If They’re Willing to Do This to an Educated, Middle-Age White Woman with No Record…

“They said emergencies required force. We saw how quickly a woman could be stripped of her humanity.” ~ Tree of Wampus Council

🌑 Ancestor Whisper: This Is Why We Sent the Wolves

Daughter.

You kept asking why we gave you teeth.

Why you ran wild with bare feet and sang to the fire.

This is why.

Because one day, they’d strip you of everything—

clothes, name, safety, voice.

And we knew you would need to rise anyway.

So we sent you wolves.

We braided fire into your spine.

So when they tried to wash you away, you’d remember:

you were born of flood and fang.

And no badge on Earth could drown you.

When I got home from jail, I thought the worst was over. I was wrong.

I tried to rent a car to pick up my dogs—my wolves—who’d been taken to the pound. A punishment all its own. They’d never been boarded, never even kenneled. They were pack animals, and I was their home. But no rentals were available for four days, and the pound was closing in 30 minutes. Helene’s aftermath still lingered—supply chains, scarcity, silence.

So I did what I always do when the world makes no sense: I cleaned. Put the house back together. Cooked soup. Folded the chaos of my evicted office into my already-too-full treehouse. Trying to make something whole again.

TG was coming in the morning so we could get the dogs. I slept fitfully, eventually gave up and got up to shower. The airport and yesterday’s arrests playing on a loop, connected but not.

I blasted the radio, trying to pretend for an hour that my feet didn’t hurt and my soul wasn’t shredded.

Then everything shattered.

They said it was about a “chemical smell.” They blocked off both ends of my street. Told TG that it wasn’t safe when he tried to get inside to check on me. They made him wait over an hour, not knowing if I was dead or alive inside.

They didn’t mention the SWAT-like team on the ready. They didn’t mention the battering ram. They didn’t mention what they were actually there to do.

I was still in the shower when the banging started. Dismissed it. No one I cared to see would knock like that. After everything I’d been through, the last thing I wanted was uninvited guests.

But they didn’t wait. They broke down the bathroom door, dragged me—naked and soaked—across the floor, across the porch, across the street.

My body on display. Dozens of officers. Neighbors. EMTs.

I screamed. I fought. I didn’t know they could enter without a warrant. Didn’t know you could be taken from your own home for burning food.

They threw me on a tarp, sprayed me down like an animal, and stuck a needle in my leg while I shouted, I refuse medical treatment!

The humiliation was total. TG watched the whole thing. Just feet away. I wish we’d locked eyes; maybe I wouldn’t have been so scared.

But he was there. My witness. My proof. My guardian.

No explanation. No charges. No crime. They said they thought I had chemicals on me—because I’d burned food. So, they sedated me. Stripped me. Transported me.

The hospital was empty. Quiet. No one told me what had happened.

A sweet nurse smiled when I said no needles. But something was already in my bloodstream. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Time slipped sideways.

From the paperwork and TG’s estimates, I was only at the hospital about two hours. Somehow my mother found out they’d released me.

With no phone.

No shoes.

No ride.

No dignity.

Again.

So I walked.

Always better outside their walls than in.

In a hospital gown. Across neighborhoods. Feet bleeding. Eyes foggy. A cop stopped me. I told him I was just walking home. He nodded, told me to stay out of trouble. Didn’t even ask my name.

Hours later, I knocked on the wrong door—convinced it was TG’s car out front. When strangers appeared, I waved and hurried off their porch.

I wandered deeper into a neighborhood that looked like mine but wasn’t. Woke to cops shining flashlights in my face, my back against a fence that wasn’t mine.

This time they wanted me to remember. They handcuffed my ankles, dragged me in a hospital gown, my ass exposed to the air, again.

I felt something tear—the tender ankle skin, bleeding. Then the same back door of the same station swallowed me again.

Three detainments in forty-eight hours.

One car accident.

One shower.

One hospital-gown fence nap.

That’s all it took. Because once you’re flagged, they can do anything. Once they decide you’re “unstable,” no act is too extreme. And when I screamed, What am I being arrested for? they gave the same answer they always do: Resisting. Resisting what? Still unclear.

But I know this: The first time, they dragged me out of an airport.

The second, out of my car.

The third, from my shower.

The fourth, off of a fence.

Every time, I got back up. Because they forgot—

I have wolves. And more are coming.

🕯 Zelda’s Sidebar: The Ashes Still Whisper

“They said the city had healed. But I can still smell the ether. I see you now—another woman taken for being too alive. Don’t let them wrap it in mercy. Don’t let them rename your clarity madness.

I left embers for you.

Take the heat, not the smoke.”