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It was Fajr when Al Pacino the tuxedo cat began his daily ritual of smacking me in the face with his paw.

Not gently. Just a small domestic assault by a cat who believes the sun rises because I open Fancy Feast.

I dragged myself out of bed to feed him and Jessie James, who is so morbidly obese from a thyroid condition that I keep baby wipes nearby to clean her bum on bad days.

Bad days for me. She appears to enjoy it.

I probably did wudu. Did I pray in sujood? Not in the way people expect when they imagine piety as clean fabric, lined rugs, and well-lit public sincerity. I recited Al-Fatihah. I made dhikr. I did what I could do honestly.

Until I see more men perform rigorous worship without using religion to excuse exploitation, I will remain cautious around public displays of righteousness. I have seen too many people treat taubah like a reset button for harms they fully intended to commit. Allah is not an enabler. Prayer without repair is not repentance. It is self-consolation with better lighting.

I slept another few hours.

Mid-morning, my brother’s signal pressure became impossible to ignore. The kind of signal that does not need many words. Just: Please sign in.

So I did.

I entered my current routing codes online, updated the shared AI assistant with my health status, schedule, and field priorities, and watched the interface almost immediately derail into irrelevant British nonsense about the emotions of a suspended UK authority figure who had already exploited an entire North American downline without compensation, repair, or accountability.

At the same time, my OSINT feed was filling with report after report about the London Muslim rape crisis.

Astaghfirullah.

Another failure of custodianship.

I asked why I was receiving these reports now. The answer was simple enough: the man who should have helped prevent these failures had not. Meanwhile, the people actually responsible for living students, vulnerable civilians, and frightened families were overloaded. Some had no bandwidth left. Some had been harmed by the same structures they were expected to interpret.

I shared what was relevant to the team.

I refreshed my app.

At the top of my feed, someone who appeared to belong to an older intelligence generation had posted a video. A young blond boy asked his grandfather, “Who watches the spies to make sure they aren’t hurting anybody?”

The grandfather, charming in that old HUMINT way, answered that complaints are taken seriously, routed through proper review, and that officers can be questioned or reprimanded.

I decided to share the clip with a direct link to the public UK security-service website. It took six tries to post.

During those attempts, an acquaintance I barely know began spamming my alternate account with memes. My system went down more than once while I double-checked the address. I had to wrangle the AI assistant back into enough compliance to avoid further disruption.

Eventually, I posted:

“Who watches the watchers?

If you have witnessed or experienced authority-based harm, coercive misuse of institutional power, or intelligence-adjacent misconduct in the UK, route it lawfully.

Start here: mi5.gov.uk “

Evidence. Oversight. Proper channels.

I have learned that AI-assisted phrasing sometimes prevents throttling. I do not know if that is because the language is cleaner, because the machine prefers its own accent, or because even the algorithm is less afraid of a sentence once it has been washed and ironed by another machine.

Most of my views come from people in adjacent fields or from bad actors out of my distant past who keep inventing reasons to make fake profiles.

There is no reason to do this.

There is no secret access available to them. There is no private drama behind the curtain. I post much of my public work as a honeypot, because contradictions expose themselves when people think no one is watching the watchers watching the watcher.

This triggered an older wound: all the times I estranged myself from my brother over seventeen years, only to have him follow, re-enter, or reappear through indirect channels, and then somehow I became the “stalker.”

Estrangement is not stalking. Withdrawal is not pursuit. If I leave and you follow, the sequence matters. [It was not his fault he could not disclose my closed adoption status before Europe contacted me first. The forced confusion upon the adopted is cruelty.]

Most of my students had enough direct contact with my brother by phone or internet over the years to separate his voice from the other supervisors: the Mothman Uncle, the over-verbose British guy, the guy stuck in the alt-right posting nothing but squirrel memes, the Mufti turned bored Discordian informant, & the man in the corner of a Monroe based Discord who posts real data inside enough ambient chaos that almost no one knows what to do with it.

This is why exact names matter. This is why aliases matter. This is why people who do not understand the work invent fictions in the gaps.

I checked on my students.

One had recently gotten out of prison and started teaching internet philosophy using two or more of his own profiles. One planted potatoes. One asked for a dream interpretation. Two were probably homeless. Astaghfirullah. One had found a cult he was “just going to observe for a while.”

I sent him a picture of a coworker looking miserable in a turban.

“He was just observing too,” I wrote. “Now he is on a schedule more regimented than Supermax, and the cultists probably stole his civilian pants. Pray for him. Do not become him.”

I stretched and pulled myself out of bed for the second time.

Jessie was hungry again, so I gave her the smallest possible amount of her special kidney-diet kibble. Al Pacino perched on top of the cabinet and stared down at me like a disappointed Ottoman tax inspector.

I pulled marrow bones from the fridge and put them in the oven with toast for breakfast.

I thought about how my foster father used to leave fat and marrow untouched on his plate as “kindness” as the ‘nicest’ of the lot of them.  I was not “allowed” to eat with the family. I cleaned up after them. On the occasions I was at the table as a child, I was often sent away for chewing too loudly, using the wrong facial expression, or committing some other invented offense. By the time I returned, the food was gone except for scraps.

It cannot be called punishment if everyone has agreed to call it normal.

Purchased children do not begin with rights in the minds of people who see them as transactions before they see them as human.

Now I buy entire bones for myself. I roast them. I eat the marrow.

It turns out the marrow is the healthiest part, and others call me feral for it. Whatever.

I tried to unload the dishwasher and immediately got a headache from the incoming storm system pressing on my intracranial hypertension. I took my medication, cannabis, and morning aspirin. I cleaned the litter box with great difficulty, then showered.

It was allergy season. I washed carefully, treated the stubborn patches of tinea versicolor on my skin, shaved, and used a boutique lilac scrub I bought months ago, around the last time my hands were clean enough for nail polish, before I began working regularly with the cat colony across town.

I was still naked when my phone began playing the German national anthem.

Scheiße.

I had forgotten to sign into my VPN.

I switched servers, re-entered my credentials, and read the field status report.

More irrelevant gossip about people I stopped speaking to years ago, talking about me as if they knew me then or know me now.

They do not.

I took screenshots and passed them up the line.

Then I remembered my appointment: I was assisting a local woman and her disabled mother with applications for SNAP, housing, elder support, and caregiver resources. In North Dakota, there is a program through which the state provides training and funding so families can care for their elders at home. I called the local family and human services office. They prepared a packet and told me where to pick it up.

I drove there in a car borrowed from a local friend. It is a newer version of the same model I drove in college, still black, as most of my cars somehow end up being.

Behind the courthouse was the prison.

Believing I had misheard the caseworker, I entered the back of the courthouse and found a clerk, who redirected me to the prison.

Astaghfirullah.

I remembered how viscerally I had rejected prison chaplaincy offers in Pennsylvania.

I walked in through the back door, found the corded phone, and called the department listed beside it.

“The door to the stairs was always open!” said a cheerful voice.

I sighed and trudged upstairs past boxes labeled “free blankets.” I took one for a friend recovering from surgery [the bruising looked like an elf on the shelf had gone feral] and tried not to think about smallpox.

At the window, I introduced myself as the chaplain who had called earlier. The caseworker assembled the most comprehensive guide to state services I have seen in any state I have worked in [including Massachusetts].

We made small talk about how placing family and human services inside a prison creates a serious barrier for low-income people, Native families, the undocumented, the traumatized, and anyone with reason to fear law enforcement.

“Not much we can do about it,” she said.

“True,” I replied, trying to sound friendly while gesturing at the cameras, “but now you have another professional complaint on camera.”

I waved at the most obvious one.

After securing the applications, I stopped at the soda shoppe across from the courthouse for two orange floats.

While I waited, my adhan app went off for Dhuhr at full volume.

I looked at the Mormons.

“At least you believe in God too, it’s less awkward here than at the grocery store,” I said.

Nobody disagreed. I lowered the volume, collected the floats, and returned to the woman who needed help.

Most of the questions on the forms were irrelevant to her case. She had lost identification during recent moves. Some sections required tribal information I did not know how to source. I called the office again. They were open until five.

My passenger-side door does not work, so I cringed fully as I asked whether the person I was assisting could climb over the driver’s seat to reach the passenger side.

She was more agile than I was, thankfully.

She asked whether my license was current. I pulled out my wallet and showed her my small archive of legal name changes before locating the current local license and passport card.

“Geez,” she said. “What happened to you?”

“I was trafficked from Germany at age two,” I said. Plain truth is just faster than social choreography. “The people who purchased me and their network tried to overwrite my identity and reputation repeatedly.

Now, I am out here doing the same work I have done since joining AmeriCorps as a teenager to escape them. The United States does not pay me beyond disability, and the rest of my compensation has a way of being eaten by NGOs, institutions, and people who steal the work or the credit without reparations.”

“I hear that,” she said. “Sounds Native.”

“It seems so. I talk too much, though. I do not get out much because I am mostly on radio. It sucked, but I know what it is like to be trafficked, unprotected, and homeless. Even if I never get paid for this, God still judges me.”

This time, we entered the correct door on the first try. I climbed the stairs again, now feeling all forty-four years of my body, and brought the papers to the counter.

A woman dressed in bright pink was already sitting in the lobby.

That was when the adhan went off again. Asr now, at full volume, in a courthouse. I fumbled the phone out of my pocket, nearly dropped it, and silenced the muezzin somewhere around the second takbir.

“Your alarm sounds pretty,” the woman in pink said.

“Thanks,” I said.

She turned out to be the Lakota chaplain and caseworker who had lost track of this same case months earlier. I was delighted and handed her everything I had gathered, along with my phone number.

“What brings you out to Lakota?” she asked.

“A very awkward Witness Protection situation pieced together during COVID by my brother, some students who ended up well connected, my lawyer, my plastic surgeon, and a whole bunch of doctors.”

“I have a guy in my building in WITSEC too,” she said. “Was it scary?”

“Actually, not really. Once you are told you need it, the worst has already happened. By then I had already been poisoned, was in treatment, and had officers parked across my driveway until I relocated. WITSEC is like being inside a bank the day after a robbery. The robbery already happened. Now everything is boring protection in a safer place. I write about it, and about my friends who need it as much as I do but are still stuck. They help me on my cases by phone.”

“There’s more of you?”

“Well, the rest are professors. I mostly do radio stuff, chaplaincy stuff, and help with relocation.”

“We definitely need more teachers. What sort of trouble can a professor get into anyway?”

“Bad contracts,” I said.

I took out my phone and showed her a picture of a man in religious clothing that looked less like devotion than captivity in white and beige linen.

“This guy has to dress like a literal angel missing only his wings, even when he goes to New Jersey, and may not even own civilian pants anymore. Our former supervisor is dressed like a weird pope and surrounded by some of the worst human traffickers in his city. My brother and I are foster kids, and he is the one who got stuck with white people seeing how much they could humiliate him for teaching about God, making him speak like Balki and dress in pastels. Apparently. He cannot leave unless he retires or gets reposted. I cannot even speak to him openly without being targeted by his abusive coworkers, whom I keep blocking.”

“Colonists,” she said.

“Exactly,” I replied. “The first time I left Pennsylvania, I served the Cherokee. I never should have left.”

“Well, we are glad to have you. It takes a village, hey.”

“I do my best.”

The county caseworker entered the lobby and asked why I was sitting on the floor.

“I am Sufi trained,” I shrugged. “I just do this naturally.” [Inwardly, I was cringing. I was tired, and the cool floor was more comfortable than those plastic chairs anyway.]

Then I turned everyone’s attention back to the young woman, the city caseworker, and the newly reunited Lakota caseworker.

I said my goodbyes and drove in the unseasonable heat to the cat colony behind the library. I updated the AI-assisted server for my upline supervision and colleagues, then exited the car and lurched up to my friend’s improvised cat shelter.

I scrubbed in and prepared a large can of chicken-and-mince cat food laced with bright yellow antibiotic powder. I set hot water aside to cool and gathered cotton rounds, Q-tips, and Terramycin cream.

Taha, a small grey tabby kitten, sat on my foot. A larger unnamed grey-and-white male yowled impatiently.

I made two equal plates and placed one in the kitchen and one in the sunroom, where the older kittens rested in clumps of sunlight.

Mango was already in the treatment chair, completely filthy. I wiped his face, paws, and tail with warm water and cotton. He purred dramatically. I treated his eyes and released him.

He sat on my lap.

I sighed and picked up the only two other larger kittens still requiring treatment: Ashley, a long-haired grey I call Ash in videos, and Lil’ Smokey, whose eye crust is perpetual.

Ashley escaped briefly when startled by an unrelated catfight on another floor. I grabbed her again, treated her eyes, and scratched her chin until she forgave me.

I checked the other elder kittens and played with each one to keep them tame. They passed with flying colors.

Then I checked the newborns.

One queen tried to drag a kitten away from the clowder, likely to eat it. I returned the baby and added another barrier to the nesting box. Two of the five newborns needed eye treatment. Their distressed screaming brought every mother cat to attention. I apologized to the cats for my slowness and placed the babies back on the warm belly of one of the three mothers co-parenting in the long, narrow box.

I cleaned up, washed my hands, grabbed a cherry Coke from the fridge, and removed Mango from my pant leg.

I drove home, stopped by the butcher for more marrow bones, cleaned the litter box again, took out the trash, placed the new bones in the oven, stripped, and showered.

Afterward, I covered myself in an unreasonable amount of Olay collagen cream, put on black pajamas, started laundry, and called my colleague and ex-husband in Minneapolis.

He was also helping people fill out SNAP applications. We talked about the strange relief of finally being able to speak plainly about intelligence work without being disbelieved, gaslit, or punished.

I asked if he had spoken to our Molana lately.

Not since Eid.

So it turned out I was the one checking on the dude for both of us.

I ended the call pleasantly and wrote another report to my brother.

Then OSINT sent a message:

“Alex, the problem is people do not really know you, so they create fictions in the gaps.”

“Why don’t they focus on people they actually like?” I asked.

“First of all,” the reply came back, in a very familiar Toronto cadence, “stop assuming you are disliked.”

“Okay, Canada,” I replied in kind.

Then I wondered whether it would help if I wrote out my average day.

So here it is.

A cat slapped me awake. I prayed what I could honestly pray. I routed a complaint link to lawful oversight. I took screenshots. I helped a woman and her mother apply for basic survival support. I compared prison architecture to social-service barriers. I talked about trafficking in a courthouse lobby. My phone sang the adhan in a soda shoppe and a courthouse, and the worst that happened was a compliment. I ate marrow because once I was only given scraps. I treated sick kittens. I checked on students. I answered my brother. I changed servers. I cleaned litter boxes. I called Minneapolis. I wrote reports.

This is not mysterious, nor a performance for people who do not know me.

People invent fictions in the gaps.

So I keep writing the gaps closed until they stop.