunning a would-be captor. My mom has a vast library of Ann Rule novels.

Anyway, I'm sitting at this table with this woman in a chair beside me. I know her, but not well. She's not family. She's maybe a school employee, possibly a counselor. I feel like my mom knows her, which might make sense since my mom works at my elementary school. I'm not afraid of her, but I hold no significant memory of her or even what she looks like. I think my memory chooses to paint her in the stereotypical 90s schoolteacher "pixie" cut, wearing an embroidered vest and a turtleneck. She has questions for me, possibly some kind of a test.

I'm used to tests. This isn't uncommon. Gifted placement tests. I took the SAT in the fourth grade. I tested at a college reading level when I was equally as young. I placed high on the now defunct Test of Standard Written English. I was selected to test for Johns Hopkins programs. I was smart, but never quite smart enough. I didn't get chosen a lot. It took me until middle school to secure a space in the gifted program.

The point is, being tested isn't strange. I like tests. Tests are tangible. They give you results. Sometimes they reward you. Full marks on a test or a quiz gets praise. Sometimes test results mean you're chosen. I want to be chosen. I want praise. I want to be seen. Sometimes I feel like I can only be seen if I test well. If I perform well. Then I'm worth seeing and praising and choosing. I like the data of testing, I like the analytics that rank and sort and give insight. It's factual and material and real. It's not like emotions and opinions, which always seem a little out of grasp for me, incorporeal and abstract. Later in life, I'll like lab results and numbers, but I won't like math. I will like analyzing data to make sense out of nothingness.

What I don't know, though, is why I'm being tested or what for. It's possible I knew then, but I don't remember now. The memory feels like tissue paper between my fingers - flimsy and see-through. Am I remembering correctly? Is this a dream that I've somehow breathed life into over the years? I don't think so, but there's so little about it to make it feel wholly real. I barely remember my mother leaving me there or how long I was at the table. I don't remember what the woman asked me or how I was tested - was it written or oral? What topics were there? What was the end result going to be, what reward would I get at the end?

I don't speak to my mother any more. That's a post for another time, if ever. I could ask my dad, but I can almost hear the inflection, the modulation, the tone of his voice as he tells me that he doesn't remember, that my mother was in charge of those things, that he was always working. I don't speak to my sister either, but she would have been too young to know. It may remain a mystery, I don't know. I have a million possible theories, from mundane IQ testing to some kind of CPS interview. Maybe it was an autism assessment. Maybe it was therapy. Maybe I was weird in a time when girls weren't supposed to be weird and someone wanted to know why.

I like to look outside myself at this memory and think that somewhere, there is a ghost of a girl in an apartment living room. She's looking out over the water and the deep green of the Doug firs and the bigleaf maples. She's got knobby knees and off brand sneakers. Brown hair that her mom tucks behind her ears to "train" it.

She's probably just trying to please.

She just wants to be seen.

comments

[LJ Idol Season 20] Week 0: Introduction

2026-09-08T19:03:53Z

So here we are and here I am.

I went back through my posts and determined that the first time I participated in Idol was in September 2008.There's an intro post there from a lifetime ago. 18 years! The four-year-old daughter I wrote about is now 22 and married. The best friend I mention (who gave me my original LJ invite code, when those were a thing) is no longer in my life. I told you all about a job I'd been at for seven years - 11 years later, they'd very unceremoniously lay me off. I've moved from the PNW to the desert outside Phoenix. The cat I had then has since passed away, but I now have three cats that are getting on in their own later years.

Suffice to say, it's been awhile. But I'm still here and I'm still Jill.

I still love Tori Amos. I still love the travel industry after managing to work my way back to it post-layoff and post-COVID. I got my degree in communications because I still love writing and communicating. I'm semi-retired from Girl Scouting, but only because I couldn't find my place in it here in the desert. I've got three (Four? Maybe four.) cross-stitch projects in progress and I bake cookies for my co-workers at my side hustle as your local old lady barista. If I had the time and money in this economy to go back to college for my masters, I'd get it in History - I minored in the subject alongside my bachelors in communication and my niche period of interest is LGBTQ+ history of Germany's Weimar Republic. Instead, I just buy and read a lot of books on and around the topic.

I have two story ideas baking in this head of mine - one that has more meat than the other and really needs to grow its legs and become a real boy. The other is destined to be a short story if I ever get past the executive dysfunction of not being able to start something new without having finished the first thing. I'm thinking I might play with them both here, but I also might not. Hell, I'll just be happy enough if the perimenopause doesn't eat my brain and make me miss too many deadlines.

So, hey, friends. Glad to be back.

comments

Move bich, get out the way, I've come to LJ Idol to play.

2026-08-28T21:52:51Z

I dropped the T because bich is Latin for generosity. Mkay.

Here's my Very Official Statement of Intent to compete in this, the 20th anniversary of LJ Idol.

Sometimes I try to making writing goals when it comes to Idol and if I've learned anything over the years, that's just - for me, anyway - a stupid fucking idea. So I've got just one goal - write to each prompt, each week. No loafing.

*waves*

Nice to see you all again. Game on!

comments