Posted by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
https://kriswrites.com/2025/05/19/free-fiction-monday-patriotic-gestures/
https://kriswrites.com/?p=36479
Crime scene investigator Pamela Kinney hears the bad guys outside her house and smells smoke, but only realizes the next morning the crime they committed—burning the flag that had covered her daughter’s casket.
Her police colleagues call it a small crime, but she disagrees. She must solve it, and she must solve it now.
Chosen as one of the best mystery stories of the year, “Patriotic Gestures” explores the fine lines that run through American culture, and sometimes through Americans themselves.
“Patriotic Gestures“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.
Patriotic Gestures
By Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Pamela Kinney heard the noise in her sleep—giggles, followed by the crunching of leaves. Later, she smelled smoke, faint and acrid, and realized that her neighbors were burning garbage in their fireplace again. She got up long enough to close the window and silently curse them; she hated it when they did illegal burning.
She forgot about it until the next morning. She stepped out her back door into the crisp fall morning, and found charred remains of her flag in the middle of her driveway. There’d been no wind during the night, fortunately, or all the evidence would have been gone.
Instead, there was a pile of burned fabric and a burn stain on the pavement. There were even footprints outlined in leaves.
She noted all of that with a professional’s detachment—she’d eyeballed more than a thousand crime scenes—before the fabric itself caught her attention. Then the pain was sudden and swift, right above her heart, echoing through the breastbone and down her back.
Anyone else would have thought she was having a heart attack. But she wasn’t, and she knew it. She’d had this feeling twice before, first when the officers came to her house and then when the chaplain handed her the folded flag which just a moment before had draped over her daughter’s coffin.
Pamela had clung to that flag like she’d seen so many other military mothers do, and she suspected she had looked as lost as they had. Then, when she stood, that pain ran through her, dropping her back to the chair.
Her sons took her arms, and when she mentioned the pain, they dragged her to the emergency room. She had been late for her own daughter’s wake, her chest sticky with adhesive from the cardiac machines and her hair smelling faintly of disinfectant.
And the feeling came back now, as she stared at the massacre before her. The flag, Jenny’s flag, had been ripped from the front door and burned in her driveway.
Pamela made herself breathe. Then she rubbed that spot above her left breast, felt the pain spread throughout her body, burning her eyes and forming a lump in the back of her throat. But she held the tears back. She wouldn’t give whoever had done this awful thing the satisfaction.
Finally she reached inside her purse for her cell, called Neil—she had trouble thinking of him as the sheriff after all the years she’d known him— and then she protected the scene until he arrived.
***
It only took him five minutes. Halleysburg was still a small town, no matter how many Portlanders sprawled into the community, willing to make the one and a half hour one-way daily commute to the city’s edge. Pamela had told the dispatch to make sure that Neil parked across the street so that any wind from his vehicle wouldn’t move the leaves.
And she had asked for a second scene-of-the-crime kit because she didn’t want to go inside and get hers. She didn’t want to risk losing the crime scene with a moment of inattention.
Neil pulled onto the street. His car was an unwieldy Olds with a souped up engine and a reinforced frame. It could take a lot of punishment, and often did.
As a result, the paint covering the car’s sides was fresh and clean, while the hood, roof and trunk looked like they were covered in dirt.
The sheriff was the same. Neil Karlyn was in his late fifties, balding, with a face that had seen too much sun. But his uniform was always new, always pristine, and never wrinkled. He’d been that way since college, a precise man with precise opinions about a difficult world.
He got out of the Olds and did not reach around back for a scene-of-the-crime kit. Annoyance threaded through her.
“Where’s my kit?” she asked.
“Pam,” he said gently, “it’s a low-level property crime. It’ll never go to trial and you know it.”
“It’s arson with malicious intent,” she snapped. “That’s a felony.”
He sighed and studied her for a moment. He clearly recognized her tone. She’d used it often enough on him when they were students at the University of Oregon. When they were lovers on different sides of the political fence, and constantly on the verge of splitting up.
When they finally did, it had taken years for them to settle into a friendship. But settle they did. They hardly even fought any more.
He went back to the car, opened the back seat and removed the kit she’d requested. She crossed her arms, waiting as he walked toward her. He stopped at the edge of the curb, holding the kit tight against his leg.
“Even if you somehow get the D.A. to agree that this is a cockamamie felony, you know that processing the scene yourself taints the evidence.”
“Why do you care so much?” she asked, hearing an edge in her voice that usually wasn’t there. The challenge, unspoken: It’s my daughter’s flag. It’s like murdering her all over again.
To his credit, Neil didn’t try to soothe her with a platitude.
“It’s the eighth flag this morning,” he said. “It’s not personal, Pam.”
Her chin jutted out. “It is to me.”
Neil looked down, his cheek moving. He was clenching his jaw, trying not to speak.
He didn’t have to.
She understood the irony of the statement. Somewhere in her pile of college paraphernalia was a badly framed newspaper clipping that had once been the front page of the Portland Oregonian. She’d framed the clipping so that a photo dominated, a photo of a much-younger Pamela with long hair and a tie-dye t-shirt, front and center in a group of students, holding an American flag by a stick, watching as it burned.
God, she could still remember how that felt, to hold a flag up so that the wind caught it. How fabric had its own acrid odor, and how frightened she’d been at the desecration, even though she’d been the one to light the flag on fire.
She had been protesting the Vietnam War. It was that photo and the resulting brouhaha it caused, both on campus and in the State of Oregon itself, that had led to the final break-up with Neil.
He couldn’t believe what she had done. Sometimes she couldn’t either. But she felt her country was worth fighting for. So had he. He joined up not two months later.
To his credit, Neil didn’t say anything about her own flag-burning as he handed her the kit. Instead he watched as she took photographs of the scene, scooped up the charred bits of fabric, and made a sketch of the footprint she found in the leaves.
She found another print in the yard, and that one she made a cast of. Then she dusted her front door for prints, trying not to cry as she did so.
“A flag is a flag is a flag,” she used to say.
Until it draped over her daughter’s coffin.
Until it became all she had left.
***
“I called the local VFW, Mom,” her son Stephen said over dinner that night. Stephen was her oldest and had been her support for thirty years, since the day his father walked out, never to return. “They’re bringing another flag.”
She stirred the mashed potatoes into the creamed corn on her plate. The meal had come from KFC: her sons had brought a bucket with her favorite sides, and told her not to argue with them about the fast food meal.
She wasn’t arguing, but she didn’t have much of an appetite.
They sat in the dining room, at the table that had once held four of them. Pamela had slid the fake rose centerpiece in front of Jenny’s place, so she wouldn’t have to think about her daughter.
It wasn’t working.
“Another flag isn’t the same, dumbass,” Travis said. At thirty, he was the youngest, unmarried, still finding himself, a phrase she had come to hate.
The hell of it was, Travis was right. It wasn’t the same. That flag these people had burned, that flag had comforted her. She had clung to it on the worst afternoon of her life, her fingers holding it tight, even at the emergency room, when the doctors wanted to pry it from her hands.
It had taken almost a week for her to let it go. Stephen had come over, Stephen and his pretty wife Elaine and their teenage daughters, Mandy and Liv. They’d brought KFC then, too, and talked about everything but the war.
Until it came time to take the flag away from Pamela.
Stephen had talked to her like she was a five-year-old who wanted to take her blankie to kindergarten. In the end, she’d handed the flag over. He’d been the one to find the old flagpole, the one she’d taken down when she bought the house, and he’d been the one to place the pole in the hanger outside the front door.
“The VFW says they replace flags all the time,” Stephen said to his brother.
“Because some idiot burned one?” Travis asked.
Pamela’s cheeks flushed.
“Because people lose them. Or moths eat them. Or sometimes, they get stolen,” Stephen said.
“But not burned,” Travis persisted.
Pamela swallowed. Travis didn’t remember the newspaper photo, but Stephen probably did. It had hung over the console stereo she had gotten when her mother died, and it had been a teacher—Neil’s first grade teacher? Pamela couldn’t remember—who had seen it at a party and asked if she really wanted her children to see that before they could understand what it meant.
“I don’t want another one,” Pamela said.
“Mom….” Stephen started in his most reasonable voice.
She shook her head. “It’s been a year. I need to move on.”
“You don’t move on from that kind of loss,” Travis said, and she wondered how he knew. He didn’t have children.
Then she looked at him, a large broad-shouldered man with tears in his eyes, and remembered that Jenny had been the one who walked him to school, who bathed him at night, who usually tucked him in. Jenny had done all that because Stephen at thirteen was already working to help his mom make ends meet, and Pamela was working two jobs herself, as well as attending community college to get her degree in forensic science and criminology. A pseudoscience degree, one of her almost-boyfriends had said. But it wasn’t. She used science every day. She needed science like she needed air.
Like she needed to find out who had destroyed her daughter’s flag.
“You don’t move on,” Pamela said.
Her boys watched her. Sometimes she could see the babies they had been in the lines of their mouths and the shape of their eyes. She still marveled at the way they had grown into men, large men who could carry her the way she used to carry them.
“But,” she added, “you don’t have to dwell on it, every moment of every day.”
And yet she was dwelling. She couldn’t stop. She never told her sons or anyone else, not even Neil who had become a closer friend in the year since Jenny had died. Neil, a widower now, a man who understood death the way that Pamela did. Neil, whose grandson had enlisted after 9/11 and had somehow made it back.
She was dwelling and there was only one way to stop. She had to use science to solve this. She couldn’t think about it emotionally. She had to think about it clinically.
She had her evidence and she needed even more.
The next morning, the local paper ran an article on the burnings, and listed the addresses in the police log section. So Pamela visited the other crime scenes with her kit and her camera, identifying herself as an employee of the State Crime Lab.
Since CSI debuted on television, that identification opened doors for her. She didn’t have to tell the other victims that she had been a victim too.
She took pictures of scorch marks on pavement and flag holders wrenched loose of their sockets. She removed flag bits from garbage cans, and studied footprints in the leaf-covered grass to see if they looked similar to the ones on her lawn.
And late that afternoon, as she stepped back to photograph yet another twisted flag holder beside a front door, she saw the glint of a camera hiding in a cobwebby corner of the door frame. The house was a starter, maybe 1200 square feet total. She wouldn’t have expected a camera here.
“Do you have a security system?” she asked the homeowner, a woman Travis’s age who looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Her name was Becky something. Pamela hadn’t really heard her last name in the introduction.
“My husband put it up,” Becky said, her voice shaking a little. “I have no idea how it works.”
“When will he be back?” Pamela asked.
Becky shrugged. “When they cancel stop-loss, I guess.”
Pamela felt her breath slide out of her body. “He’s in Iraq?”
Becky nodded. “I put the flag up for him, you know? And I haven’t told him what happened to it. I’ve gotta find someone to fix the holder, and I have to get another flag.”
Pamela looked at the house more closely. It needed paint. The bushes in front were overgrown. There were cobwebs all over the windows, and dry rot on the sills. Obviously the couple had purchased it expecting someone to work on it.
Either the money wasn’t there, or the husband had planned to do the work himself.
“I can fix the holder,” Pamela said. “If you have a few tools.”
“My husband does,” Becky said. “I can show them to you.”
“I have a few things to finish, and then you can show me,” Pamela said.
She dusted for prints, and then, for comparison, took Becky’s and some off the husband’s comb, which hadn’t been touched since he left. Then Pamela went into his workroom, which also hadn’t been touched, and took a hammer, some screws, and a screwdriver.
It took only ten minutes to repair the flag holder. But in that time, she’d made a friend.
“How’d you learn how to do that?” Becky asked.
“Raised three kids alone,” Pamela said. “You realize there’s not much you can’t do, if you just try.”
Becky nodded.
Pamela glanced at the camera. Untended since the husband left. It was probably in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the house.
“Can I see the security system?” she asked.
“It’s not really a system,” Becky said. “Just the cameras, and some motion sensors that’re supposed to alert us when someone’s on the property. But they clearly don’t work any more.”
“Let me see anyway,” Pamela said.
Becky took her past the workroom, into a small closet filled with electronics. The closet was warm from the heat the panels gave off. Lights still blinked.
Pamela stared at it all, then touched the rewind button on the digital recorder. On the television monitor, she watched an image of herself fixing the flag holder.
“It looks like the camera’s still working,” she said. “Mind if I rewind farther?”
“Go ahead.”
Backwards, she watched darkness turn to day. Saw Neil inspect the hanger. Saw Becky crying, then the tears evaporate into a stare of disbelief before she backed off the porch and away from the scene.
Back to the previous night. No porch light. Just images blurred in the darkness. Faces, not quite real, mostly turned away from the camera.
“Got a recordable DVD?” Pamela asked.
“Somewhere.” Becky vanished into the house. Pamela studied the system, hoping that she wouldn’t erase the information as she tried to record it.
She rewound again. Studied the faces, the half turned heads. She saw crew cuts and piercings and hoodies. Slouchy clothes worn by half the young people in Halleysburg.
Nothing to identify them. Nothing to separate them from everyone else in their age group.
Like her, her hair long, her jeans torn, as she stood front and center at the U of O, a burning flag before her.
She made herself study the machine, and figured out how to save the images to the disk’s hard drive so that they wouldn’t be erased. Then she inspected the buttons near the machine’s DVD slot.
“Here,” Becky said, thrusting a packet at her.
DVD-Rs, unopened, dust-covered. Pamela used a fingernail to break the seal, then pulled one out, and inserted it in the slot. She managed to record, but had no way to test. So she made a few more copies, feeling somewhat reassured that she could come back and try to download the images from the hard drive again.
“Will this catch them?” Becky asked while she watched the process.
“I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I hope so.”
“It’s just, they got so close, you know.” Becky’s voice shook. “I didn’t know anyone could get that close.”
It took Pamela a moment to understand what she meant. Becky meant that they had gotten close to the house. Close to her. The burning hadn’t just upset her, it had frightened her, and made her feel vulnerable.
Odd. All it had done to Pamela was make her angry.
“Just lock up at night,” Pamela said after a minute. “Locks deter ninety-percent of all thieves.”
“And the remaining ten percent?”
They get in, Pamela almost said, but thought the better of it.
“They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg,” she said. “Why would they? We all know each other here.”
Becky nodded, seemingly reassured. Or maybe she just wanted to abandon an uncomfortable topic.
Pamela certainly did. She wanted to play with the images, see what she could find.
She wanted a solid image of the culprits, one that she could bring to Neil.
Maybe then, he would stop complaining that this was a petty property crime. Maybe then he might understand how important this really was.
***
But it was her own words that replayed in her head later that night as she sat in front of her computer.
They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg…. We all know each other here.
She had lied to make Becky feel better, but the words hadn’t felt like a lie. Thieves really didn’t come here. There was no need. There was richer pickings in Portland or Salem or the nearby bedroom communities.
Besides, it was hard to commit a crime here without someone seeing you.
Except under cover of darkness.
Her home office was quiet. It overlooked the back yard, and she had never installed curtains on the window, preferring the view of the year-round flower garden she had planted. At the moment, her garden was full of browns and oranges, fall plants blooming despite the winter ahead. She had little lights beneath the plants, lights she usually kept off because they spiked her energy bill.
But she had them on now. She would probably have them on for some time to come.
Maybe Becky wasn’t the only one who felt vulnerable.
Pamela put one of the DVDs in her computer, and opened the images. They played, much to her relief, so she copied the images to her hard drive and removed the DVD.
Her computer at home wasn’t as good as her computer at work. But it would have to do.
She didn’t want to do any work on this case at the State Crime Lab if she could help it. The lab was so understaffed and so overworked that it usually took four months to get something tested. When she last checked, more than 600 cases were backlogged, some of them dating back more than nine months.
Those cases were bigger than hers. The backlogs were semen samples from possible rapists and blood droplets from the scene of a multiple murder case.
She couldn’t, in good conscience, bring something personal and private to the lab. She would work here as long as she could. Then if she couldn’t finish here, she might be able to convince herself that the time she took at the lab would go toward an arson case—a serious one, not a petty property crime, as Neil had called it.
Petty property crime.
Funny that they would be on opposite sides of this issue too.
Pamela went through the images frame by frame, looking for clear faces. Her computer didn’t have the face recognition software that one of the computers at the lab had, but she had installed a home version of image sharpening software. She used it to clean out the fuzz and to lighten the darkness, trying to find more than a chin or the corner of an ear.
Finally she got a small face just behind the flag, a serious white face with a frown—of disapproval? She couldn’t tell—and a bit of an elongated chin. Enough to see the wisp of a beard—a boy’s beard, more a wish of a beard than the real thing—and a tattooed hand coming up to catch the flag as the person almost blocking the camera yanked the pole out of the holder.
She blew up the image, softened it, fixed it, and then felt tears prick her eyes.
They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg.
No. They grew up here. And worked at the grocery store down the street to pay for their football uniforms at the underfunded high school. They collected coins in a can on Sunday afternoons for Boosters, and they smiled when they saw her and respectfully called her Mrs. Kinney and asked, with a little too much interest, how her granddaughters were doing.
“Jeremy Stallings,” she whispered. “What the hell were you thinking?”
And she hoped she knew.
***
Neil wouldn’t let her sit in while he questioned Jeremy Stallings. He was appalled she’d even asked.
“That sort of thing belongs on TV and you know it,” he’d said.
But she also knew he probably wouldn’t do much more than slap the boy on the wrist, so what would be the harm? She hadn’t made that argument, though.
Instead, she waited on the bench chair outside the sheriff’s office conference room, which doubled as an interview room on days like this, and watched the parade of parents and lawyers as they trooped past.
No one acknowledged her. No one so much as looked at her. Not Reg Stallings, whose brother had sold her the house, or his wife June, who had taken over the PTA just before Travis got out of high school. No one mentioned the friendly exchanges at the high school football games or the hellos at the diner behind the movie theater. It was easier to forget all that and pretend they weren’t neighbors than it was to acknowledge what was going on inside that room.
Then, finally, Jeremy came out. He was wearing his baggy pants with a Halo t-shirt hanging nearly to his knees. He wore that same frown he’d had as he took the flag off from Becky’s front door.
He glanced at Pamela, then looked away, a blush working its way up the spider tattoo on his neck into his crew cut.
His parents and the lawyers led him away, as Neil reminded all of them to be in court the following morning.
Neil waited until they went through the front doors before coming over to Pamela.
She stood, her knees creaky from sitting so long. “He confess?”
Neil nodded. “And gave me the names of his buddies.”
Pamela bit her lower lip. “Funny,” she said, “he didn’t strike me as the type to be a war protestor.”
Neil rubbed his hands on his pristine shirt. “Is that what you thought?”
“Of course,” Pamela said. “Every house he hit, we’re all military families.”
“Who happened to be flying flags, even at night.” There was a bit of judgment in Neil’s voice.
She knew what he was thinking. People who knew how to handle flags took them down at dusk. But she couldn’t bear to touch hers. She hadn’t asked Becky why hers remained up, but she would wager the reason was similar.
And it probably was for every other family Jeremy and his friends had targeted.
“That’s the important factor?” she asked. “Night?”
“And beer,” Neil said. “They lost a football game, went out and drank, and that fueled their anger. So they decided to act out.”
“By burning flags?” Her voice rose.
“A few weeks before, they knocked down mailboxes. I’m going to hate to charge them. There won’t be much left of the football team.”
“That’s all right,” Pamela said bitterly. “Petty property crimes shouldn’t take them off the roster long.”
“It’s going to be more than that,” Neil said. “They’re showing a destructive pattern. This one isn’t going to be fun.”
“For any of us,” Pamela said.
***
Her hands were shaking as she left. She had wanted the crime to mean something. The flag had meant something to her. It should have meant something to them too.
God, Mom, for an old hippie, you’re such a prude. Jenny’s voice, so close that Pamela actually looked around, expecting to see her daughter’s face.
“I’m not a prude,” she whispered, and then realized she was reliving an old argument between them.
Sure you are. Judgmental and dried up. I thought you protested so that people could do what they wanted.
Pamela sat in the car, her creaky knees no longer holding her.
No, I protested so that people wouldn’t have to die in another senseless war, she had said to her daughter on that May afternoon.
What year was that?
It had to be 1990, just before Jenny graduated from high school.
I’m not going to die in a stupid war, Jenny had said with such conviction that Pamela almost believed her. We don’t do wars any more. I’m going to get an education. That way, you don’t have to struggle to pay for Travis. I know how hard it’s been with Steve.
Jenny, taking care of things. Jenny, who wasn’t going to let her cash-strapped mother pay for her education. Jenny, being so sure of herself, so sure that the peace she’d known most of her life would continue.
To Jenny, going into the military to get a free education hadn’t been a gamble at all.
Things’ll change, honey, Pamela had said. They always do.
And by then I’ll be out. I’ll be educated, and moving on with my life.
Only Jenny hadn’t moved on. She’d liked the military. After the First Gulf War, she’d gone to officer training, one of the first women to do it.
I’m a feminist, Mom, just like you, she’d said when she told Pamela.
Pamela had smiled, keeping her response to herself. She hadn’t been that kind of feminist. She wouldn’t have stayed in the military. She wasn’t sure she believed in the military—not then.
And now? She wasn’t sure what she believed. All she knew was that she had become a military mother, one who cried when a flag was burned.
Not just a flag.
Jenny’s flag.
And that’s when Pamela knew.
She wanted the crime to mean something, so she would make sure that it did.
***
She brought her memories to court. Not just the scrapbooks she’d kept for Jenny, like she had for all three kids, but the pictures from her own past, including the badly framed front page of the Oregonian.
Five burly boys had destroyed Jenny’s flag. They stood in a row, their lawyers beside them, and pled to misdemeanors. Their parents sat on the blond bench seats in the 1970s courtroom. A reporter from the local paper took notes in the back. The judge listened to the pleadings.
Otherwise, the room was empty. No one cheered when the judge gave the boys six months of counseling. No one complained at the nine months of community service and even though a few of them winced when the judge announced the huge fines that they (and not their parents) had to pay, no one said a word.
Until Pamela asked if she could speak.
The judge—primed by Neil—let her.
Only she really didn’t speak. She showed them Jenny. From the baby pictures to the dress uniform. From the brave eleven-year-old walking her brother to school to the dust-covered woman who had smiled with some Iraqi children in Baghdad.
Then Pamela showed them her Oregonian cover.
“I thought you were protesting,” she said to the boys. “I thought you trying to let someone know that you don’t approve of what your country is doing.”
Her voice was shaking.
“I thought you were being patriotic.” She shook her head. “And instead you were just being stupid.”
To their credit, they watched her. They listened. She couldn’t tell if they understood. If they knew how her heart ached—not that sharp pain she’d felt when she found the flag, but just an ache for everything she’d lost.
Including the idealism of the girl in the picture. And the idealism of the girl she’d raised.
When she finished, she sat down. And she didn’t move as the judge gaveled the session closed. She didn’t look up as some of the boys tried to apologize. And she didn’t watch as their parents hustled them out of court.
Finally, Neil sat beside her. He picked up the framed Oregonian photograph in his big, scarred hands.
“Do you regret it?” he asked.
She touched the edge of the frame.
“No,” she said.
“Because it was a protest?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t articulate it. The anger, the rage, the fear she had felt then. Which had been nothing like the fear she had felt every day her daughter had been overseas.
The fear she felt now when she looked at Stephen’s daughters and wondered what they’d chose in this never-ending war.
“If I hadn’t burned that flag,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had Jenny.”
Because she might have married Neil. And even if they had made babies, none of those babies would have been Jenny or Stephen or Travis. There would have been other babies who would have grown into other people.
Neil wasn’t insulted. They had known each other too long for insults. Instead, he put his hand over hers. It felt warm and good and familiar. She put her head on his shoulder.
And they sat like that, until the court reconvened an hour later, for another crime, another upset family, and another broken heart.
___________________________________________
“Patriotic Gestures“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.
Patriotic Gestures
Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published published in Scene of The Crime, edited by Dana Stabenow, Running Press, 2008
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Americanspirit/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list in a special insert section that listed authors, most of whom are real, and books, most of which are fake. Signs (it’s a big neon sign about 100 meters tall) point the text being generated by AI.
A Princess of Passyunk
