The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 11
⋈ Sometime in the past.
Previously on TMO: Wil made a highly personal confession to MadHatter, and was told why they kidnapped him—he’s to interview her on a livestream that’s already amassed 20,000 viewers, thanks in part to a group of Mad Ophelias storming the Liberty Foundation building. Now we check in on Ophelia after the shooting range incident.
I CAN’T FEEL MY FACE. Standing on the sidewalk with the parking lot and Puget Sound Rifle and Pistol Club and the scruffy hillside behind me, a kneeling bus in front of me. Is it a routine face? Happy face? Sad face? I reach my hand up to my mouth to see if my fingers can tell, but they’re trembling. No use.
You coming? asks the bus driver.
Crosswalk signal flashes DON’T WALK, DON’T WALK, DON’T WALK.
Sky as dark as a crow’s wing, drizzle of rain. My t-shirt is wet with sweat, absorbing the chill, a shriveled ball where my stomach should be. I know I should get on, but my brain refuses to math—take step forward, choose card to pay, pick seat—and aren’t there cameras on the bus?
Damn junkie, someone on the bus says. Which is true, but not for the reason they think.
The bus door closes, a groan as the tire inflates, white plume of diesel smoke that drifts. I take a deep breath. Pull it into my lungs.
They’ll have me on the security camera footage at the range.
But I don’t hear sirens. I internally thank whoever decided to hire the underage Roy.
WALK.
I walk. Cross four lanes of traffic toward the derelict strip mall across the street with mostly empty storefronts except one that’s brightly lit, Lake City Liquors and Hardware. A prostitute lingers under the liquor store’s eaves, ultra-short black miniskirt, spiked heels, and some kind of fake fur coat. She looks cold. Young. Rain beads her hair-sprayed, puffy red bouffant, catching the neon light, glistening.
I pull off my cap, wig, glasses, and head for the trash can that’s already overflowing with fast food bags, empties and plastic cups with lopsided straws. Couple of scratch tickets and shattered glass behind it. Sucks because wigs that look like real hair are expensive, and it’s the one I wear in my best fake passport.
Still no sirens.
“I’ll take it.” Click, click, click of heels on pavement as the prostitute comes over, hands jammed in her pockets. Looks hard at me through long, fake eyelashes.
I slip off my jacket because that’s compromised, too. “Swap.”
She shifts her weight from one heel to the other. Presses her tongue against her lower lip, considering.
“And a bottle of whatever you want.”
She raises a chin. “Johnnie Walker.”
“Done.”
Sigh of regret for not asking for more—she must be good at it, negotiation—and she doesn’t take off her coat but yanks off her wig, revealing shorn black hair and a gnarly-looking, thick scar that runs above her temple. Oh. She thought I meant swap wigs.
It’ll work. I hand mine over, take her wig, cover my head with it, and wrap the jacket sleeves around my waist, tying them tight. Just like that, I’ve gone from Bellevue soccer mom slumming to just got off my shift from 7-Eleven.
I leave the prostitute adjusting her new locks, using the storefront glass as a mirror, and go inside. She gives me a nod. I return it.
Honestly, it looks better on her.
JOHNNIE WALKER. CHECK. Another Johnnie—it was buy one get one—check. Crowbar. Check. Hammer and nails and power drill and flashlight with batteries, check and check and check and check. Package of beef jerky and a family-size bag of BBQ potato chips for dinner. Box of fancy cat treats to appease Milton when I come home late.
Checker takes my cash, holding the bills up to the light. No sirens. I hold onto that. I hold onto that tightly.
But I need to prepare to bounce. I don’t have a car because car = registration = address that’s easily accessible to law enforcement. But I could rent a moving truck with one of my fake IDs. A pro tip I was given in my short time in juvie, Don’t rent a car, rent a moving truck and leave everything behind. You never hear about police checking truck rentals. Got a cousin in upstate New York I’ve never met, and while I don’t relish the idea of getting back on my aunt’s radar, I could make it work. Whispers of a cover story start to form, maybe I’m looking for some quiet to write my memoir, one that credits my aunt with saving me from my evil father, who is always evil in every narrative. So convenient that he’s dead and can’t defend himself.
Probably my job, but I’ve got to take care of the living.
Fuck, what if my cousin has a thing against cats? That’s the problem with attachments. They complicate things.
I leave the store, bags in hand, look for the prostitute, but she’s gone already, so I pull out her Scotch and tuck it just to the side of the trash can because she’ll probably be back, and a deal’s a deal. Behind me, a car pulls up, the familiar knock, slap, knock, slap of SlyDevil’s engine. She refuses to take it in, says car repairmen always up-charge women 50%, but she can’t find an alternative.
SlyDevil rolls her window down. “You planning to walk back to the Central District?”
I was planning on the cold anonymity of an Uber. Because I know why my hands are trembling, because I want to go back to the range. I want to feel cool metal in my palm. I want another hit.
“Seriously,” SlyDevil continues. “Do I need to call an ambulance and have you checked into a psych ward or something? ‘Cause you’re really starting to freak me out and that’s not an easy thing to do.”
But an Uber would create a digital trail to where I’m going.
At least that’s what I tell myself. The truth is, I feel too visible to be around strangers.
So I reach for the door handle and get into the car. Snap into the seatbelt, put the bags by my feet, and pull out the pack from under my seat. Tuck my hands under my thighs. They’re freezing. “I gotta hit the office before home.”
She eyes the plastic bag. “I thought you abstained from that kind of thing.”
“I do.” I reach down for the Johnnie. “I did.”
I want to hit something with my fist. Christ, I want to hit something so very fucking hard. Instead, I take off the wig and lean my head against the glass of the cool window.
Search my heart for something, anything like an emotion.
Come up empty.
IT’S ALMOST SEVEN by the time we get to the office. I point to the alley so we can go in the back. Wet black pavement, looming dumpsters and scattered trash, the broken reflection of office lights in puddles.
“Pisses me off.” Bottle is half empty. My hands are finally steady.
“What?” SlyDevil drives slowly. Like every shadow is a carjacker who might pop out. But they don’t jack cars much here. They just rob you.
“Those lights,” I say, tapping on the windshield glass. “On for no fucking reason. All they had to do was flick a goddamn light switch.”
“A few lights being left on in one office tower aren’t exactly going to tip the scales into global extinction,” says SlyDevil.
“It’s the accumulation. The accumulation of all the things we shouldn’t be doing.”
“Okaayyy,” says SlyDevil, giving a sideways look. “I think I like you better sober. Where exactly are we going?”
“There.” I nod at the gaping maw of the loading dock. “Park in the ‘no parking’ space.”
She pulls in and glances at the rearview mirror. “I don’t know how comfortable I am waiting out here.”
“Then come with.” I dig around in the bag for the bottle cap, can’t find it.
“I don’t know how comfortable I am leaving the car out here either.”
Oh, it’s in the cup holder. I reach for it, but no, it’s the top of something else. “Then. Come. With.”
Why did I say that? She can’t come with. She can’t see.
“Fine,” says SlyDevil, putting it in park.
I focus on the power drill by my feet. The brand-new crowbar resting on my knees. The hiss of heat through the car vent. But when I catch my reflection in the glass of the passenger side window, for a split second I see my twelve-year-old self—scrawny, corn-haired, slightly feral. Violent.
“You know,” says SlyDevil carefully, “maybe we should just go back to my place. Get some rest. Think about all this tomorrow.”
“MadHatter’s thinking about this tonight.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“You don’t know me.” My voice breaks in a way that’s strange. Unfamiliar.
SlyDevil looks flummoxed. “Well of course I know you. We’ve—”
“You don’t know me, know me.”
SlyDevil opens her mouth to respond, but I just grab the bags and step out into the dark. The alley smells of piss, and shit, and rotting garbage. A rat-sized shadow scurries along the sill of a basement window. One of my chores had been catching mice and rats for the Rottweiler we never named. Small rabbits and birds too. The thing was so spoiled that it wouldn’t eat anything if it wasn’t alive. I got used to their terrified screeches, eventually.
SlyDevil gets out of the car. “For the record, you are making zero sense.”
If I think too much, I’ll plummet, and that goddamn abyss is so hard to crawl out of. Instead, I knock the car door shut with my knee, consolidate the crowbar and bags in one hand, and blow some heat on the other.
SlyDevil clicks the key fob to lock it. The parking lights blink twice.
I grab the exterior door office key, something I talked Doug into giving me just after my hire—in case there’s some kind of PR crisis—although I had a whole different reason.
I just never meant it to be a long-term solution.
FROM THE DOOR by the loading dock, we take the back exit stairs down, just concrete walls and crumbling cement steps that look like they might have been painted teal decades ago. The massive overhead fluorescent lights cast everything in a bright, unearthly hue.
“…and that’s when I told the dean, look, if we don’t get some actual diversity in the tenured ranks I’m going to The Stranger and I’m going to out them for the last presidential search which cut a wonderful Black woman from the finalists just because she was shy a few years of experience from the old white guy candidate,” SlyDevil says.
She’s chatty. She’s always chatty when she’s nervous.
“You have to look at a lived experience, right?” SlyDevil continues. “And what would any of them be able to contribute in terms of understanding our student body? They don’t want to be reading A Tale of Two Cities and Faust.”
The lights in the stairwell suddenly dim, leaving us in near darkness. I flick on the flashlight. “We really need to fix the electric.”
“Isn’t that your whole company’s thing?”
“They’re worried what else might turn up if they open a wall. Everyone wants to change the world until it costs something.”
“That’s actually funny.”
“Funny not funny. And why am I carrying everything?” I pause and hand SlyDevil the crowbar.
“I’ve never used one of these before,” SlyDevil says, reluctantly taking it.
“It isn’t complicated.”
“You’re not going to kill me with it, right?”
“Not now.”
It’s a joke that doesn’t land quite right.
But then nothing is quite right. I didn’t even know what I was looking for when I got off the bus at the King Street station with a duffel bag. Seattle was just a word on a map—something about grunge and coffee—but all I really wanted was something different, radically different. The chance to remake myself into someone else. Someone normal.
I cast the flashlight beam down the stairs and continue.
“Where did you say you were from…originally?” SlyDevil trails behind me.
“I didn’t. Small town in New Hampshire. You never heard of it.”
“Huh.”
I can guess the next question. It’s always the next question. I’m glad I drank the Johnnie. It’s made me loose, swingy.
“Your family still back there?”
I have to catch my balance on the next step, hold a hand up to the cold wall to steady myself. Bad fireteam. “Sorta. They’re all dead.”
The word ‘dead’ is pretty much guaranteed to stop most people from pursuing the topic any further, but SlyDevil isn’t most people.
“Well that’s intriguing. How?”
I have a litany. My mother died when I was born, my brother died fighting in Iraq, my father of…usually I go with cancer. If I’m feeling more creative, cerebrovascular disease. It’s easier to rattle off something palatable. Easier still to tell people my parents retired to Florida where my brother lives nearby, an accountant. Nothing like accounting to make people’s eyes glaze over, tune out.
“My mother and older brother were killed in a hit-and-run accident. I was about eight. She was driving him home from soccer practice. No one ever found out who did it.”
“Goddamn. I’m sorry,” says SlyDevil.
“Me too.”
We’re about halfway down now, and it’s a few degrees cooler.
“I was supposed to go with them, but I’d forgotten to collect the eggs that morning. We had chickens. So my father said I couldn’t go.” I see her in a cotton nightgown putting the kettle on, a raggedy Calico twisting between her ankles. Jimmy at the table, penciling in a crossword. Me curled up on the floor, hot tears running down my face.
“I guess that was lucky,” says SlyDevil, and then she catches herself. “Or not.”
“The thing is…my father didn’t think it was an accident. He thought it was retaliation.”
“For what?”
Hiding in the closet while he raged. Broken glass on the kitchen floor in the morning. Empty bottle of whiskey on the table. “I’ve never told this to anyone except the police.”
Think she’ll understand? Woman like her? No blood under the nails?
“He worked for the electric company. Just before the accident, he was on a couple of right-wing radio shows, talking about how cascading failures could lead to a complete breakdown of the electrical grid. Hospitals, commerce, transportation—anything that depends on electricity. He just got…obsessed. With transformers. You know, they’re not like a breaker. Can’t just flip a switch to reset. The entire infrastructure would have to be rebuilt. Six months, a year, in a country without electricity? Well things would go to shit fast. That’s why he bought the farm when I was about three. So we could grow all our own food, that kind of stuff.”
“Okay, little unusual. But it sounds fairly harmless.”
“It was, at first. In fact, it was pretty nice.”
His big Timberland boots that I’d try to walk in, having to keep my toes flexed up so they wouldn’t fall off. The tickle of a baby goat licking dried corn off my palm. Picking straw out of my mittens.
“I guess after the accident we both blamed ourselves, for different reasons. I thought maybe if I’d gotten the eggs and had been able to go with them, I would have seen the other car and could have prevented it somehow. And he…well he thought it was the government trying to silence him. As if he was even on their radar.”
Black mildew gathers in the steps’ crevices. Like the bunker.
“Is that where you learned to shoot like that?” SlyDevil asks carefully. “The farm?”
Here we go. The real question.
“My father taught me a lot of things. Shoot, lay a snare, keep warm in the winter with a blanket and a single tea light, build a temporary shelter with leaves and branches.”
“Like scouting, right?”
“No, not like scouting.”
You can stop. You can tell her you’re just messing with her.
I grip the railing with my free hand. “He taught me how to mix defensive chemicals. Homemade mace basically—that could burn skin so badly someone’d need hospitalization. How to make Molotov cocktails. How to lay booby traps around the house. How to limp, or cry, or pretend to be blind until you’re inside the gate. Until they’ve written you off in their minds as ‘non-threatening’ and you have the chance to pull your knife or your gun and take them by surprise.”
I hear her stop behind me. “My father didn’t just teach me how to shoot. He taught me how to obliterate with whatever was around. How to be the weapon.”
The stairway ends with a nook that’s gathered a thick layer of dust, grime and spiderwebs. The battered old door with a rusting sign, WARNING: ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS. EMPLOYEES ONLY. Piece of plywood crookedly nailed across it. I reach into the paper bag for the power drill and the plastic clamshell with the attachments. Select the nail puller.
SlyDevil lets the crowbar down and holds it by her feet like it’s a golf club. “I think that sign means we’re not supposed to go in there.”
“Exactly. That’s why I put it up.”
“Okay…Well, then what’s behind it?”
I insert the nail puller into the drill, tighten it, and then pull out a set of batteries from the bag. “My inheritance.”
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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.
"Some of my best friends are women." A smart little line, that is.