The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 1

⋈ Sometime in the past.

Previously on TMO: What was that barefoot woman in the hospital gown carrying, exactly? And who are the Mad Ophelias? From the plant explosion just outside a nowhere town in the future, we now go back in time to see—as the sheriff said—how it all went so wrong. [Content warning]

NO ONE SHOWED UP. It’s a disaster. Just seven of us standing outside the entrance of the Fairmont Hotel on this dark, wintry morning, rain soaking the cardboard signs sagging in our hands. SlyDevil, Eyasi, OddsBots, RoskHill, Vajrapani, MadHatter. Me. The temperature cold enough to make our fingers numb but not cold enough for snow, which at least would make us less wet. Because no one brought an umbrella. It’s Seattle.

The worst part is that Sen. Walsh isn’t even at the Fairmont. The same weather pattern that’s causing an atmospheric river here has dumped an ungodly amount of snow in Newark, canceling all flights. SlyDevil got a message that the SAVE OUR UNBORN panel he was heading up is canceled, too.

“Just our fucking luck.” SlyDevil swipes at her phone’s screen, which is beaded with rain. “It’s not even on KIRO yet.” Her blond hair is cropped so close she’s almost bald, just a slight fuzz, like the belly of a hatchling. She’s planning on retiring next year from the college where she’s an adjunct theater professor.

KIRO was just bought by a conservative news conglomerate, and they’re probably waiting for talking points—but telling SlyDevil that would be a bad idea. No need to step into her blast area. She’s originally from New York (the city) and loves to tell us how we don’t measure up.

A skinhead stands under a bus stop shelter across the street. Green camo pants, brown work boots, a gray hoodie, and over that some kind of Carhartt-type coat. Lean as a greyhound. He hasn’t got on any bus in the last hour. Instead, he glares at us, occasionally holds up his cell phone. Given the distance he shouldn’t be able to get a great shot of my face—but just in case, I pull my hood farther over my head.

Twenty-five would have been enough. Carefully framed from an upward angle, it could look like more on social media. Upward conveys power, strength. A limbic response carried over from our cave-dwelling ancestors who knew that something bigger could eat you. Another option is to raise your camera over your head. Point down, cram as many bodies in the shot that you can. This implies mass consensus, a movement. Intersperse with some texture—a face looking skyward, a dog or kid if you can find one, a flyer stapled to a telephone pole—and you won’t even need to bother much with text.

The trick isn’t telling people what to think or believe. It’s making them think they came up with it themselves.

OddsBots shifts her weight from one foot to the other, either because she’s nervous or because she’s cold. With OddsBots, nervous is usually the safe bet. She’s new. Her blue hair is somewhat covered by that pink beanie everyone else has moved on from and the ink on her KEEP YOUR ROSARIES OFF OUR OVARIES sign runs, so it looks like the letters are weeping.

“You could have laminated it,” says RoskHill. RoskHill knows a lot about lamination because she teaches third grade.

“That’s not eco-friendly.” Vajrapani pulls the sleeves of her black puffy coat over her hands. “Plastic never breaks down. It just turns into microplastics that get in your bloodstream. They’ve found microplastics in polar bears.” Vajrapani wanted to be a wildlife biologist but her parents needed her to help with their two motels.

“At least it would last.” RoskHill’s laminated sign says OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE with little hearts colored in with crayon.

“They’re both good options.” Eyasi, our diplomat. She’s eight months pregnant, and we’ve been trying to get her to go inside City Lights Cafe to warm up, but she won’t hear of it.

“It doesn’t matter.” MadHatter’s long black hair clings to her skull, making her look like a drowned kitten, and her wool pea coat practically hangs off her body. No sign. “Men won’t take us seriously until we speak their language.”

That again. No one says anything. It’s a line she keeps dropping but never explains.

Skinhead man pockets his cell and starts to walk away from the bus stop toward the corner with a jewelry store.

Seven. Our numbers are dwindling. Interest is dwindling. Or maybe not so much dwindling as scattered—a rapid-fire of so many obscene news stories, each deserving of its own protest, that it’s becoming hard to collect around any one issue. Just this morning, they arrested a teenager for live-streaming his girlfriend while she died of a drug overdose. Then he dumped her body—tied to cinderblocks—in a marsh. It barely made the local news; the rest of the country too consumed with a pipe bomb whodunit.

It’s not like when we had a few heady months of nationwide—no, make that worldwide protests—hundreds of thousands of women filling the National Mall, Boston Common, Grant Park in Chicago, the Wall of Peace in Paris.

But that feels like a century ago.

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Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

SKINHEAD MAN STOPS AT the corner and presses the crosswalk button. Practically radiates cockiness. Shit—he wants to come to our side of the street. He’s flanked by a jogger with no common sense and a man walking a miserable-looking Goldendoodle.

MadHatter steps up next to me. She sees him too.

We don’t know much about her. SlyDevil jokes that she must be in the CIA, the KGB, or maybe she’s a jewel thief on the side because she has money. No job that we know of. But she can afford a huge, three-bedroom apartment in Capitol Hill, brand new furniture that looks like it was all picked up from Pottery Barn in one trip, a Lelia Mara X espresso machine.

She hasn’t even shared what happened to her. The ‘thing.’ It’s the ‘thing’ that got us out of bed on this dark, wintry morning to stand on a sidewalk holding signs and wet clipboards, collecting signatures to shame the Fairmont into canceling the panel that just got canceled, no thanks to us. The ‘thing’ that made us call out to passing strangers like weird, carny barkers—Do you think women should have bodily autonomy? The ‘thing’ that makes it impossible for us to let go.

Traffic stops and the crosswalk light turns white. Chirp, chirp, chirp.

SlyDevil’s thing was being groped at age thirteen by an assistant coach. OddsBots was told by a babysitter that he wouldn’t be her friend if she didn’t let him pull up her nightgown, the flannel one with teddy bears.

The light turns to a blinking orange hand and a countdown. 10…9…8…

RoskHill had a stalker. Eyasi somehow made it through a desert after her parents promised her in marriage to a man twice her age—she’s still scared that a relative in the U.S. might kill her to defend the family honor. Vajrapani grew up in a small, rural village near Pune and was raped, along with her younger sister.

7…6…5…4…

I had one drink at a party in college. Woke up naked on a couch with a guy I’d never seen before. Splitting headache. Metallic taste in my mouth.

3…2…1…

Took two other guys to pull me off him.

Skinhead man walks towards us with a smirk.

Maybe MadHatter’s ‘thing’ is something she can’t share—too triggering, too horrific. That’s always a possibility. And it’s not like I don’t have secrets of my own. But with MadHatter it feels, as my father would say, hinky.

I see him standing in the kitchen looking out the window not long before he died, a lit cigarette hanging from his lips, the stubble on his jaw turned gray. Predators recognize predators sweet pea, in his sandpaper voice. Stay frosty.

I can see why, in skinhead man’s assessment, we’d look like easy targets. He pulls out his cell again.

MadHatter lifts her chin and pushes her hands deeper in her pockets. “Looks like we’ve got testosterone weather.” Not loud enough for anyone to hear but me.

Photo by Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash

Everything comes into sharp focus—passing cars and the people in them living in level white, a couple going into a donut shop, the whooshing splash as a bus hits a puddle.

There’s a security guard by the Fairmont’s entrance—he wears a yellow high-visibility vest and has already asked us twice to move farther away, so he’s not exactly on our side. The jewelry store has a large security camera over its entrance, but that’d only be useful in ID’ing him after. A woman comes out of the Fairmont holding a takeaway cup of something steaming. That’s a possibility. A cup of hot coffee in the face might buy time, but could also just irritate skinhead man into doing something stupid. I have a hooked pry tool in my pocket and mace. With this rain, the mace will be practically useless.

The skinhead lifts his cell as he walks, muttering something unintelligible. Bad idea, not paying attention to the ground in front of you. I wonder what got him out of bed on this dark, wintry morning. What traumas he’s running away from or to.

I slip behind OddsBots to her other side to be a buffer. She’s distracted by the Goldendoodle peeing on a bush.

How did he know we’d be here? Our invite list is curated. And I doubt anyone would have forwarded it to him. Definitely not a Fairmont Hotel guest type. Maybe someone in the hotel going to the panel saw us and called in a pit bull. Recording from the window of their safe and cozy room, getting a nice overhead shot.

“Hey ladies.” He lets the ‘s’ drip and stops. Now he has everyone’s attention. OddsBots clutches her sign closer to her chest. “I just have one question for you.”

Vajrapani, Eyasi and RoskHill retreat a few steps, putting space between them, and Eyasi wraps a protective arm over her belly. My hand grips the pry tool.

“So.” He points his cell phone camera right at OddsBots’ face. Licks his lips. “Is the top the same as the bottom?”

OddsBots lets her sign fall to the wet concrete and I’m about to block his camera with my hand when SlyDevil charges him, shouting What the actual fuck do you mean you prick! Vajrapani and RoskHill pull Eyasi backward toward the hotel entrance, thank god. But OddsBots stands still, frozen.

I reach out for her. Skinhead man shoves SlyDevil away, yanks off OddsBots’ pink hat, and waves it over his head like he just won a prize, laughing, a shrill giggle. Just as I’m pulling out my tool—oh shit, it’s the mace—OddsBots blinks and stumbles into me. The security guard sprints our way—Hey!—but slips, crashing onto the pavement, and then MadHatter rushes in, slams both of her palms against skinhead man’s chest, which seems to excite him—his eyes get bright.

The venom in my heart leaches out and burns. I picture things. Dark things. Like how hard I’d have to strike his eyeball with my tool to jam it into his brain.

But MadHatter’s quicker—she snatches his phone and throws it into the street. A shuttle runs over it. Crack.

Now skinhead man isn’t laughing because his phone is smashed. All broken glass and warped metal and wire innards.

But MadHatter is. A shrieking, almost hysterical sound.

He clenches a fist and leans forward, like there’s a wind and it’s blowing hard against him. “You fucking bitch.”

She laughs harder. Like this is fun.

He throws the beanie into a puddle by the gutter and kicks MadHatter’s legs out from under her. She lands hard on the concrete. I slide up closer to him. My hand is really on the tool now. I’m calculating whether it’d be better to use the hook or flat side when something heavy falls out of MadHatter’s pocket with a loud clack—her phone?—and goes skittering across the sidewalk.

No. Not a phone. It’s a gun. A four-inch K-frame .357 Magnum, checkered walnut stocks.

Since when did MadHatter start carrying?

Skinhead man sees it. I can tell he’s registering distance, timing.

I am too.

He looks at me.

My hand is still in my pocket, holding the tool. Now the venom is in my arms, my legs, but I keep my face still. I press the tool against the fabric and raise it, point it at his chest. Mouth the word pow.

He grins, takes a moment. Like he’s trying to figure out whether I’m serious. Patter of raindrops bouncing off concrete. Rain streaming down his face like sweat. Tick, tick, tick. Suddenly he turns and bolts across the street—traffic is stopped for a light, but a few cars honk anyway—and he almost knocks over a teenager on the other side before dodging into an alley. Gone.

I’m breathless. My hands are shaking. That was too close. Far too close.

“Everyone ok?” The security guard comes up behind me, limping, a walkie-talkie in his hand, finger near the TALK button. Eyes on the gun.

MadHatter gets to her feet, makes a big show of brushing off her pants like she landed on her knees or something. “A-okay.” She nonchalantly walks over to the gun, picks it up, and slips it back into her coat pocket.

Now we have the attention of a few scattered passerby—two older men in suits holding umbrellas, a woman in tight racing gear and a helmet who stopped in the bike lane, a scruffy man with an oversized backpack and hiking boots.

The security guard points at MadHatter with the walkie. “You got a permit for that?”

No way in hell does she have a permit.

“Of course I have a permit, what do you think I am, an idiot?” She cocks her head. Blinks. Daring.

Jesus, way to poke the bear. I’m sure he’d love nothing more than to call the police and have us hauled away—free speech be damned—because undoubtedly nervous guests have been calling the lobby to see what’s going on. Which was the point.

Keep your shit together sweet pea.

His face scrunches and he raises the walkie to his mouth like he’s about to press TALK, but I force myself to step in and give him my biggest, friendliest smile. The one that took me a year to get right.

“Hey look.” My work voice—warm and an octave lower. “She should have had it properly secured in a holster, granted, but it’s not her fault that man just assaulted her.” I nod to the others, and they lower their signs, except, of course, for MadHatter, who doesn’t have one. “We were just about to leave anyway.”

Security guard man seems aware of the onlookers, too. The woman with the bike stares him down. “None of you are hurt or anything?” Covering the bases, making sure there isn’t a lawsuit later from a twisted ankle or fractured knee.

I send psychic daggers in MadHatter’s direction to keep her mouth shut, and miraculously, she does.

“Well, all right then.” He turns back to the hotel, but before he does, I see a flash of something—suppressed fury, the things he’d like to say choked down, swallowed. In the far distance, I hear the faint wail of a fire truck.

The beanie still floats in the gutter. Brown water, a soggy plastic grocery bag, a clump of white…something. I go get the beanie, shake it, wring it out and hand the limp thing to OddsBots. Offer a realer smile, even though I’m spent. “You’re one of us now. Wear it with pride.”

She tucks a strand of wet, blue hair behind her ear. Smiles back. Puts it on her head.

SlyDevil gives it a rub. “For luck.”

MadHatter grins. “Did you all see that? Did you see how fast he ran? That’s what I’m talking about.” She pats her pocket. “That’s the language they understand.”

And I know she’s not wrong, not entirely. It’s the language I was raised with. What comes after though, well that’s not so neat and clean.

But what really worries me, on this dark and wintry morning, is that no one contradicts her.

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© 2026 J. Lincoln Fenn. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction published as a serialized novel on Substack. No part of this work may be reproduced, reposted, or distributed in any form without the author’s prior written permission. First publication rights reserved by the author.