I did not know where I was.

In my mind, I was briefly back in residency in Somerville, at the CHA Somerville Campus. I remember when the hospital closed all their in-patient beds, and you had to do everything with the Cambridge Health Alliance, including residency.

But I was there before that. I was lucky to have had the hospital, before it 'closed'. That was when I'd met Mr. Zero. Mr. O. Not-a-doctor, who turned out to be June's dead-beat dad. My friends had warned against him - one had accused me of wanting one normal, heterosexual experience, which the man definitely was not. But it was more than that.

Still, I got that out of my system. If June had been the result, then I lived with that.

It's strange where your mind goes when you're struggling for bearings. I must be in some distress, because nothing makes sense. The sounds around me, they don't add up.

Bootheel Colony? I remember being there. Sometimes I wish I was religious, because I just heard myself say, 'please Jesus, don't let this be Bootheel. I can't take any more.' No, I'm not religious, but I can see why some are.

Then the main voice, it started to make some sense, some words were forming. That voice, I recognized it…. but it was from long, long ago. More confident than it had been.

"Well," the male voice said, "in any other place I'd explore stem cell transplant. Here? Removal from the cause of radiation, that would be number one, that would be the no-brainer."

No, as the voice gained clarity, it wasn't - thank you Jesus - Mr. Zero. Of all the cruel places one's mind goes, that would have been too, too much.

IT'S BEEN A WHILE

Holly Maddox: Jesus, Gil, where did you come from?

Gil Yates: It'd be better, Holly, if you referred to me as Dr. Yates. Look, it's not an ego thing…..

HM: - weak sarcasm - Oh no, it's not an 'ego thing'. You call me Holly, and I call you Doctor. Not an 'ego thing', no not at all.

GY: Do you know how long you've been out?

HM: At the Bootheel Colony? It must be a year…. maybe longer….

GY: No, I mean here - at the infirmary? They said you collapsed a week ago.

HM: Is that where I am?

GY: It's where both of us are, Holly.

HM: - trying to sit up in bed, then collapsing back - Oh, Jesus. - pause - Am I dying, 'Dr.' Yates?

GY: Well, as long as I can keep you from going back to the pits, I think I can work with you. But, let that little effort you just made be a lesson to you. Don't be sitting up. - looking back at the ward door - On the other side of that door are Guardians, they think your presence here is a waste.

HM: Well, Gil…

GY: Tsk-tsk-tsk, Holly. It's 'Doctor'. Dr. Yates. Those Guardians, they are some serious hombres. I won't tell you again.

HM: Listen to you, an establishment man.

GY: Yeah, I guess. You were always into that earthy-crunchy style of medicine….

HM: ….. that was a restaurant, Dr. Yates. I was into women's medicine. - sighing - If you're here in Bootheel, then you are, too. Finally.

GY: The 'flu is still the 'flu, Holly, even out here in southern Missouri.

HM: Careful, Yates. I've seen women beaten for mentioning the old US States. - pause - So, I'm irradiated, radiation poisoning. Hardly a surprise. Is that why you're looking into stem-cell transplant?

GY: Where'd you hear that? - pause - Right, a transplant, at a penal colony. A nuclear waste dump….. - sarcastically - I'll get right on it.

HM: You know what they say about people in comas, beware what you say about them, within earshot.

GY: Remember old-man Findlay? At Somerville? Dr. Findlay, he was so old, he threw tea into Boston Harbor against the British…. but that was his theory, too, about comas.

TURKEY

HM: How'd you get here, Gil? - seeing the look on his face, she amended her words - Ok, how'd you win the lottery, Dr. Yates, the one that brought you to this fresh hell?

GY: You really wanna know?

- When the armed Guardian came in, Yates held the business end of his stethoscope, and secured the earpieces. He pressed the diaphragm-side of the bell to Holly's chest and asked her to take deep breaths -

GY: You still scare me, Dr. Maddox.

HM: Oh, I'm a doctor now!

GY: - smiling - Shut up! - long silence - Best guess?

HM: Okay, I admit, this is Gilead. What did Dr. Findlay always say, when you 'guess' you make mistakes. 'You can drive yourself crazy guessing', he'd say.

GY: Ever heard of the Waterfords? Frederick and Serena Joy Waterford? Sons of Jacob?

HM: She was that Phyllis Schlafly clone. Bitch.

GY: You know, you really need to keep your voice down.

HM: What? The Waterfords sent you here?

GY: The Waterfords, my dear doctor-friend…..

HM: ….. you're not my friend, Dr. Yates….

GY: ….. look, shut-up for a minute. You're supposed to be weak with radiation poisoning! - silence - Okay, good. - pause - The Waterfords, they're in Canada. They've either defected or were captured, no one knows. Fred, he's a Commander in New Gilead…

HM: …. what does any of this have to do with you…..?

GY: Okay, I was going to fill you in, but here it goes… your daughter. The now infamous 'June Osborne'.

HM: My June!?

GY: Yeah. G.I. June. - pause -

HM: Wait, June had the Waterford's arrested?

GY: Don't get ahead of me. - pause - She'd been in the Waterford house, as a surrogate….

HM: …. a sex slave, Dr. Yates. A sex slave…. c'mon, we're doctors…..

GY: Okay, a sex-slave. Have it your way. - pause - This part probably had nothing to do with the Waterfords, but then again with them in Canada, and 86 Gilead kids ending up in Canada… do the math.

HM: 'Eighty-six kids'? What are you talking about?

MY JUNE

I became aware of the few times I referred to June by her full name, the one she herself chose when she was six.

June Osborne. I always assumed being known by Mr. Zero's surname would make one a failure.

Who knew that the 'Osborne' name would amount to something? According to Gil, ….. er, Dr. Yates, she was now the face of Mayday, at least out in New Gilead.

My June. June Osborne. Mr. Zero's seed had amounted to something.

Gil, he'd talked about me with June, when he'd been seeing to one of those surrogate, Bilhah births. He wouldn't tell me all of it - I assume that the mom came out okay, although with Gilead, the surrogate is always just a womb on two legs.

Gil said he'd held back information from The Eyes, that those jackbooted thugs. They then 'invented' a case against him. That part I disbelieved, since when did The Eyes need to 'invent' anything.

But June, who Gil now called G.I. June. She'd been so driven according to him, so obsessed by losing Hannah, that she was going to stick it to Gilead - hurt them in the worst way possible.

Steal their kids. A Handmaid, smuggling out 86 of Gilead's most precious. Most of them themselves first stolen from women like me, or worse - what could be worse? - kids the product of State sponsored rape. Their Bilhah program.

If I died tomorrow, if I succumbed to these horrible and painful lesions, knowing what June had done, that would almost be enough.

Me, I had never seen it in her. I had hoped, I had taken her to rallies, I had exposed her to women's pain. But instead, she had always retreated into her books. Her profession - it was one so attractive to my radical women friends, but she needed to be on the streets - the streets were where we needed to be heard.

My, oh my. June had taken back the streets, against Gilead.

My June, she had done that.

BOOTHEEL COLONY

My release from the infirmary, it was back to the cow-barn.

Just about everything to do with that new, expensive construction, the upgrades, the water-trucks, the four-hour shifts….. once the international visitors had departed, all of it was left to rot.

Seeing that, that had led to my collapse. Turns out I am not strong after all, I am old. Or both.

What remained? Probably only the infirmary, where I had been for radiation. Dr. Yates, for his care and attention, he'd said, 'radiation poisoning is the same Gilead as it had been at Three Mile Island in the American-days'. He got me back up and running. At my age.

Turned out, I was still good for a ten hour shift.

Which included the resumption of a one hour march to the killing field, to be concluded with similar march back once our ten hours on site were done.

Me, I'd hoarded those anti-biotic topicals. At first, after scrounging from people, I'd figured that they would last two months.

Then the infections, they increased. Then that was balanced off by the deaths…. deaths by collapse at those fields.

A resumption of indecent burials - namely, just leaving them where they'd fallen. At least they'd been spared the one hour march back to the cowshed.

IMAGINING JUNE

How had June done it? How had an enslaved woman, how had she purloined a cargo jet? Out here in southern Missouri - there, I said it - Missouri, out here that would be unimaginable! I mean for starters, out here I'd not seen one contrail in the sky. Not one.

Even if I had, how does an irradiated old woman like me, how do I get it to land?

June seemed to know how to do that.

Getting back to our heavy cloth cots, the ones that rubbed so badly on our lesions…. getting back, I had a first.

I hit another unwoman. Badly. I was losing it. I hit her so hard she had trouble getting up, and she was half my age.

What had she done? She had an anti-biotic squeeze bottle, and she was rubbing its contents on the faucets at the washing troughs, the faucets that no longer had skull and cross-bone warnings on them.

The silly bitch, wasting antibiotics on the faucet! As if we weren't dead enough, these was no room for stupidity.

So I hit her. A good one. I had decked a woman half my age.

Something I had taken an oath, many years ago, not to do.

No wonder Gil Yates, no wonder he'd not called me 'doctor'.

I was failing. I was failing women.

My apolitical daughter, June - she was sticking it to them. I wonder - was she still alive?

LIEUTENANT STANS

(Unbeknownst to Holly Maddox, June had not been a hero long. The following is an account as to how she was doing.)

Lieutenant Stans had a marvelous bedside manner. But that was with his 'interviewees', there at the prison.

With his own underlings, his own 'lieutenants', he was experienced as a tyrant. On one famous conflict he'd had with a Guardian who had not followed orders to the letter, Stans had simply tossed the guy from the roof of the prison.

Five storeys.

"Leutenant Stans, sir," the Guardian had said, "what good is Ofjoseph to us dead? How long is she going to be in that box?"

"Well," Stans calmly considered, "she seems resistant to water-boarding. Me, I admire that about her. Her endurance extends my day, it interrupts my meals…. but, I'm learning a lot from the way she spits it back at me. It's a pleasure to see."

"With all due, sir," the Guardian risked, "it's been three days. She's been in that box for over 72 hours."

Stans leaned back in his chair, "well, if you're going to press, let me ask you two things. One, has she told us where the rest of the Handmaids are?"

"No, sir. She hasn't."

"You see, son," Stans said, "you'll never be in this seat, in my seat, if you lose track of the plot. No info from her on what we want to know…."

Stans then leaned forward, "Two - has the good doctor, her mother, arrived yet?"

"No, sir, she hasn't," the Guardian replied. "But two of Commander Lawrence's marthas just got delivered. They were in the house the night of the child trafficking."

"My good Lord, you're going to make me work, aren't you. If Dr. Maddox had been delivered, like I asked, that would have spared me a pile of work. Now I have to go down and interview not one, but TWO Marthas. Okay, I'd better get to it …"

".…. but if Dr. Maddox shows up, regardless of the shape she's in, come get me. I want to finish my dinner before midnight!"

Getting up and grabbing his little black bag he said, "oh, and if she doesn't know where she is, explain it to her. These people, they're so dull. It's easy to beat sense out of them. Me, I'm going to beat some sense into two Marthas. I wish I didn't have to."