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His mother regretted him, never wanted him, even tried to terminate him, but, at his most sought-after, he was both the second and the eighth most wanted men in the jurisdiction where he practiced his trade. He will stand trial as just one activist, all his aliases merged, but, until his arrest, he performed as several. Two women died in the recent daytime blast he executed, both of them pregnant with babies who doctors tried in vain to deliver (a detail he calls ironic justice) but whose bodies he refuses to tally as hits. A nurse, surprised by shrapnel during her coffee break, lost one eye and the use of her right arm. Do I look scared to you? she will ask him from the witness stand, left hand raised. His ascent through the ranks of the wanted was ingenious. When he was only tenth most wanted, he earned a number eight spot for an alias by planting stolen ID at the scene of a clinic bombing. Since then, he’s conducted workbench surgeries on his cheekbones and jaw, unremarkable features even before he went into the abortion dissuasion business, now half swollen half erased to further frustrate mug book matching, like challenging parents to select their fetus’s image from a random batch of sonograms. Meanwhile, he’s promoted alternate identities in other towns, with unrecognizable faces and aspects, while agents in pursuit go chasing mustaches he’s since shaved or eyeglasses he stole only to be seen in them once. When he is ultimately apprehended, poking around the remnants of an explosion, then interrogated, identified, identified repeatedly, repeatedly convicted, and slapped around with the name his mother gave him, the law will conspire to keep him alive for life, for all of his sacred lives in fact, to be served concurrently.

Original Copyright © January 24, 2007
Revised Copyright © January 30, 2026