THE ORIGINS OF JUNE'S GLARE

Mom, you can blame Emily for that one. I got accused of using it too much. I mean, if this had been a video drama, you could see a director or writer overusing what others said I possessed - a glare, head tilted down, eyes coldly glaring up. Perfect for the transition to a new part of the narrative. One Martha who'd had a brief career in New York film, said that what I managed would have made a good 'end of episode' tableau - fade to black, cue your Billie Eilish or your Shocking Blue and roll the credits.

On the basis of my defiant glare, the viewer would be back.

So, mom, I know it's hard for you to imagine it was me who got the reputation that Angel's Flight garnered. Calamity June. No doubt when you look back at me as a barely socially-conscious teenager, you'd probably just laugh. I wish I could manage that 'legendary' stare on command - I don't think it's up to me.

Who first saw it in me? Don't judge me, mom. It was Nick, he was the first one who saw - and became intimidated by - me. He was the first to see that glare - in me.

A Handmaid. Him a Guardian. Him an Eye. Him who Mrs. Waterford made impregnate me - that one WAS against my will. That one WAS rape, mom… I still can't bear thinking of that first act, which was definitely NOT intimacy. Far from it, it was monstrous, afterwards I became alternately suicidal as well as homicidal. I shut it out for the longest time.

It certainly did not make me love Nick, not that time.

But I didn't blame Nick. I blamed Serena Joy - I blamed Gilead. Strangely I'd not blamed Commander Waterford. But that forced, vaginally-painful copulation was the first seed of me wanting to hurt Gilead, the way it had dragged Hannah away from me, in that dark forest. I wanted nothing more than to make 'them' fear, the same way I had been afraid.

Through all of that, blame Emily. Blame Emily for 'the look' that others told me I could summon.

What had happened?

It was Emily. As Ofsteven. After she had been put 'back into service' as a Handmaid. After she had been mutilated as a result of who she'd loved - when she was Ofglen. When she had told me her real name, Emily, for the first time.

It was at the open market, not Loaves and Fishes. A Guardian had just driven up, hopped out, left his Mercedes sedan running with the door open. With the Lord as my witness, Emily - vacant catatonic Emily - she turned to me, told me her real name, told me to 'find Mayday', then without so much as a 'how do you do', she ran over and climbed into the driver's side.

Everyone knew how that would end up - but speaking of 'looks'. You should have seen the look on her face as she hit the gas. It was the look of freedom. The sight of a woman driving, the sight of a Handmaid driving….

…. smiling, and free. The Guardians fired at her, but of course the Mercedes was armoured.

We Handmaids, we started to shriek in glee! They could shoot some of us for that, but even that wouldn't have stopped the applause and giddy laughter! Realizing that, the Guardians knew they'd have to stop Emily, but how? One Guardian paid for it with his life - Emily drove straight over him. That produced a mixture of panic, screams, but more shrieks of glee from us.

They eventually stopped her. They dragged her off. We were sure she'd be shot in some lonely basement somewhere. But even after, she still had that 'look' on her face, one that was unique to Handmaids. For one brief shining moment, Emily had won.

We had won.

Me? That night without asking, no longer fearing being caught, at midnight I marched up to Nick's little carriage-house above the Waterford garage. I didn't even knock.

That's when he said he first saw that 'look' on me. I mean, he'd not seen the scene at the market, he'd not experienced how so briefly invincible Emily had looked in that car.

But he noticed it in me. I glared at him. He'd never seen that before in a Handmaid. I pushed him onto his bed. Me, I disrobed him - the very first time I'd ever had sex with a man where he hadn't stripped me first. I realized then how unequal men were with sex. They'd always wanted the woman naked and vulnerable before they would commit their body.

Not me, not with Nick, not that night. I stripped him. I remained clothed for as long as I wanted, it was my wishes that counted that night at Nick's, it was my needs which counted - Nick was just a body. A naked body for me to both survey and possess.

The look? Nick told me that that night was the first time he'd seen it from me. Mom, I'm sorry for being so graphic - a daughter can only do it with her mother once, and I guess this is the one time.

So, where did I get that 'end of episode, cliff hanger, roll Billie Eilish' look? The menacing, sporadically bad ass June Osborne look?

It was from Emily Malek that day at the market. She had been invincible. I'd never seen her laugh with glee like that before. Very Janine-like.

I wish I could summon that glare on command. I don't think it's up to me.

THE LOOK

"I tell you, Holly," Emily said to me as she sat on a stool, at a folding, solo-portable dinner table beside her tent, "it was June's look. The way she transformed - from a scared handmaid, to laser focused hatred. All of a sudden-like."

There she was, camped out on that burned out lot. This neighbourhood of Shelby had been hit by Gilead drones three year's previous. The Assiniboine from Fort Peck, as well as Blackfeet combined their rifles to join with Shelbyites for a counter attack. That had driven Gilead back as far south as Great Falls and Augusta. They made such progress that the white folk wanted to continue west to Missoula, but the Blackfeet Chief countermanded them.

Emily still wasn't sure she'd pitched her tent on her parents' old lot - it could have been the Morris's. But she wasn't moving. She'd said, 'I remember the day I'd come out to my parents. It was right here on this plot. I'd gone to the Morris's after in tears. Mrs. Morris, she comforted me, said, 'you pay it no mind', the grand rural Montanan way of avoiding your troubles.'

Me from Boston, I didn't know how lucky I'd had it. My guess was that 'gender-fluidity' did not gain much of a following on the Montana prairie back then among the white folks.

Still, I wanted to know about June. To be honest, I was a little desperate. Emily did not look long for being 'psychically available'. June, she was down in town, at the Oasis Bar & Casino, inquiring about passage farther south. Good luck, June, was all anyone would say. Me, I did not exactly relish a return to Colorado Springs.

Up with her parents remains, Emily sat on that little stool, where I'd pulled up the only other chair - as well as pulled tighter the sweater around me, it was needed that cold morning.

I said, "I am so sorry to be grilling you about June, Emily. You look like you have your hands full right now."

Emily stared vacantly as she accepted the black coffee I'd brought from downtown.

After a moment and after a sip, then warming her hands on the cup, she said, "no, that's fine. Me, I need to talk about June. It's probably better to say it to you than tell her. The bitch."

Okay, I don't want to overstate it, but Dr. Emily Malek, she was a walking Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for PTSD. She was a walking exhibit for recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic event(s), dissociative reactions, intense and prolonged distress, as well as overreactions to what others might see as unrelated external cues.

Like all former Handmaids of Gilead, or ANY woman in that theonomic fascist State.

But look at me, defaulting to my M.D. mode, making diagnoses, as if I was not totally compromised. Using the DSM-5 as a shield to the pain of finally finding June. A manual I had dismissed many times for it's cultural hetero- and male-normative bias.

The voice in my head? 'Shut up, Holly, let the woman speak. This ground on which her tent sits is a graveyard of her youth. To her, it's holy.'

She recovered some, realizing who she was talking to. "So sorry, Holly, I don't mean to be rude to your daughter. Not in front of you, anyway. It's hard, it's just hard."

This time I shut up, giving her time to assemble her thoughts.

"It was that look. When she'd handed me Nichole, in the back of Commander Lawrence's truck, I immediately knew she wasn't coming. I cried out her name, I really tried to get her to climb into that truck. I mean, Commander Lawrence, he'd got it, for me… or so I thought at the time. He'd said, 'I'm getting myself into some real shit'."

"But June… she'd just handed me the baby, then she said defeatedly, 'Call her Nichole, tell her I love her.' She had a look of resignation and pain, which made it even weirder that she didn't even try to get in with me."

"Then she closed the rear door, me holding Nichole. As we drove away I could see her."

"There it was, the look. No more defeat, no more resignation. No more pain, not on June's face. As we picked up speed, even from the increasing distance - it was the damnedest transition I ever saw."

"The look. Determined defiance."

"Then the night in Canada when we'd heard that Fred Waterford was going to slip away from the World Court's version of justice - that he was going to be swapped at the border for Marthas. Me, I was sitting across from June, it was late the night before, Moira, Rita and Luke doing the talking. They just wanted rid of the guy. Out of sight, out of mind."

"Me, I was surveying June during all that defeatist dialogue. I stared at her, really scanned her, looking for that same look. It was not there. She was prepared to admit defeat, that Waterford - probably both of them - were going to slip away, like always."

So I asked her. I guess it's something neither Moira nor Rita would have known to ask. Certainly not Luke. I asked her a simple question, 'What do you want, June?'

Her answer was equally simple. She said, 'I want him to be afraid, like I was afraid. Because I was afraid for so long.'

That's what brought out 'the look'. How had I managed to bring that out of her? I asked her another simple question, 'how afraid?' I mean, it was me, I was the one turning June into a monster. Probably always had been me.

It was then that I saw what I'd seen before, in Joseph Lawrence's truck that night. It was then that I knew I had her. She said coldly, with no fear or doubt, 'as afraid as I was the night in the woods when they took Hannah. I want him THAT afraid.'

I knew then that I had her. I knew that she had the facility to arrange with that fascist boyfriend of hers, Nick, that something would happen - probably at the exchange at the Rock River Bridge. I mean, the way that that was handled was how I'd got into the good graces of Martha Lori when I went back.

But when it was over for Fred Waterford, we went for pancakes, when we'd scrawled 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum' beside his stinking corpse. Instead of going home, we went for pancakes, with celebratory butter and extra syrup. We literally slurped up from our plates what we'd done the night before. Me, I was glad I was involved, I was glad I'd got in a few licks.

I was glad that I'd ignited that fire in June. She was such a ditz without it.

At breakfast, June's 'look'? It wasn't there any more. She wiped her mouth, pissed off the others, the women who she'd rallied at Moira's fucking self-help group-shit. She after wasn't going to lend her 'cred' to go after the others' tormentors, particicute their Commanders and take broom handles to their wives.

She just wouldn't.

It's why, Holly, Martha Lori sent me back to Canada. To see to June. Yet here I am, back on my own terrible homesoil. I had my crack at both June and Serena Joy. Now here, my tormenting-parents, now gone. Even the bullying I'd received here at home, it is now only a memory. As black as the ashes.

I'm glad I didn't kill June in Canada. That's why I cannot go with you and June to go get Hannah. Me, I'm staying here in Shelby. I'm throwing my lot in with the Blackfeet, with the Assiniboine.

By the way, Martha Lori says that no matter what befalls you as you go on your fool's errand to Colorado Springs, that you, Holly, you will be seen to. June, she would be on her own. Yes, Martha Lori's influence extends out this far. You, you'll be all right, Holly.

June, she'll have to look somewhere else.

WHO WAS MY DAUGHTER?

Was June in league with Commander Blaine? I mean, there was no reason to doubt where Nichole came from. Not even Serena Joy - now back up in Calgary with June's daughter - not even Mrs. Waterford ever denied that June and Nick had produced a baby. There was a 'story' there, one that I was hearing in dribs and drabs.

While in Toronto, June had had extensive conversations with both Commanders Lawrence as well as Blaine. If it had been unlikely that a lowly sex-slave, Handmaid could commandeer a cargo jet…. why not have that one-woman-Mayday manipulate two, high ranking Commanders of the Faithful? Is that why Martha Lori won't protect her?

All I knew, was that now it was just me and June, we were the two heading further south. Every other American was headed north.

June's take on that? "The vehicles bringing them north, they have to go back south don't they?"

But even with that, so far there's been no 'look'. Not the one Emily counseled me to be on the lookout for.