On the world of Yan, marriage is more than a promise—it is legal protection. When a husband abandons his wife, she loses not only her home but her status, her children, and any claim to dignity. Within hours she must file the documents that will determine her fate, while officials prepare to remove her children and process her as property of the State.
Marigold spends a long night completing the forms that strip her of identity. Every question measures her as though she were merchandise: appearance, fertility, temperament, usefulness. By morning she has done everything required of an Abandoned. She has filed the availability papers. She has surrendered her money. She has prepared for whatever claim the system allows others to make upon her.
Then something happens that changes the outcome of the process entirely.
But systems built on humiliation do not easily restore what they destroy. Even when the rules offer a way back, the damage done during that one night cannot simply vanish. What follows becomes a quiet reckoning between law, marriage, and a woman who has learned exactly how little protection either truly offers.
Donald F. Daley wrote only one known science fiction story, “The Abandoned of Yan,” published in the March 1963 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction.
