The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 16
⋈ Sometime in the past.
Previously on TMO: After learning that Eyasi had been shot and was in the hospital, an emergency meeting was held at MadHatter’s place to figure out what to do next. Buckle up.
EVERYONE IN THE MINIVAN except me is giddy, and I can’t believe the whole thing came together in a week. Weaselly man is in Olympia to cast a vote—too many preschoolers getting a free lunch—which means he and his burly security team will be at the state capitol, not his Leschi mansion. Five-bedroom Tudor with a manicured front lawn, towering oak trees. Technically he’s supposed to live somewhere in the district he serves, but as long as he serves up some racism, no one seems to care.
Still haven’t been able to get a hold of Eyasi, which makes my chest tight. Even my reporter contacts haven’t been able to suss out if she’s still in the hospital or has been taken somewhere else. Gray space.
Weaselly man has a motion detector light/security camera over the front door, and his neighbors do too, but that’s kinda the point. They don’t like him much and will be the first to leak their footage to media. To cover our tracks, we bought everything outside of King County with cash. Vajrapani flew to Portland to get the minivan—old enough, and dark enough, to not draw too much attention parked across the street. RoskHill bought the black respirators from a paint store in Spokane—not as good as a balaclava for obscuring a face, but SlyDevil thought they’d be more dramatic and I was overruled. I picked up the camouflage pants, hoodies and t-shirts from an Army/Navy store in Vancouver. SlyDevil got red face paint and hair color wax from a costume store in Kent, a nod to the blood of murdered women she said, although it could also symbolize menstruation. Nothing freaks out men like women on their period. I don’t like putting shit in my hair, so I just went with my red bouffant wig.
OddsBots started to get nervous at the last minute—what if we get caught?—but SlyDevil said it was just a little artivism. It’s not like we’re going to blow up the place or anything.
So now here we are at four a.m., dressed in fatigues, artificially reddened hair covered by hoodies, faces smeared with red paint, respirators dangling around our necks, waiting on MadHatter.
Who decided to come separately. Surprising and not surprising.
Back of the van’s got cardboard boxes filled with female mannequin parts. A loose collection of heads, arms, legs, torsos, and hips, with just smooth indentations suggesting breasts, eyes, bellybuttons, fingernails, and toes for what SlyDevil calls an homage to the “Woman’s Body Found In” exhibit we all missed. Room after room of stacked, naked mannequins, representing the number of women murdered by their male partner in the US each year. I feel a little bad about appropriating the idea, said SlyDevil, but theft is the sincerest form of flattery. We spent half a day writing the names of the women on various parts in red Sharpie, then splashed red paint on them to make them look bloodied.
If my father could see me now, he’d be laughing his ass off. But it’s better than actual violence.
Maybe if I tell myself that enough I’ll believe it.
OddsBots sits on the bench seat in the back with Vajrapani and RoskHill, blows on her hands to warm them. It’s too cold to just be wearing hoodies—the condensation from our collective breath is already fogging up the windshield—but running the engine for heat would draw attention.
SlyDevil taps the wheel with her fingers, antsy. “Is she blowing us off?”
“She’ll be here,” says RoskHill, although she doesn’t sound sure.
Wish I’d brought some headphones. Something to take my mind off the dark streets, the occasional passing car. If we spend too much time parked, we might get flagged by a neighbor—stealth vans mean homeless people and homeless people mean a call to the police. No one wants to pay these kinds of real estate prices only to have someone shacked up outside for free, driving down the home values.
OddsBots pulls her cellphone out of her pocket, searching for a message that doesn’t exist.
MadHatter seemed on board—she even bought a hot cellphone from a drug dealer in Portland so we can stream the video and toss it after.
“Should we just do it without her?” Vajrapani asks.
“Let’s give her another ten,” says SlyDevil.
“If she doesn’t show, I vote we do it tomorrow,” I say. Or never.
RoskHill groans. “I have to grade papers tomorrow.”
“I have to work,” says OddsBots. “Maybe next weekend?”
“It won’t be as effective next weekend,” says SlyDevil. “Ten more minutes.”
“We should have brought coffee,” mutters OddsBots.
“I’d kill for a macchiato,” says Vajrapani.
SlyDevil stops tapping. “What the hell kind of baby-ass activists are we anyway? You think Rosa Parks was worried about getting a goddamn coffee?”
And then we see MadHatter come up the street in a white Sprinter cargo van. Beater with paper dealer plates. She pulls right into the mansion’s driveway with a careless screech of tires on asphalt, almost clipping the mailbox.
SlyDevil leans over the steering wheel. “Where’d she get a van?”
“I’d guess she lifted it,” I say. There’s a tense moment as that sinks in.
“She stole it?” says SlyDevil. “That was not the plan. The whole point was to avoid prison time. I mean seriously, what the actual fuck?”
Which is probably MadHatter’s point. Choose to give up on the whole thing or take a risk and put a toe over the line of law-breaking.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” says RoskHill nervously. “I mean, for all we know she bought it.”
No one believes that, but it gives the others enough reasonable doubt. Vajrapani slips the respirator up over her face and pulls down her hoodie, revealing her long, dark hair streaked with red. “Screw it, let’s do this,” she says, her voice muffled.
OddsBots and RoskHill shrug and follow her lead. Even SlyDevil just sighs and pulls her respirator up.
Score one for MadHatter.
MADHATTER BLOCKS OFF each end of the road with cones and sawhorses that sport detour signs—smart, no one ever questions construction in Seattle—while the others unload. Lucky that the rain has tapered off; otherwise, their red hair might have washed away. Dense marine layer of fog offers some extra cover.
OddsBots stands by the open hatch of the minivan, hopping from one foot to the other, barely able to contain herself like we’re about to go trick-or-treating.
“Can I start?” she asks, her voice muffled through the respirator.
“Not yet,” says SlyDevil, “we should—”
But OddsBots grabs a head and an arm and trots across the street. RoskHill shrugs, pulls out two cans of spray paint from the box, a pair of legs, and joins her.
“A little coordination would be nice,” SlyDevil mutters.
I agree but don’t say anything. Instead, I grab a mannequin hip—earlier RoskHill drew on pubic hair with a red Sharpie—and watch how MadHatter casually makes her way back to us, like she’s out for a late-night stroll, like we have all the time in the world. Something eerie and apocalyptic about a woman in a respirator wearing a hoodie, no light except the streetlights, which have a hard time penetrating through the fog.
Vajrapani gathers an armful of…arms. “I want to plant a row of them,” she says. “Did we bring a shovel?”
“There’s not enough time,” says SlyDevil. “This is a strictly in-and-out kind of thing. A neighbor could still call the cops.”
“Yeah, well if we’re not shooting anybody, it’ll take them hours to get here anyway,” says Vajrapani. She’s bitter—someone broke into her apartment and stole her laptop and flat-screen TV. The police didn’t come until the day after she’d called 911, but then she lives in Federal Way.
SlyDevil grabs the box with the rest of the limbs. “In this neighborhood, they’ll come quick. But if you want, you can take your time and get arrested with MadHatter. Just don’t call me when you need to post bail.”
“Whatevs,” says Vajrapani. She turns and walks toward the lawn to join the others. MadHatter stops on the sidewalk and pulls out her cellphone, swiping her finger across the screen.
“Did Vajrapani just actually say ‘whatevs’?” asks SlyDevil.
“She did.” The hip is heavier than I thought it’d be.
“I get the feeling there’s been some behind-the-scenes meetings again.”
“Probably. Let’s just get this over with.”
“Agreed.”
I cross the quiet street. Just a few scattered cars parked along the sloping curb—a good representation of Mercedes, BMW, and Audi, a low-slung white Porsche with tinted windows. What’s amazing is that five blocks north or south, any one of these cars would be hit by prowlers, but here in the genteel, twisting streets of Leschi they remain untouched. Like lakeside views offer some kind of invisible shield against random acts of crime.
We get to work. I plant the hip dead center on the lawn, make sure the pubic hair faces the sidewalk. Vajrapani does plant the arms in a row—the rain has made the soil soft enough so all she has to do is pull out tufts of grass with her hands, dig a small hole—and OddsBots spends some thoughtful time with her arrangement, putting the head right next to the arm, then in front of it, then on a diagonal. SlyDevil isn’t as picky—she just grabs limbs from the box and tosses them randomly, scaring the hell out of a cat hiding in the bushes.
I hate to admit it, but it is disturbing. Feminism channeled through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But it doesn’t quite feel equal. It doesn’t have that sting.
I think about Eyasi puttering in MadHatter’s kitchen, the way she’d press her hand against her lower back when it ached. For her to have come so far, gone through so much, only to have some weaselly man with oily sheen skin say she’s a criminal. That getting shot was her fault. If I’d taken her call…I don’t know. Makes me want to throw a rock through one of the lead-paned windows. Toss a Molotov cocktail through the hole. Watch it burn.
Instead I curl my hands into tight fists until I feel my fingernails dig into my palms and go back to the box. Stare down at the few pieces that are left. Decide on a lonely foot marked with the name of a woman who didn’t survive her boyfriend stabbing her thirty-eight times—Corey Thomas. Put it on the lawn by the hip.
Wish it made me feel better, but it makes me feel nothing.
I turn and MadHatter approach the front door with a strange intensity, a bulge in her back pocket. A gun? MadHatter stops when she reaches the step, unzips her hoodie, and pulls it completely off.
MadHatter’s half-naked.
What the actual fuck?
In the dim light, her small breasts and narrow shoulders make her seem vulnerable, almost adolescent. But then I see that each nipple is marked with red, circular crosshairs. Sniper scopes. What an old and twisted joke, sex as a weapon. Watch where you point those things a guy once said, one whose name I can’t conjure—he was blond. I laughed like he’d actually said something funny, cupped each breast in my hands, squeezed them and went pow, pow, pow before he pulled me close to him again.
MadHatter reaches into her back pocket with a languid ease I remember from the hot yoga class and pulls out…a can of spray paint. She pops the top off, then holds up her cellphone with her other hand. The camera’s flash illuminates her ghostly flesh and reflects off the metal of the respirator.
“This is for Eyasi you motherfucker,” she says. She sprays MAD YET? across the window in blood-red paint, recording herself all the while. Then she brings the cellphone close to her face. “We’re the Mad Ophelias and don’t you ever fucking forget it.”
Mad Ophelias. Kinda genius. Something cunning about it too though, putting Mad in front.
I feel SlyDevil come up beside me.
“Did you get that memo?” SlyDevil asks. “About the name?”
“No.”
Meanwhile Vajrapani, OddsBots and RoskHill have also shed their hoodies, revealing their own half-naked bodies, nipples circled with red sniper crosshairs. Vajrapani spray paints the front door with #MadOphelias and #MO, and MadHatter turns the camera to catch it all on video.
“Looks like it comes with hashtags too,” I say.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s too cold for that shit. And we should clear out as fast as we can. It’s stupid to record yourself committing a crime. We were supposed to just capture the art.”
SlyDevil sighs. “Kids these days.”
But what I really think is yes, yes, yes. It’s the one thing that feels right in the whole, fucked up tragedy. A part of me wants to join them. If only I could chase away the itchy sense that things will go further, darker. That eventually there will be a point of no return for any of us. I’m surrounded by gasoline, tinder, and kids playing with matches, excited by the power of holding fire in their hands.
Which one of us will start the blaze is anyone’s guess.
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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.
“You think Rosa Parks was worried about getting a goddamn coffee?”