#i need to be put in maximum security prison in solitary confinement with no visitors ever bc of how tjis image makes me feel

[gingerpeachtea]

[thewritewolf]

Rekindle Chapter 29: Werecat

A confrontation a long time in the making.

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@marichatmay

Enjoy!

Read on Ao3

Marinette watched as Adrien paced in front of her. His hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides, she could see the tension in his jawline and shoulders. She knew that if he was transformed right now, his tail would be flicking back and forth. She reflected that, given the circumstances, his anger was entirely relatable. Even with a cursory glance through the papers, he’d found enough to get him riled up and that was before they’d taken them home and started really digging into them.

It had been a real shock to see what Adrien had uncovered at the mayor’s office. The rest of the night had ended up feeling like a formality - even the discovery of a shard of the peacock miraculous, blackened and pulsing with energy and locked in the mayor’s desk, had only ended up being met with almost business-like indifference. After a certain point, it was hard to muster the energy to get more upset.

Thankfully, the same procedure that worked to cleanse akumas was easily adapted to purify corrupted miraculous. She noticed that the miraculous cure didn’t seem as effective as usual, but considering that all the damage would be primarily in the mayor’s building, they hadn’t been too broken up about it. For both the mayor’s sake and their own, they hadn’t gone back to check on him. Watching Adrien in this state, she couldn’t regret that decision.

She reached out and grabbed the cuff of his shirt, stopped him in his tracks. “Adrien, take a seat. You’re going to wear a hole into the floor.”

“I can’t!” He looked at her with such helpless emotion that was breaking her heart all over again. “Mari, my father blacklisted you from your dream job! And that’s not even touching on all the other horrible things he did to our friends, either directly or by supporting that terrible person!” He crumbled to his knees and rested his head on her legs. “I’m so so so so sorry. I had no idea…”

She lifted his head up to look him in the eye. “Adrien. Listen to me - don’t you dare for one minute think any of this is your fault. It is all on Gabriel and Andre. Not you. Okay?”

“Okay…” With a hesitant nod, he got to his feet. “How can you be so calm about this? You got hit hard by this.”

“Honestly? I’m pissed. But I choose to take it as a compliment. Gabriel Agreste, head of his own fashion empire, thought that I was good enough to ruin him.” She leaned back and crossed her arms at Adrien. “And you know what the best revenge will be? Getting bigger than he ever did on skill alone.” She patted the seat next to her and gestured towards the papers. “Now come on and help me sort through this.”

Adrien seemed to be mulling something over. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I need to go for a run. I’m too angry to think right now.”

“Woah, kid, you sure about that?” Plagg piped up for the first time since they’d gotten home. It hadn’t been the lazy quiet she was used to from Plagg, but a very careful silence. As if he was waiting to see how things would play out.

“I don’t know if it is wise to-” Tikki stopped when she saw Adrien shake his head.

“I can’t help anyone right now. I just… I need some air.”

Marinette stood up and cupped his face. “Then go and get it out of your system. I’ll be right here waiting for you.” She rolled forward to kiss his cheek. “Don’t get lost out there, okay?”

He watched her with a tender expression, unable to do anything but nod. “Claws out.”

Once he was gone, Marinette collapsed into the couch. Tikki landed behind her.

“Are you sure that was a good idea?”

“Adrien is feeling a lot right now. It’s like Hawkmoth’s defeat all over again. I’m here for him, but this is something that he needs to come to grips with before I can do anything to help him. Once he comes back we can talk things out.”

Tikki considered this. “And what about you, Marinette?”

Marinette sighed. “I’ll be happy when I have my kitty back. Until then,” she leaned forward and started working through another set of papers.

---------------------------------------------

Chat Noir’s mind was empty of thoughts as he let himself fully sink into the mechanics of running, leaping, and swinging. He had no destination in mind, but ran like a man possessed. As if he’d be able to burn out his anger and frustration with physical exhaustion. For a while, it worked and he was able to outrun his emotions - he became lost in the moment.

Running, however, is only a temporary solution. It took a while, but even his superhuman endurance began to waver and everything hit him all at once. He slowed down, legs becoming tired from more than just physical weariness. His knee hit the metal roof of the building he was standing on and only there and then, alone, did he allow himself to shed tears.

There were plenty of emotions vying for his attention. The most obvious was anger - he was beyond pissed at Mayor Andre, and more especially his father. He had known that Gabriel was not a savory character, even when his mom was alive. It had only worsened over the years, but even at his lowest, Adrien hadn’t expected his father to be capable of such… corruption and vileness. Which lead to frustration. Even in prison, Gabriel was ruining his life and hurting his friends. Shame was hot on its heels - despite Marinette’s reassurances, he knew that if there was anyone that could have noticed this earlier, it would have been him. The money used to torment his loved ones was the same money he’d helped Gabriel make through years of modeling.

Belatedly, Adrien realized where he was standing. The same warehouse that Hawkmoth - his father - had held Marinette in to get at Chat Noir. Like the true coward he was.

His brushed his tears aside and stood tall. There was one stop he needed to make before he went home to help Marinette deliver justice. Gabriel Agreste needed to understand the enormity of his crimes. And who better to do it than him?

So single-minded was Adrien that he failed to notice the white fur taking shape below him and a throaty growl that echoed in the empty space...

------------------------------------

Gabriel Agreste stared at the wall of his small prison cell. He’d been put into maximum security, solitary confinement as he awaited his no doubt highly publicized trial. There had been no visitors to break up the monotony of his daily routine. Nathalie was gone, likely a victim of the same miraculous that had stolen so much from him already. Adrien hadn’t been seen in months, abducted by his hated enemies. And clearly, all of his business associates were doing their best to divorce themselves from any relationship they had with him. He did not even have Nooroo any more, his one constant companion for the past what? Twenty, thirty years?

Worst of all, he knew that his wife was gone. The machine could not have sustained her for much longer, least of all without his frequent maintenance and care. No, now Gabriel was entirely alone in the world.

...Or at least he was until he noticed the figure in black standing on the other side of his cage, just outside the reach of his pitiful overhead light.

Of course, even in the weak light he would recognize that figure. Even if he hadn’t been spending the last ten years trying to pry jewelry off his body, living or dead, there weren’t many people in Paris who wore cat ears and a leather tail. At least, none that he would allow within twenty meters of him.

His face twisted into a sneer. “Chat Noir. Finally come to gloat at how you defeated the mighty Hawkmoth? How you tore a family apart because of your desperate need to play hero?” He watched Chat Noir flex his claws as his glowing emerald eyes stared back at Gabriel. Despite himself, Gabriel shivered - there was a coldness in that look that he’d never seen in the hero before, no matter what akuma’s eyes he had been looking through.

Instead of a response, Chat Noir said, “Claws in.”

After blinking away the spots from his eyes due to the green light show, he eagerly looked one of his nemeses in the face for the first time. A knot of some unfamiliar emotion knotted in his gut. Despite the suit vanishing, none. "...Son?"

"Hawkmoth."

Gabriel frowned, the much more familiar sense of parental disappointment returning to him. "Still no respect for your father, I see."

"There's no one here by that title. No one here who deserves respect. Let me tell you about some people I DO respect though." Adrien pulls pictures out of his jacket and throws them one by one at Gabriel’s feet.

The first picture was a happy couple dressed in wedding finery that Gabriel could barely remember as one of Adrien’s circle of nobody friends. "This is Alya and Nino. You remember them, right? Well this is their wedding rehearsal dinner. In Venice. Why in Venice, do you ask? Because, as I just learned, they were threatened by Andre Bourgeois to the point that they had to leave this city. They now travel where Alya can report the truth without being blackmailed."

Another picture hit the floor. "This is my former fencing instructor. I'm sure you don't remember him, because you didn't care about how I lived my life as long as I was busy and quiet and cut off from the world. He ran against the mayor several times trying to bring real change and each time he was met with a smear campaign that ruined his reputation and his business. He moved, and last I heard he has a very nice fencing studio in Marseille. He hasn't been back to Paris since."

"Adrien-"

The last picture was tossed directly at his face and Gabriel caught it easily with one hand. He almost wished he hadn’t when he saw his son, smiling wider than he had in years, his arm around a young woman that he definitely recognized.

"And THIS.” His son’s face was a mask of anger. “This is Marienette Dupain-Cheng. The love of my life. And she's still here. DESPITE the horrible competition she endured trying to break into the fashion world. DESPITE the critics who will tear apart anything innovative for ratings. DESPITE the blacklist I found in Mayor Bourgeois's office that had her name on it. The list you gave him."

Long moments passed between them, a silence thick with tension.

“You’ve got nothing to say for yourself.” It wasn’t a question.

“Everything I did was for us, for our family-” Gabriel was cut off by Adrien laughing, a biting, hollow noise.

“You didn’t do it for me,” Adrien spat at him. “You didn’t do it for mom. You did it for your idea of us, some… some fictional version of us that only exists in your head.” He shook his head. “Do you really think mom would have ever wanted you to terrorize Paris for her? Do you think she wanted to spend her last days of life stretched thin in stasis? What the hell would make you think I’d want a supervillain instead of a father?”

Gabriel didn’t have a response to that either and felt his legs give out underneath him as he collapsed onto his hard prison bed. He barely registered the flash of green light as his son - who he realized with dawning horror he had tried to kill many times in the past ten years - left him.

He finally recognized the unfamiliar emotion he was feeling.

Guilt.

-------------------------------

Marinette took a big sip of her best red wine as her phone rang. She knew they were out of their league with this one, but she knew exactly who to call for help. It was a big enough story to entice her, but if she wanted this to work, she needed to be as honest as possible.

A voice answered on the other end. “Hey, M. What’s up?”

The time for hesitation was over. “Alya, I hope you’ve got a lot of time to spare.”

“For my best friend? I’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Good.” Marinette took a deep, fortifying breath. “I’m Ladybug, and I need your help.”

[reporting-socialjustice-blog]

The Hutto Visitation Program Script

By: Jeremy Steen

WIND SOUNDS

MUSIC

A little over thirty miles outside of Austin – in Taylor Texas – sits the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. The facility currently houses over five-hundred women who are seeking asylum in the United States. Chivas Watson does advocacy work with Austin based nonprofit Grassroots Leadership.

WATSON CUT 1: I heard about an overwhelming amount of women, who in the mindset that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, sought out asylum here in this country thinking it was safe. And in their efforts to find sanctuary have been detained and landed here in Williamson County. (20)

He made the long drive many times to visit the women detained at Hutto as part of a program run by Grassroots Leadership.

WATSON CUT 2: It’s a humbling drive. You come to this Residential Center that’s anything but. It’s humbling to know where you’re headed even more so when you know where you’ve been.  (12)

If the facility is ANYTHING BUT a residential then what is it? Attorney Denise Gilman runs the immigration clinic at the University of Texas.

GILMAN CUT 1: Hutto was a medium security prison for women so it feels like a prison. It is a prison. It’s all cinder block walls and clanging keys and doors with push button latches that are run by the guards and one-way glass. (20)

If this is a prison – AND the women housed there can’t leave what crime have they committed?

GILMAN CUT 3: They’ve committed no crime. This is not criminal detention. It’s not even  pretrial detention in the criminal justice sense. Detention at Hutto is administrative it is just connected to the immigration proceeding. (15)

When Hutto originally made the transition from a maximum-security prison to a detention center it housed immigrant families. After a three-year fight Grassroots Leadership’s Immigration Programs Coordinator Sofia Casini and other community members had it shut down in 2009. But in 2010 it reopened as a women’s only facility. That’s when Casini and Grassroots Leadership began a volunteer based visitation program.

CASINI CUT 1: The volunteers are trained to do human rights monitoring. We go in as friends of the women. We go in as friends of the women so we don’t ask permission from ICE which protects us and enables us to do what we really want to do which is really just advocate for the women there. (14)

Watson volunteered for the program after seeing the impact immigration issues have on the community in which he lives.

WATSON CUT 3: I’d be remiss to walk outside or to walk through the areas in which I live and not at least reason with myself that my Hispanic brethren and sisters are scared to walk outside. (14)

He also has a personal connection to what the women at Hutto are experiencing.

WATSON CUT 4: I did the entire month of July 2016 in solitary confinement. So, when I would connect with Laura I could see the fear I could see the desperation. I had an immediate intrigue into Hutto and the issues that were going on chiefly because of our amiga, Laura Monterrosa. (20)

The conditions at Hutto became public after Monterrosa made allegations of sexual abuse to the volunteers from Grassroots Leadership. Other women there have revealed human rights violations during these visits.

GILMAN CUT 2: It’s critical because the visitors are often the first to notice when there is some egregious violation taking place at Hutto. In other words, they really do serve as human rights monitors for the situation at Hutto and they are often able to let the larger public, the lawyers, know about problems they’re seeing at the facility. (10)

According to the women at Hutto – the conditions are bad enough that they are willing to give up the asylum process and return home.

CASINI CUT 2: You know, they’ll make statements like I’d rather return to my home country and face death, than be in this facility one more day. (6)

Monterrosa was released from Hutto with a stay of removal on March Sixteenth 2018. This was a result of Grassroots Leadership’s months-long campaign that drew support from all over the country.

GILMAN CUT 2: So, Laura is a perfect example of the role that the visitation role plays because it really was through visitors from Grassroots Leadership that the case of sexual abuse against Laura Monterrosa was detected. (15)

Five-hundred-and-eleven women are still detained at Hutto while they try to prove to the United States’ government that their lives will be put in jeopardy if they are forced to return to their home country.

CASINI CUT 3: So, in the past you didn’t have these sort of detention centers. When people came over and asked for asylum they would be going through their whole court proceedings but they would be doing it while living with their family. The majority of women at Hutto have family who want them. (11)

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center is a source of revenue for Taylor, Texas. Casini says the women are paid a dollar a day to do the majority of the labor required for the facility. The center brings in a hundred dollars per woman per day in tax payer money. This creates an incentive to keep every bed full – a goal that is in conflict with those working on behalf of the detainees.  

CASINI CUT 4: We’re not in the business of reforming, we’re not in the business of making it better there we’re in the business of closing down the whole detention system. This system very much a for profit driven system and it is not needed. (11)

Hutto will continue to detain its five-hundred-and-eleven women until they can prove they have a credible fear of returning to their home country or they agree to a voluntary removal. Casini and Gilman both point out that the attitudes of the current political administration are make it more difficult for them to gain asylum in the United States. However – the volunteers will continue to make the drive to visit their amigas – to offer them some comfort and a watchful eye. They can do that with the knowledge that the end of Laura Monterrosa’s detention may mean a new beginning for the five-hundred-eleven women still held at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. Watson can feel the need for the work to continue.

WATSON CUT 5: The world is on fire right now. The world is on fire right now. (6)

I’m Jeremy Steen, for the Texas Standard.

[supporthosechi]

Our Third Visit

        Home again, whatever that means exactly.  Moving for most people is terrible because it involves putting a bunch of small things into larger boxes, carefully wrapping delicate items—heirlooms, art, instruments, televisions, anything which is not really designed to be packed into a van or truck or other vehicle and moved any distance.  It also can mean uprooting oneself, which obviously cuts both ways: no more favorite diner down the street, no more garden in the back, no window which catches the light in the morning just so, no paint on the walls which has been redone to suit moods or fancy, no immediate physical access to friends, family, and work left behind, all to be exchanged for comparable or better versions. 

        Our LeLe’s move shares variations on many of these characteristics.  She moves from maximum to medium-minimum security, from 2000 fellow inmates to 500, from a facility housing people who will live out their natural lives within to those who will be there nine years or fewer. She leaves behind an ex-partner to become “fresh meat” at a new facility.  She sacrifices friendships and a place where anything might be obtained to one where inmates are far more cautious and the state’s control is more ironclad.  She cannot bring her paints, for which her nails have (temporarily) suffered, but the kitchen has a fryer and not everything is made of soy, by dint of which her skin has immediately cleared.  She exchanges the promise of contract work to reduce her sentence, the possibility of working with animals or cosmetics for a kitchen job which pays next to nothing (from 15 to 20 to 30 dollars a month as she moves up the ranks, rapidly), and layoffs in prison labor which do not allow her sacrifice herself to menial labor to move towards swifter release.  It’s a new place and there’s not much going on.  We sometimes think of our jobs, our relationships, our apartments, the very contours of our lives as prisons, and it sometimes feels as if we move from one to the next.  Alisha Walker’s situation has in some ways actually gotten worse with this move, and I can tell, and it tears at me, which in turn makes me feel dumb, because it tearing at me does nothing for her.

          It is hard not to imagine what it was like for her arriving as we do, pulling through a proper town and into a different sort of stone and barbed wire hell.  There is a funny little hut with some tables at the entrance and I momentarily lose track of where I am, thinking: “this would be a nice spot for Alisha to sit with her family.”  The presence of the eerily immobile guard standing beneath a strangely folksy, wooden sign proclaiming “Staff Only” quickly dispels that notion.  These are places of utmost control and power over, and any person who leaves them not wanting to smash, kill, and destroy after serving their time is either an incredible model of restraint from whom we all could learn that lesson at least, or else has had their spirit so utterly broken that it must take many soul-searching hours to find themselves anew outside.  This being our first visit, we brace for different regulations and novel layers of arbitrary command to fight through to gain entry.  We are not disappointed in this expectation.  Our first time through the double glass doors finds paperwork and, interestingly, more people of color behind one desk than we saw at the entire facility at Logan.  We are informed that one of our membership’s attire will bar her from entering, despite it being identical to what she wore on our last visit, and so I run back to the car to find something else she might wear, to no avail.  After a trip to Target to buy something less revealing than thick black tights and a hooded sweatshirt (the dead cops t-shirt is fine, mind you), we make our second attempt, now being told that we need a second form of ID each, which I dutifully return to the car again and procure. The third try reveals that the hooded sweatshirt cannot be worn in, nor can my cardigan.  When we finally make it through the metal detector, we’re left to peruse the scenery outside the gendered shakedown rooms, then left again to our own devices until we realize we can walk into the visitation room on our own accord.  The distance from the visitor’s entrance to the building to the door behind which we’ll spend the day with our friend is perhaps thirty feet, entirely indoors. This is emblematic of an entirely different, arguably even more nefarious affect of the Decatur facility.

           The entry desk is opposite a giant set of plaques devoted to employees of the month and retirees, each of which is clearly hand-carved, burned, and painted as if we were in a backwoods hunting lodge such as one might find just a few miles away from town.  There is one calligraphed sign for “Warden,” one for “Guard on Duty,” and a variety of smaller ones for the time clock and a key rack. There is a hand-etched lithograph commemorating a mother and children reunification program, to help reintegrate ex-offenders, which is distastefully hung next to a prison-staff lotto game of some variety where officers can put in their names for a monthly drawing for cash prizes.  I’m uncertain which is the more disingenuous of the two.  The guards interact with us in a generally saccharine tone (“It’s always more complicated the first time, sorry.”), wholly opposite the gruff, put-upon affect of the previous set.  I detest them and their complicity in this system, and I do not want to muse on this being a better work environment than the previous facility, that they get on better with each other and perhaps even the inmates, I want them to feel the full gravity of the despicable institution in which they are cogs, and I want them in turn to be as miserable as possible as they help make this needless societal scourge for the women inside.

           But this is not the place for any more of this particular screed.  I am privileged to see and hug and laugh with and hold and update a friend who has gotten closer and closer, and I want to know she is as all right as is humanly possible in a place designed to rob her of her humanity at every turn.

           We know each other a bit better now.  Alisha knows which one of our troupe she’ll have wild parties with and learn about the tough edge of the anti-fascist struggle when she gets out, which one will take her to tiki bars and teach her about the subject position of being a queer femme and all its responsibilities and travails, and which one will laugh too hard in spite of himself at all her jokes and make sure she’s well-fed when she needs home cooking with her Chicago family (I’m the last one, if you were wondering).  LeLe is her usual combination of vivacious hilarity and genuine interest in what we are up to on the outside.  As has been the case throughout, some of our mail has gotten through (all her birthday cards) and some, infuriatingly and arbitrarily, has not (two of our members’ last letters), so there is some general updating to be done on our end.  But we are, as anyone would be, curious about our friend’s move, and it is safe to say Alisha is at least a little wistful for the, shall we say, woolier world of Logan, a place better suited to her bawdy, mischievous, and social personality. In short: our girl is bored.  But I am reminded more acutely in this visit also: our girl is easily but deeply funny.  She tells us about the first set of clothes she got at the new facility, the crotch and thighs stained (“somebody had like a toxic vagina or something!  Just burning through!”), and how she soon found that there was no fashion scene to keep up with here.  We comment on how clean the clothes she has now look, and how she has clearly lost back some weight from the—marginally—better food and find that she’s wearing her “special occasion” polo, pristine and white, and her pair of shoes from Logan that “nobody else got.”  At the old facility, she’d be altering clothes and getting the new garb whenever it came in or else risk ridicule, which would result in mouthing off, which consequently would result in something worse.  We comment this sounds like high school all over again, and Alisha’s eyebrows go up as she busts up laughing: “It’s worse than high school!  They’re criminals!  You get your ass beat!”  She tells us about the sort of pranks unique to a place where people are already on edge but used to certain routines which mark out the time.  There is the regular practice of lining up to receive prescription medication, which LeLe naturally thought was worth crying wolf at, at least once: “MEDLINE!”  The effected inmates, of which there were many, all piled out of their cells to line up for drugs, furious at the false alarm.  When one of the older inmates got especially angry, Alisha responded with the natural question of the nonplussed prankster: “You mad?  Are you big mad or little mad?” knowing full well this would be the end of the incident.  In this “minimum security” place, loaded with contradictions, the restrictions regarding fighting and sexual relationships are vastly harsher than the previous: either will get you cited and likely put in solitary confinement, in the hole.

           We ask her a few questions on behalf of a reporter friend who is doing a profile on Alisha, one of which we already have a sense of the sad answer to, but ask anyway and receive a classic LeLe answer.

           “How are you passing the time at Decatur?”

           (slight pause) “Dyking out!”

           She goes on to explain that she is “talking to” three people, but there are ten more interested.  We get into a discussion about how “everyone is gay” on the inside, because there’s nothing else to be.  As mentioned before, she has been separated from the partnership she had begun to build at Logan, which we assume would be difficult, but as it turns out, not for the reasons we guessed.  Suffice it to say, Alisha had her heart broken while she was still at the last facility, subjected to the same sort of amplified betrayals that anyone who offers up herself to another, who feels she has forged a connection through the harshest of obstacles, who takes a calculated risk knowing separation is immanent, would find themselves susceptible.  The classic coping mechanism of “needing to spend some time alone” is drawn into brutalist relief in a place like this where one is at once in a uniquely profound solitude and at the same time never more than ten feet from another person or fifty.  Alisha proclaims she is “manic depressive,” a diagnosis about which we are all concerned and interested in how it is made and treated in this environment.  It turns out that a formal diagnosis has never been made, and Alisha explains how there is no intermediate state for her, she is either hyperactive and excited, sociable to the point where she kids with the guards in the dining hall and pushes buttons just to get some kind of reaction from the subdued and tamped-down inmates, or else utterly depressed. Not just sad about her lost girlfriend, the absent opportunities which were available to her at Logan, her missing family and friends, the wrongful nature of the system which reminds her daily it would have simpler if she had just died that night, but a purer, simpler low, resultant from the basic realities of being a giant spirit and personality cordoned off and hidden away from the society she would choose and which would, I am certain, choose her. 

         The time is more real now, she says it and I can see it, because this will be the final destination before release.  She bargains with us for all the things she would give up to be able to step outside, or do anything positive for herself at all, and then we hit the crux of the matter.  Alisha tells us she is not used to—and at this point, there’s no reason to think she’ll ever get used to, which is fine—having to ask for everything, and being powerless to help those she cares about.  Among the myriad motivations for doing sex work, the at least potential command over one’s income, how often and what sort of work one wants to do, was clearly foremost for our girl.  Her mother, brother, sister, and new nephew need her, not simply financially or even emotionally but—and I do not use this term lightly—spiritually.  Anyone who meets Alisha and finds favor with her would comprehend this sort of need; she is magnanimous not because she is a saint but because it is clear that when she cares it is wholesale and not easily vacated. She will never become accustomed to be so dependent on, having to ask for things from, her mother, having to be shaken down to use the bathroom, finding nearly every step, of which there are only so many which can be taken anyway, requiring official and explicit sanction.

           It does no real good for me to soften the situation in these reflections: our dauntless survivor is hurting, each next forced renegotiation of her dignity and creative power taxing the underground wellspring of strength from which she draws.  The tiny gold cross she wears around her neck borders on satire; this is no cloister for the likes of Alisha Walker, and there’s no spiritual quest or fulfillment concealed within.  Just the full, indifferent weight of the state’s corporal fetish borne down on a young woman full to bursting with creative potency.  I, insignificant and impotent in the face of such forces, have two options, with only the first being at all viable.  Either LeLe will emerge from this place, sooner than later, intact and excited to make good on all the plans we make every next visit, or I do not want to go on existing in the world which not just allows but applauds her forced sacrifice.

           Alisha is disappointed that one of our members does not eat red meat, having raised cows in her youth and, accepting this reality, turns to me in mock-frustration:

           “Aaron, please tell me you eat steak.”

           I do, LeLe, I do, and I don’t know if it’s going to taste right again until you’re on the opposite side of the table from me for the first time.

-AH