Topic Justice

On the Matter of Crayons and Carp

A white-haired woman in a tan leather coat swims in an aquarium with a cobra-fish and a beaked swordtail.

Sometimes the safest place in the world is the one that should kill you. In the fishtank, where the rules say you aren’t supposed to breathe, she finds the only kind of silence that doesn’t eat her alive. There’s a dead goldfish to carry, tunnels that only run one way, and walls begging to be colored in before the filters scrub everything clean again. The farther she swims from the surface, the clearer it gets: somebody has to decide which deaths are accidents and which ones are crimes, and the water is not nearly as confused about it as the people on land.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 3

An abandoned house marked “HQ” stands among black reeds and oil-slick puddles in a poisoned marsh, its porch collapsing under the gray spring light.

In The Superfund Spring, the thaw comes everywhere but the old dump site where Doc, Peachy, and René discover their so-called HQ—a crumbling house surrounded by poisoned marsh. What begins as another reckless adventure turns grim as they piece together the truth: they’ve built their clubhouse on a wound in the earth. Between blackened reeds, rainbow-slick water, and relics of lives long gone, laughter turns to unease. It’s the moment when childhood curiosity meets the adult realization that some places remember what was done to them.