Kindling
Copyright© 2025 by Gibigabi
Chapter 1
They came at nine in the morning. Gabriela Rodriguez had hoped they wouldn’t, but she wasn’t surprised. She had planted the bomb, after all. That had been her. And oh, she had been careful, honest to god, she had. She’d worn gloves and brought only a burner phone. If she’d been more serious about getting away, maybe, she would’ve left the country or at least the state. She could go back to Texas, maybe. She’d always loved Austin. But so did she love Oregon. She loved the Communist book group she led on Tuesdays. She loved the farmer’s market, her neighbors, her comrades. And she loved her home.
So, she didn’t try to run. Gabriela Rodriguez, age 22 and doomed, went about her morning as usual. She brewed herself a mug of chamomile tea, sat on her woven mat, and drank. She looked at the art which filled most of her walls, the plants which filled in the gaps. She went through her stretches. She was bent over, stretching her hamstrings, when the wall caved in.
Battering ram? Maybe. It all happened so quickly, and before she could do much at all, she was on the ground, arms behind her back, and saying over and over— in a voice steadier than she felt— “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, I’m cooperating.”
Gabriela was not a small woman. She was 5 ‘10, 185 pounds of muscle and tits, but there were five— no, six— men, none of them small, all with very large guns in her studio apartment. Fucking fascists, she thought. It felt good to think it. Good and right to know that maybe these pigs had her on her stomach, but they were just dirty pigs and she was righteous.
They sounded like pigs, too. Squealing and snorting like mud-covered hogs. “Stay down!” “Don’t move!” “You have the right to remain—” “Don’t even try—” Their words overlapped like barnyard noise. They pulled her to her feet, and Gabriela let them. She let them march her out, down the stairs, and to the street. They passed sweet, old Mrs. Chen, her neighbor, and Gabriela watched as poor Mrs. Chen’s eyes grew wide and face grew pinched at the sight of Gabi, who helped her carry boxes and brought her fresh tamales, handcuffed and stone-faced.
So she marched to the unmarked white car Pig #1, balding and chubby, shoved her in. Head up, she reminded herself. Eyes straight. They can’t take what you don’t give them. She catalogued the other piglets with a flat expression. For a moment, she let herself think of her comrades. Had one of them turned her in? She suspected she’d never know. She had talked of her plans at meetings, always in vague, half-joking terms. That Luigi Mangione, huh? Hot. Wish he’d shoot another one. Unabomber? Politically incomprehensible, but, like, aura.
Her remarks were hardly controversial in her group. They elicited laughs and nods without fail. But Gabriela had always been willing to follow through in a way her comrades, bless their souls, simply weren’t. It wasn’t that they were cowards, but who would throw away their life at twenty-fucking-two years old just to blow some rich guy’s house? Who’d be that fucking crazy? Gabi, that’s who.
They arrived at Marion County Jail not fifteen minutes later. A safe place to keep uppity bomber bitches until trial, where they could stick those same uppity bomber bitches in supermax and wipe their hands of them.
At the same time as Gabriela Rodriguez, 22 years old and doomed, held her head high as pigs in uniform marched her through beige halls, a very different sort of criminal sat in Interrogation Room 302.
Akira Drake had ants crawling under his skin.
He felt like it, anyway, and to Akira, feeling and being were nearly the same thing. Yes, there were ants crawling under his skin. Fire ants— which felt appropriate— and any moment now they would break out, come out of his skin like from pale, cracked earth, skitter up his chest and in his eyes until he was just ants and burning.
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