The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 7
⋈ Sometime in the past.
Previously on TMO: Wil met MadHatter plus a couple of other Mad Ophelias, and it’s going wonderfully, other than, maybe, that he’s zip-tied to a chair, trying to shake off being drugged, and is concerned for his life. Meanwhile, back in the past, Ophelia has problems of her own.
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS I wear routine face and keep the blinds closed. Routine face while I’m dragging the trash bags of old food out to the dumpster, leaving a can opener and a set of plastic cutlery in a Ziploc bag in case Benny wants anything. Routine face while I wash my laundry at six o’clock on Sunday morning even though no one’s awake. Routine face collecting my grocery delivery in the lobby and holding the elevator door open for 80-year-old Max who lives on the top floor and doesn’t like to be bothered with small talk anyway.
Milton gets real face. Routine face makes him hide under the couch and mew.
Monday morning, I get up at the usual time and stand at my bus stop, hood up against the rain. Take the 40 downtown to the office. It’s packed. Bodies pressed against each other, breath fogging up the windows. There are the regulars—man in a beige jacket who always stands and reads a book, woman in a black puffy coat and thick glasses who watches videos on her phone, bone-thin man wearing a blue hoodie in the back leaned up against the glass, sleeping. Then there are the ‘box of chocolates never know what you’re going to get’ riders. A young woman with a small brown dog cradled in her arm, a man who reeks of dope huddled over talking to his fingers, a couple of tourists who are clearly having a moment of regret.
No one’s looking at me. Level yellow.
Have to muscle my way off the bus by the building that used to be a Ross and is now nothing. Pass by the closed bakery, the closed bank, the closed drugstore. A first-floor desert that makes the office spaces above cheap.
Which is how Doug, founder of Power to the People Solar Solutions, can afford it.
I use a brass key to open the door between a closed bar and a closed ice cream parlor—not my favorite, keys can be easily duplicated—and climb the four flights of stairs, which are worn, and greasy for some reason. Routine face while I hang up my wet jacket on a nail in the wall to join the others. A puddle is already forming underneath them.
A cash shortfall caught the building’s property owner in the middle of a renovation, so the office is just a massive, unfinished space. Walls are 2x4s with clear plastic sheeting. The floor is exposed plywood. Random power cables spark because they aren’t meant to carry the load.
But for Doug it was a huge step up from his parents’ garage in Bothell.
“It’s temporary,” he’d said two years ago during my job interview. At some point, he also said, “We’re going to save the world, one ton of CO2 at a time.”
I use that a lot in press releases. It’s not the best, but he always approves it.
I go to my desk and slide into my chair—dumpster finds—and feign an interest in the weather and the lives of my co-workers.
Really coming down, huh.
Did you do anything fun over the weekend?
God, are we out of creamer again?
They’re nice people. Have to be working for a subsidy program that provides solar panels to low-income homeowners, which isn’t the easiest sell in a city known for perpetual rain and never-ending committees.
In a SHTF situation, I don’t think they’d last more than two weeks.
Today I’ve got to come up with a good spin for a press release. A city council member making noises about permitting because he says (behind closed doors) that low-income residents won’t be able to afford the maintenance costs of the solar panels. It’s just throwing money down the drain.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Power to the People Solar Solutions Advancing Energy Equity
Seattle, Wash. — Power to the People Solar Solutions announced today that it was moving forward with subsidizing solar panel installations for the first eight homeowners who signed up for the program, despite maintenance concerns raised by city officials.
“With climate change advancing faster than scientists anticipated, we need to adapt just as quickly, and our biggest opportunity lies with a shift to solar,” said the company’s CEO Doug Hennessy. “This is a proven technology that offers our best chance to reduce our carbon footprint. And with subsidies, it also addresses the equity barrier that prevents low-income people from enjoying the financial benefits of cutting the cord from expensive power utilities.”
Not bad. Doug will love it. And for the city official, it’ll be bad optics right before the elections. His spokesperson, Judy, will come back with something like, While we’re in complete agreement on the need to find alternative sources of clean, sustainable energy, we need to do so strategically for the long-term, and then I’ll come back with something like, The time to think long-term was two decades ago.
We’ll both post any coverage on social media with our talking points, and then, when the coverage dies down and the elections are over, grab a coffee. Judy wears slacks and pressed jackets. Not a single strand of hair out of place, no matter what the weather. People have said Doug should run for some kind of office. He’s got the right kind of face. And she’s the right kind of spokesperson for that face.
It’s not that we’re trying to convince anyone you’re innocent, said my lawyer’s media training coach. People have already decided. We’re here to give the people who think you’re innocent ammunition.
I should write her a postcard and thank her for inspiring me to pursue this line of work.
The rest of the day drags. An unproductive meeting where we talk for two hours about applying for grants we definitely won’t get. Someone nukes a fish fillet at lunch, which stinks up the whole place. Click, click, click on keyboards, typing things in private chats we can’t say out loud. Hoping we don’t drop a snarky comment in the wrong one.
anyone want to start an office pool on when doug’s going to figure out how to use the coffee machine?
right? why we always stuck with office housework?
i’m fucking freezing too. gotta be an osha violation haha
totally using you all for references
like you can escape
like you can escape
like you can escape
Then it’s sliding my still-damp coat on at the end of the day. Take the 68 back home with the regulars and irregulars, keycard into the lobby, elevator, appease Milton with half a can of wet food, and scoop the cat box, pop open a can of chicken noodle soup, eat it cold, and crash.
you in?
Set the clock, listen to the rain fall until I’m asleep.
Tuesday. Repeat. Doug springs for some bagels, which earns him a few points. We lose internet for two hours and play trash can basketball until it’s back. you in? As I come down the stairs at the end of the day, I hear the whoop, whoop of a police siren, and my stomach clenches. Level orange.
I think about taking the extra flight of steps down to leave by the loading dock—but the alley’s sketch as hell. So I crack the door open to have a look. Across the street, an officer is cuffing a guy without pants who’s staring at the sky, shouting something unintelligible. Another officer standing by, clearly bored. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk until I’m past.
Wednesday. Repeat. Baggy eyes because Milton decided that 3 o’clock in the morning was breakfast time, and I couldn’t fall back asleep—replaying the protest, the gun, the pink hat dripping dirty water, Eyasi standing under the hotel eave, both hands pressed against her lower back, stretching.
Hoodie man on the bus must have slept good though because he’s awake, and stares at me. I stare back. It’s important to hold your ground, always. you in? I get off at the stop before my stop and take a different route to the office just to be on the safe side. But when I unlock the office door in the morning, back turned to the street, a shiver runs down my spine, like someone’s watching. I ignore it and step inside. Take the stairs up two at a time, rush to the window to see if anyone’s out there, ignoring the way my co-workers look up, but no, the street’s clear.
Thursday morning when I get to the lobby Ella is checking her mailbox, wet ponytail, windbreaker streaming with rain, running shoes making squish, squish noises. She lives above me and her toilet overflowed and dripped into my bathroom and she felt bad about it so now we know each other.
She looks at me. “Hey, are you okay?”
I don’t know what she means, but then I realize I haven’t put routine face on.
you in?
“Oh yeah, fine. Just thrilled to go to work on such a beautiful day.”
“Ha. Yeah, it’s really coming down.” She gathers her mail and swipes her card over the elevator pad. Ping. “Have a good one if you can.”
It’s hard to breathe on the bus, like they turned off the air. No hoodie man. No book reading man. No woman in a black puffy coat. I wonder for a minute if I got on the wrong bus, my heart rate starts to pick up, but when I pull out my cell phone to check, I realize I’m an hour late. I don’t remember waking up an hour late. Did my alarm go off at the wrong time? It’s just a regular clock and nothing else because it should only do two things: tell time and wake me up. Maybe the battery is running low—don’t like the ones that plug in, useless in a power outage situation, or a grid failure.
Did I lock the door behind me? I must have. I always do. But I can’t visualize it. I can’t pull the memory.
And then when I step off the bus, I see it, the wet flyer stapled to plywood covering the window someone smashed last week.
LADIES NITE, Sigourney Weaver, sweat dripping down her forehead, flamethrower. New too. The paper hasn’t been ravaged by rain like the others. Level red.
The doe, after I’d shot it. Glassy brown eyes staring at nothing, steam rising from the warm blood dripping from its mouth. Terrifying, horrific and thrilling all at the same time, like putting a hand on a live electric wire and surviving. Nice shot sweet pea. My dad handing me the hunting knife in the shed, me cutting open the belly, and then seeing it, the sac. Rough shape of the fetus inside. A tiny hoof.
you in?
I tear the flyer down. Ball it up. And throw it in the gutter.
I KEEP FINDING REASONS to get up and pass by the windows. Restock the printer paper tray. Pour myself some lukewarm coffee and shake in the powdered almond milk creamer that doesn’t dissolve right and floats. Water the spider plant that’s been on its last legs forever. When I’m stuck at the desk, my foot taps, taps, taps on the plywood floor until someone gives a look and a polite cough. Impossible to think when you’re surrounded by people in library silence, because silence = working and working = paycheck.
Half expect to see MadHatter stroll in with her rolled-up yoga mat, Walkman, and old-school headphones. Buzz of a tape rewinding. Firefly pose.
Was it her? It must have been her. Unless it was a coincidence.
Beneath that, dark memories like a flurry of butterflies, gathering.
No such thing as a coincidence, my father says at the television that’s going on about a plane that crashed at 11:11. Tinkle of ice in his sweating glass of Coke.
That’s what they want you to think.
By the afternoon, I’m on my fourth cup of coffee, and the quiet is suffocating. I pull my cell phone out of my bag, pretend to look at it, mutter something about King 5, grab my jacket and head for the roof.
When I get there, the cold air, the rain, feel right. Scattered puddles collect on the sagging, asphalt roof, defunct air conditioners rust, patches of moss try to make a stand. I pull a crushed pack of emergency Pall Malls from my inside pocket and a lighter. Take a cigarette out and lean forward for the flame.
His brand. The smoke feels like home. Stole my first cigarette from the pocket of his worn, woolen coat, took it out to the coop, snow pockmarked by chicken scratches and frozen droppings. But I didn’t light it, didn’t dare. Just put it to my lips and exhaled into the winter air, creating a cloud of mist, pretending.
He’d probably take MadHatter’s side. I can see them now in the kitchen, oiling pistols together.
And if they’re right? Because from what I’ve seen of the world, the real, outside the homestead world, is that to girl is to trust a system that never has your six. Would it be so bad for MadHatter to unload a wall of bullets on some perp who was trying something?
Wouldn’t I secretly enjoy it?
My cell buzzes in my pocket, the cell I haven’t looked at all week but keep on me in case of emergencies, the cell I know has stacks and stacks of unloaded, unread messages. I could ignore it. I should ignore it.
Instead, I inhale another puff of smoke, let it seep deep into my lungs. Exhale a cloud.
Pull the cell out, tap in my password.
don’t think for a goddamn minute I’m going without you
so you better hustle your sorry ass down
i don’t want to get stuck in this goddamn traffic cause none of you morons in this city know a goddamn thing about driving
and bring me something to eat cause there’s shit to get around here not that there’s shit to eat anywhere
like is it so hard to make a fucking decent pizza
SlyDevil.
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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.
Secondary point really, but this sentence locked eyes with me and wouldn’t look away: “Have to muscle my way off the bus by the building that used to be a Ross and is now nothing.” It’s not critical to the story, or even the chapter, but it’s so good and I can explain why. So I’ll move on.
Levi already nailed it - we’re in the early stages of a spiral and the inevitability of it is intoxicating. Love how this chapter makes me feel.
Love the dynamic/hectic/paranoid voicing of this chapter.