The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 4
⧗ Sometime in the future.
Previously on TMO: Wil received a note, presumably from the Mad Ophelias, to meet at a cafe he’s a regular at. It could be a game-changer for the book he’s writing about them. Of course, it could also be a gambit by the Corps, and he’ll wind up behind bars. It’s a chance he’s decided to take.
WIL TAKES A DEEP BREATH of the cold, fresh air and walks briskly down the sidewalk. The smell of mildew lingers in his coat, and he turns his collar up against the rain. Their only umbrella is somewhere in the back of their closet, a thing they bought when they first arrived in the last days of a hazy, warm summer and have hardly used since. Rain is just a constant, the ‘X’ in every algebraic weather equation, and now when the sun comes out, it feels harsh and foreign—he feels exposed somehow.
This from a Los Angeles native.
He passes the alcove of a shoe repair shop that’s been closed ever since they moved into their neighborhood. Someone sleeps on the concrete, a dark blanket wrapped around them like a shroud.
It was the thing Lucy had the hardest time believing, that he was actually born and raised in Los Angeles.
“Who does that?” she’d asked over pork dumplings. She was good with chopsticks, that one.
They were in Chinatown—he was trying to impress her on their first date by taking her to a little-known but exceptional dim sum restaurant on New High Street, only it had changed hands and now the water glasses were filmed, and he’d caught a scuttling cockroach out of the corner of his eye. Or a mouse. Hard to tell.
“I think there are four of us. Five, maybe,” he said. “Where are you from originally?”
And there it was. A shadow flitting across her face, a glance toward a corner that held nothing interesting. A look he’d eventually come to know well.
He prodded a piece of limp cabbage, waiting.
“Iowa,” she finally said.
A lie. They both knew it. But ninety percent of the people who came to Los Angeles were trying to escape something.
He skirts a small pile of human feces piled by a fire hydrant. Across the street, two men picking through a trash can stop to watch him. One leans over and whispers something, and the other laughs without looking away. He pretends he doesn’t see them and picks up his pace.
Does she blame him? For their crappy apartment? For their crappy life? She must. It’s his fault they’re here.
It all started in Los Angeles on a cheery spring day when a student in a Mad Ophelia wig threw an egg at his face during commencement, screaming, “WE ARE NOT YOUR PLATFORM!” Wil honestly didn’t think much of it, didn’t even flinch.
The cell phone video of him not flinching, of him cheerfully waving away public safety officers and wiping the yolk away with the sleeve of his gown, for some reason, it trended.
A debate raged online—one side said he was the world’s biggest cuck who didn’t even know what a man was anymore, the other that he’d gotten better than he deserved, what with appropriating feminism and making a career out of it. He’d expected to be defended. By someone. Anyone.
Then it was picked up by national media, and then he was doxed in a Patriot Keeper blog post, and then it didn’t take long for his email to fill with death threats.
Wil turns a corner—there’s a dark delivery van parked in front of a dry cleaner, engine idling, small puffs of exhaust drifting from the tailpipe. He slows as he walks by the passenger side door, glances through the window.
Empty.
He keeps walking.
The turning point came when their apartment was stormed by SWAT after a report that he was sitting on a stash of illegal weapons. Being yanked naked out of bed by officers in body armor, facing the barrel of an assault rifle, had an effect. Lucy was deeply shaken, too.
So when the offer came from the Seattle startup—content developer for an app that connected women to pro bono legal help, twice what he was making—he accepted immediately, without even talking to Lucy. They’d been living together for what…eight months? It just seemed like a no-brainer.
But Lucy wasn’t thrilled. For a few weeks, she didn’t talk to him at all. He thought maybe he’d blown it, and he’d be moving to Seattle alone. Then she seemed to gradually warm to the idea, found an apartment in a high-rise with views of Mt. Rainier, and they signed the lease, made the jump.
Not long after, the startup went bankrupt.
Worse still, he’d cashed out his retirement to invest in additional stock options. Had to scramble to pick up some classes and the only place he could afford was their dank apartment flanked by industrial warehouses.
She’d insisted, firmly, that they sell a ring he’d given her—a gold band with a glittering diamond, not an engagement ring exactly, but not exactly not one either—because she said if they were going to live in a ‘dive’ they needed to invest in surveillance cameras. Always looking out the window through a gap in the blinds, interrogating him when he went out—Where are you going? Who are you seeing? How long will you be?
She, on the other hand, had plenty to say about his Mad Ophelia research—Why can’t you just admit it’s a dead end and find something else to write about?
Because it was his. It would matter. He would matter.
He walks past an abandoned building, ARE YOU MAD YET? spray-painted on the door, graffiti serpents coiling around the letters.
Some long ago Mad Ophelia. Could make for a good book cover. He has a photo of it tucked away in his cell phone.
Which reminds him—did he turn the surveillance cameras back on after he left? It’d be stupid to pull it out to check on the app—no need to volunteer for a mugging—so instead, he just picks up his pace.
HE GIVES A CURSORY GLANCE for traffic and crosses the street to Café Flora. It’d been a diner once, which probably made more sense in the 70s when the area was filled with dock workers and fishermen. Now it’s a place between time—it offers espresso, but tepid coffee from a percolator too, gluten-free scones and fried egg plates with baloney and greasy hash browns on the side. Fake wood paneling covers the walls, a black-and-white vintage cat clock with eyes that move back and forth, and polished stainless-steel countertops. Background music is almost always Bossa Nova.
Lucy jokes they call it ‘Café Flora’ because your digestive bacteria need to be in good shape to eat there. She came once.
He pushes through the door, catches the tail end of “Corcovado” on the speakers, and examines the morning’s crew of customers.
An old man with a cane leans against a wood-paneled wall—he’s working at a crossword puzzle with a large white espresso mug taking up the rest of the table space. A mother breastfeeds an infant in the corner while she also breaks a scone apart for a yellow-haired toddler who is half on, half off a chair. A homeless woman sits in a booth, head leaned back, dead asleep but no one cares, and a goth girl with a spiked collar sits at the counter, absorbed in her VR headset.
No one with the telltale Mad Ophelia red hair, no sign of hidden rifles, machetes, or suicide bomb vests.
The door shuts quietly behind him, and he approaches the lone, young barista who always takes his order. Her blond hair is shaggy, bottom lip pierced with a small, silver orb. He still doesn’t know her name.
She smiles. He smiles. It was stupid to be nervous.
“Double shot cappuccino and lemon croughnut for you Wil?” the barista asks.
It’s warm inside the cafe, and God, the lovely smell of bacon. His stomach rumbles. But he’s down to double digits on his crypto account, and it’s still a week until payday.
“Just coffee,” he says.
“Living the dream, huh,” she says. “You and me both.”
She rings him up, and he reaches into his back pocket for his cell phone. Swipes through for his wallet app and holds it out for her to scan. She does, then pretends not to watch as it prompts him for a tip. He adds a few more dollars than he can afford and heads to a short booth with a tall window overlooking the street.
It’s early enough that Lucy will probably still be asleep, buried deep in the comforter since the heater has been acting up.
What if she’s awake, though? Already tracking where he is? Fuck.
He pulls out his cell, clicks through to the surveillance app. It’s connected to three interior cameras—bedroom, living room, stairway—and he takes a moment to turn on the exterior camera by the front door. Then he lets his finger hover over the interior cameras. Clicks the live feed for the bedroom. It’s highly pixelated in the dim light, but he can just make out Lucy’s face against the pillow, the small ‘O’ of her open mouth.
In fact, he can’t even remember the last time they went to a restaurant. How is that even possible? Lucy pecks at food now, grazing on slices of white bread, canned peas, and individually wrapped slices of cheese. Only things that come in packaging. He suggested therapy once, and she’d looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. Don’t you know what they’d do with that?
She wasn’t wrong. It still stung, though.
Suddenly, he misses her, a riotous ache in his chest. She’s been hard on him, but he’s been hard on her, too. Maybe that’s what happens to couples in hard times—they take it out on each other. All the untapped rage at the way things should be, but aren’t, directed at an improperly cleaned fork.
“Here ya go, Wil,” says the barista, surprising him.
She slides a plate with a warmed croughnut onto the table, then a soup bowl-sized cappuccino. “Don’t tell the owner.”
He swallows. Kindness is a rarity these days. “Thanks. I really mean it.”
Her eyes fall to the screen of his phone, and he quickly turns it over. Doesn’t want her to see him watching the feed, which would be creepy.
Because it is creepy.
“Sure thing,” says the barista. But an odd look flits across her face. Then she catches herself and smiles again before leaving.
He doesn’t remember her ever calling him by his first name before. She’s done it twice now. He files it away and turns to the window, scans the street. Nothing and no one. Checks the time. They’re late. He presses the power button on the phone to turn it off. Better to go back to the apartment with a lame excuse than have Lucy text, call—or worse still—track him down, at least for the next couple of hours.
He takes a sip of the cappuccino. Bitter, just the way he likes it, although it leaves a slightly metallic aftertaste this time. Pulls his notebook out of his damp pocket and a pen to jot down some questions.
The toddler kneels on the chair, peeks at him through the slats of the back.
He waves.
The toddler waves back. But when his mother notices he’s playing, she pulls him to face the table in a swooping, single gesture—not rough, but not gentle either. Wil’s a stranger after all. And these are such very strange times.
He wants to tell the woman it’s okay, he’s safe, he’s not with all of that bullshit. I used to teach Women’s Studies.
But what he thinks, or who he is, doesn’t make her any safer. That power is beyond his ken.
The truth is no one is safe these days.
AN HOUR LATER, Wil is left wondering if this was just a setup because he’s still nursing his now-cold cappuccino, and no one’s shown up. It’s tempting to grab his cell, check the news, peck away at one of his social media accounts, but to do that would be to turn on his tracking app too.
So instead, he looks out the window. Watches the cars go by, the familiar drizzle of rain.
Lucy will surely be up now. She’s probably pissed that he hasn’t answered a call or responded to a text. He looks up at the cat clock, pendulum tail wagging, and decides to give it another ten minutes before he calls it a wash and heads back to face her.
The old man in the corner folds his crossword puzzle and tucks it in his jacket pocket. He reaches over for his cane and takes his time standing like he’s not entirely sure where his legs are, but he makes it and gives the barista a cheery salute.
“See ya Charlie,” says the barista whose name he really should know.
“Have a good’un,” Charlie says as he hobbles out the door. A blast of cold air enters as it shuts behind him.
The baby starts to fuss and the toddler kicks at the wall. He tries to scooch off the chair, crumbs stuck to his mouth, shirt untucked, but if the mother notices, she gives no sign.
No Mad Ophelia is coming. Another addition to his growing list of failures. His mind flashes over to that other, greater failure, the one from so very long ago, and darkness starts to gather in the corners of his eyes, always the start of an impending migraine. Why won’t she pick him up.
He looks up at the clock, and the cat’s tail seems to slow. A refrain in Portuguese from “The Waters of March”—one of his favorites, who doesn’t love Jobim?—he knows it’s something about night, and death, and guns, and the nursing mother is now staring at him, screaming baby on her lap, a sound like a knife pressing into his brain.
And the homeless woman is staring at him.
And the goth girl at the counter who’s taken off her VR headset.
And the barista whose name he doesn’t know. She walks over to the door and flips the sign from OPEN to CLOSED.
It’s so dreamlike, surreal, that he laughs.
And he can’t stop laughing. Which is strange, but pleasant too.
And the darkness in the corners of his eyes curdles and grows, and he feels dizzy, and euphoric, and perilously sad, and he wonders if this is death, coming. That strikes him as funny too. He laughs so hard that his chest aches.
“The Waters of March” bleeds into another song, one with an irregular, staccato drumbeat, or maybe that’s just his heart, which seems too loud all of a sudden. He’s in another place now, one he doesn’t want to be, and he sees a sliver of light through a door, hears that god-awful thumping, the muffled groans, and he knows where he is, where he’s going, and why.
It’s a relief. Maybe hell is where he deserves to be. He thinks he falls to the floor, registers pain as his head lands on something hard, senses that his body might be convulsing, but that doesn’t strike him as terribly important. Nothing does.
Too much, someone says. Barista girl. He should have asked her name, on one of those wasted mornings.
He should have done so many things.
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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.
I'm loving it - looking forward to the next installment!
expert-level ratcheting of tension