Chains

Johns is a struggling single father of three in the mid 1800s, attempting to raise healthy children with a positive moral grasp of the horrors of slavery. He’s struggling to feed his kids on a teachers salary. Also, there’s lots of negative views from friends and relatives concerning his views on black americans. Especially from his brother who owns a small plantation in the south. His brother has offered handouts to help Johns, but Johns refuses, as his late wife would never have approved of accepting money generated by slavery. When Johns’ brother dies and Johns inherits the plantation and the slaves. He wants to free the slaves, but if he does, he knows that he will lose the property and be unable to feed his children. He tries to befriend the slaves and do right by them while persuading them to stay, but it’s virtually impossible and of course his kids are learning that slavery means they get to eat. Emancipation means that they go hungry.

The Greatest

Susan strives to achieve renown by becoming the youngest living great great grandmother. After having her child at 16 and dealing with that adversity, she is then distraught when her daughter makes the same ‘mistake’. Having spent her life worried about everyone but her, she decides to capitalize on this by becoming a great great grandmother. So, at 47, she is now pressuring her 16 year old granddaughter to have sex and have child. Obviously, this violates social norms. Her daughter disapproves as well. And she’ll need to instill in this a child a sense of youthful sexuality in order to get her to continue the trend for at least one more generation. The human race becomes abruptly sterile, so Susan consents to having her high fertility studied in order to perpetuate the race. Before doing this, she must contend with the consideration that if the world goes post-apocalyptic, at the present, she has a disproportionately large clan to fight by her side and this could be advantageous if the old paradigm is never reinstated.

Getting Back

A young girl wakes in the woods with no idea how she got there. She has no clue where she is. There are no woods near her house. Her life thus far has been entirely indoors. She’s hungry and thirsty and scared and lost. And the animals in the woods want to eat her. She learns some survival skills and begins the long trek back toward civilization. She eventually finds her way home but it turns out that her father deliberately abandoned her there. So when she gets home he decides that maybe just killing her will be more effective. She flees back into the woods, but he chases her. Not the end of the world. This is her natural environment now and she’s got some skills that he doesn’t.