Cut From Firm Posturing
Two tables in the same city on the same day.
At one table the attorney general spent five hours not answering questions about what happened to children ... At the other table the first lady made valentines with children who are sick enough to live at the place where the government studies what is wrong with their bodies ...
Same word ... Children ... In both rooms ... One room could not say what was done to them ... The other room could not stop chatting with them about sports and music ...
The hearing ended ... Bondi was visibly tired ... Not tired from the weight of what she carried ... Tired from the weight of what she refused to pick up ... The body knows the difference even when the face performs the same fatigue ...
She did not back down ... That phrase ... Did not back down ... As though backing down were the danger ... As though the danger were softness ... She traded barbs ... Small sharp things designed to go in easy and come out hard ... She traded them the way people trade currency nobody wanted but everybody spent ... And then she left through the staff exit ... Tired ... Hooked ... Still standing ... Standing being the only metric that mattered in that room ...
Down the road.
The Children's Inn at NIH ... A place where children live while the government tries to figure out what is happening inside them ... Not a hospital exactly ... An inn ... The word inn ... A place for travelers ... These children are traveling through something and the inn is where they rest between the parts of the journey that happen in machines and laboratories ...
Melania Trump sat at two separate tables ... Paper and glue and the kind of scissors that cannot cut anything that matters ... Ten children and young adults ... She chatted with them about their lives ... Their sports ... Their music ... Their interests ...
Their lives ... The hearing three miles away just spent five hours not talking about children's lives ... The files contained children's lives ... The redactions failed to protect children's lives ... The pivot was away from children's lives ... And here at the inn the first lady is asking a child about their life as though the word has only one room in it ...
Valentine's Day ... The day we make small things out of paper to represent the large thing we cannot hold in our hands ... Hearts cut from construction paper ... Red ... The color of the organ and the color of the craft ... The children at the inn are making the shape of the thing inside them that is still working while the rest of their bodies are being studied ...
Her fourth visit as first lady ... Fourth ... She has sat at this table before ... She knows the scissors and the glue and the faces that change each year because some of the faces from last year are not here anymore ... Nobody says that out loud at the craft table ... The craft table is not built for that sentence ...
Two tables in the same city ... At one the country could not digest what was done to children ... At the other the country made hearts out of paper with children and pretended the word children only meant one thing today ...
The glue is still drying on the valentines ... The dish is still sitting on the other table ... Both tables are in rooms where the lights are still on ... One room made something small and red ... The other room made nothing at all ...
DISCUSTING
February 12, 2026
Unfolding
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Song
Oyparaploo
