The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 12
⧗ Sometime in the future.
Previously on TMO: Post-shooting range incident, Ophelia shared more of her ‘ripped from the headlines’ backstory with SlyDevil and is about to also share her mysterious inheritance. Meanwhile in the future, Wil’s livestream interview with MadHatter begins…
WIL CAN’T REALLY ASK WHAT he wants to know—Is the first Ophelia still alive? He needs to build rapport, or at least try to. If MadHatter wants him to play a role, he needs to play it to the hilt.
“Why don’t we start with the basics,” Wil says. “What’s your name?”
“Well, I could tell you my boring name,” MadHatter replies. “A first name my mother gave me, a gendered, archaic thing, then a last name that identified me as my father’s property. But I prefer the name I chose for myself. MadHatter.”
“The MadHatter.”
“The one and only.” She raises her hand and shows off the MO2 tattoo to the camera.
“But how do we know that for sure? Anyone can tattoo their hand. Their neck. For all we know, MadHatter’s dead, and you’re an imposter.”
“Is that what you believe, that I’m an imposter?”
“Personally, I’m still on the fence. But some people watching might.”
“Some men watching.”
“And all the women watching will believe you?”
She cocks her head slightly, considering. “You’re right…I may have overstated. Let’s just say that if they don’t believe me now, they will. Soon.”
“Well then, why don’t you fill in some gaps. Not a lot about you—assuming you’re MadHatter—in the records. Your life before. Why you joined the Mad Ophelias.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is created,” says MadHatter.
“My bad. Why you, and the first Ophelias, created the movement.”
MadHatter looks off over his shoulder and takes her time. Hum of the cooling fan in Whippet’s laptop. Motes of dust catch in the light. There’s a dull, jabbing pain behind his right eye that’s impossible to ignore, and a duller, threatening ache between his shoulder blades. It takes all his willpower not to shift position.
Finally, she says, “My life before was a black hole. Junkie mom. No idea who my father is. I was bounced around foster homes, ran away, started using, did some time, and then when I was about fourteen, I met a man who seemed kind. He knew a rich man who was looking for a masseuse. The rich man had many friends. Powerful friends. Names you’d recognize. I was passed among them. On private airplanes. Yachts. In their mansions when their wives were away. I saw their true faces behind their masks. Those faces were terrifying. Eventually, I aged out, and they found new fourteen-year-olds. I was given a sizable chunk of money and an NDA. No family, no friends. I hated everyone, including myself. But then I got an invitation to be a part of something. A sisterhood. The first Ophelias.”
She looks down. “I don’t know if they understood me, really, but they welcomed me. And I realized I wasn’t alone. That they all had stories. Scars. Anger. Like a lot of women watching right now.”
Being a part of something. Welcomed. He misses that. Heart emojis stream across the bottom of the live stream feed, which has jumped to 40,000.
Damn, she’s good.
“You felt solidarity then with the #MeToo movement.”
“No. I felt solidarity with the women. That movement was too…optimistic. Like a hashtag and some celebrities were going to shift men’s entrenched hatred of women.”
“You think men hate women?”
A rueful smile. “Can you look at what’s happened since Genesis to the present and reach another conclusion? Today of all days?”
There’s another spike in viewers, but now some angry faces too. Whippet reaches for a piece of paper and scribbles something in Sharpie, then holds the paper up for MadHatter to read—PATRIOT KEEPERS IN THE CHAT. MadHatter gives a nod and seems pleased.
“I think some people might call that an overly broad generalization.”
“Oh, men say they love women. They write love songs. They paint portraits. Some even believe that the mask is true. But their actions. Their actions tell the real story.”
“And what do you want then. For yourself? For them?”
“Why don’t you tell me? You’re the Mad Ophelias expert.”
“I wouldn’t dare to assume.”
“But you do dare,” MadHatter looks over to Whippet. “Read that bit out loud. You know, from Chapter 12.”
Whippet’s fingers fly on the keyboard, and then she stops and squints at the screen. “The question isn’t why the Mad Ophelias failed—all movements rooted in violence eventually fail because terrorism erodes the sense of solidarity ordinary people might have with the issues at hand—the question is whether a peaceful approach could have averted the devastating resurgence of patriarchal and misogynistic systems. If recent violent acts can be attributed to a revival of the Mad Ophelias, it’s troubling to think they’re applying the same strategy that will inevitably lead to the greater oppression of, rather than freedom for, women.”
“Projecting blame on the victims. What a surprise.” MadHatter leans back in her chair. “Let’s go ahead and post the link to the manuscript so we’re not accused of making it up.”
Oh dear God. His book. His rough first draft. A raw, naked thing he’d never even show a trusted peer until he’d carefully gone through each argument, each sentence, each phrase. Two years. Two years of late nights, painstaking research, jotting notes on his cell phone between classes…
“Looking a little pale there, Wil,” says MadHatter.
…worthless. Completely worthless. The six-figure book deal, the tenured position, the autumnal leaves, the future he was going to build with Lucy—going, going, gone.
He tries to swallow, but it’s impossible. His mouth is too dry. “That wasn’t…that’s a position, but it’s not my personal position. It’s a theoretical exploration. Due diligence.”
“Huh.”
His eyes flit to the screen. 60,000 viewers. How long before someone at work sees it? Realizes his lame excuse was a lie?
How long before Lucy sees it?
Focus. “You have to admit that when it started, there was a place for male allies. Shit, I donated to the cause, and I was broke. It felt so vibrant. Compelling. And then it took this hard, radical turn into violence.”
“Was there anywhere else to turn after The Bloody March? We’re not allowed to defend ourselves?”
He was actually in Seattle—had been invited to speak at it but got stuck in traffic. A lucky break. Later that night, as he walked to his hotel, he was followed by three young women wearing dark nylons over their mouths and chins. One had a baseball bat she dragged on the asphalt. He was afraid and then ashamed for being afraid. Didn’t women go through that, and worse? Who was he to complain?
“Defending yourselves, sure. But the gruesome way men were killed…” he says. “Without being charged, without evidence, a trial, a jury. Larry Edwards—”
“Oh Jesus, Larry Edwards.”
“He was in another country on the date Gloria was assaulted, there were tickets—”
“One mistake. How many innocent people have been killed as collateral damage in any number of the endless wars conducted by men against men? Tens of millions would be a lowball.”
“Not just one. Enrico Chavez, Terry—”
“Are you calling us vaginalantes?”
“No, I would never use that term.” Coined by the nephew of a prominent member of the Liberty Foundation, it got a lot of play on social media. “But don’t you think that, to a certain extent, it’s contributed to this national reaction that’s led to the populist backlash against women’s rights?”
PitBull slips her finger toward the trigger of her rifle. But they didn’t go through all this trouble for a sycophant. They want a show. And a show needs drama.
MadHatter lightly traces a circle on her knee. “And what were we supposed to do in the face of thousands of years of violence? Suck it up?”
“Peaceful protest. Running for office. Passing legislation.”
“Tried that. Didn’t work. You were there. You remember.”
“It wasn’t perfect, no,” he says. Well, that’s a helluva understatement, Wil. He knows it, MadHatter knows it, everyone watching knows it. “But has terrorism worked any better?”
“One person’s terrorism is another person’s revolution.”
“And the difference?”
“Whoever wins gets to call it. And we’re going to win this time.”
“And is there a place for male allies?”
MadHatter sighs as if he’s just asked the stupidest question on the planet. “You can’t help the limitations of your gender. Like the male chimpanzee, you’re biologically geared for predation and domination. Your testosterone makes you aggressive and violent. Which, if we were still living in caves and fighting saber-toothed tigers, might be useful. But we’re not. The truth is…men are obsolete. You start endless wars to dupe women into thinking we need you to protect us from those men over there. Without wars, your uselessness would become obvious. The backlash wasn’t because we were violent. The backlash was because we woke up.”
It’s chilling because he recognizes the rhetoric and knows he’s royally screwed. For a brief window of time, someone had uploaded what was reputedly the Mad Ophelias’ original charter to a discussion thread. It was taken down before he could screenshot the pages, but the tone, the position that men were biologically obsolete and should volunteer to go to suicide centers—this is it. He wants so badly to run through his curriculum vitae, all his hard work supporting feminists, his research into the Combahee River Collective, his efforts to create an evaluation matrix to remove gender bias from employment applications.
Some of my best friends are women.
But he’s facing someone who thinks all men, even those with good intentions, are demons. And the truth is, it’s not a hard argument to make.
Not when you look at the data.
Which he has.
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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.