EDITOR'S NOTE: ZBP is expanding our stable! When we first read Mara McQuire's incendiary crime novel, dot, (She insists it's lower case, and who are we? Why, ZBP!) it was a different time; order had been restored to our American experiment, and we were looking like we might be getting our first woman President... and then the unthinkable became reality... and writing became dangerous. Intimadation made the mightiest of media titans bend the knee, and kiss his a... ring. But we're too Irish for that. We don't kiss or bend for anyone, and especially here.  Zuzubean Press has always prided ourselves on bold storytelling, and so the molotov cocktail that this is this tale was thrown. We couldn't be more proud! if Joy is resistance, then art is shots fired... ZBP

When Meghan, a rising reporter for the news site The Asphere was sent to the Stateville Penitentiary to interview a woman who had confessed to over 70 murders, she had no idea it was the same serial killer she and a small group of reporters had been tracking for the past year. She also had no idea why she, a black, trans, “cub” reporter with only political bylines to her name was chosen out of the entire Chicago journalistic community.

But she should have known…

As Meghan conducts two weeks of officially sanctioned interviews, she’s never sure if she’s helping the FBI interrogate their suspect, (spoiler; she is) or a killer publish a manifesto (spoiler: likely) or a suicide note (spoiler: more likely). Nobody, including the Illinois Attorney general’s office, even knows the killer’s name, who Meghan has nicknamed “dot” (lower case, not “as in short for Dorothy,” but rather the character/cypher between two bits of information) because there is no record of her having ever existed.  When the evidence of her trail of carnage across 7 states is verified by facts only the killer and the FBI would know, the State scrambles to make a case that would have never have broken if the killer hadn’t turned herself in.

But one thing that is becoming clear to Meghan as she journeys out everyday to dot’s maximum security cell … dot is methodical, coldly calm, and committed, and… she’s been watching Meghan for a long time.

Meghan struggles with this realization as much as she does with dot’s confession that her mission is not murder, but rather, “The removal of assets from the battlefield.” dot’s targets in her war, are the deadliest anti-trans operatives, from the Legislator who literally died with the legislation rammed down his throat as he had done to the trans people of Nebraska, to the Ohio Pastor who has the Bible burned onto his chest opened to the passage he used to justify conversion therapy of trans boys. Meghan can’t square the extremes that dot has gone to make her case ~ isn’t her vigilantism going to make life harder for Trans people? Isn’t she playing right into their hands?

As the days approaching dot’s arraignment countdown, Meghan and dot’s debate ramps up.  from “why she did it” to “how in the hell did/or could she?” Pressure rises to a crescendo, with The FBI, the Illinois State Police and the US Marshals office swept into dot’s maelstrom ~  The mounting body count and gruesome tableaus of death that are dot’s macabre MO reveal the weaknesses of the Justice system and law & order for marginalized communities. With the authorities embarrassed more every day trying to explain how one woman could wreak so much havoc from inside a maximum security cell, Meghan is reeling, struggling to get it right, to tell the unvarnished story while keeping herself from being sucked into dot’s one-woman war…

I’ve yet to see her fully. I’ve caught glimpses of a single eye close enough to the grimy and scratched, postcard-sized window in her cell door, to tell its color: hazel. I had thought them blue for the longest time until they were green one day. Of course, her head has been shaved by her warders, not a standard practice for a person who just walks in one day and turns herself in, but then, rarely has someone confessed to a string f murders spanning seven states, that is, if all of her facts check out.

I have caught brief glimpses when she’s turned her head and what I’ve seen shows a gentle graying in dark… red… red-ish or maybe once was red? stubble. Her mind is very sharp and I found our sanctioned conversations over what has been the agreed two-week period as she awaits arraignment, both, fascinating and oddly illuminating.

Her motives are very clear. Her remorse is non-existent. Her confidence in her actions are not the justifications of a radicalized zealot, but more like the calm observations of a witness, a scientist, an analyst, and are just as unshakable. As if she has the benefit of oversight. An aerial view of all sides of an issue and its past, present, and future implications.”

“Bitch, please. You’re not seriously considering publishing that?”

Meghan stopped her recording. “What?”dot’s eye pressed up to the glass. This was how she froze time for Meghan. Figuratively holding her aloft by the scruff of her neck, like a mama cat, gently discipling her kitten. Meghan would try to breathe through the sudden weightlessness, the sudden disorientation, more worried that at any time dot would end the interview, cut off her access, and there would go her story.

dot’s eye stared unblinking, today it was a light gray, as if all color had been drained from it. In truth, it merely reflected the gray walls and gray sky through the only window in the entire cell suite, which was as Meghan had been told, reserved for high-profile cases. The thin sliver of a window in the “observation area” just outside dot’s actual cell, revealed a late spring gloom hung over the Stateville State Prison, or ‘The Pen,’ as it was fondly referred, just outside Chicago’s western plain.

dot’s gaze softened. She blinked once as if to release Meghan and receded into the dim of the cell. Meghan tried to shrug off the stare, tried to remember where she was. Her handwritten notes, still in her hands. She slumped down onto the bench, rereading to see what had drawn the question.

Meghan Woods was late thirties, Black. Her button-down shirttails, pale triangles on the thighs of her black cotton jeans peaked out from under a Peacoat. Meghan took her first breath in all this time, “Well, yes. This is serious, therefore, I am serio…”

“Come on, Meghan…Oversight?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“It’s inaccurate.”
“It’s… inaccurate?”
“And it’s a double entendre. And not in a good way, making it a contranym.”

Meghan stared at her notes.The eye appeared at the glass. Was she gloating? Looking for acknowledgment? Observing? The line, the words, the…

fucking contronym… Meghan’s arms slumped to her sides. She felt the eye and grudgingly made contact. dot’s eye winked, “Careful, your editors will claim you’ve gone native. And for the record, I would ordinarily rock that one, but, it’s important you get this right. For your sake. As for the rest of it… past, present, sure… it’s a bit boastful...

but it’s not like they didn’t have it coming.