Midnight Ink
The fluorescent hum of the raid's chaos swallows the last of the morning air. Renee sits in her Honda Pilot, a mother fresh from school drop-off, reduced to a target in crosshairs, her heartbeat a glitch in the crossfire of state-sponsored cruelty. The Constitution is a moth-eaten shroud over the eyes of Justice. It does not reach the Minneapolis street where a woman bleeds out in her seat. Instead, a trigger pull in broad daylight acts as a scalpel, severing the cord between a human and the right to remain alive. They value the balance sheet over the Bill of Rights counting quotas while the pulse thins. Evidence is a paper fire in a locked room. The logs are redacted into a midnight ink and the body cams glitch at the crucial hour. They scrub the blood from the asphalt and call it a routine sweep. ICE is a machine built of rusted gears that only know how to grind. It views a woman’s agony as a procedural delay her wounds as defiance of the operation's clock. They block the b...