the Wild Conceits essay: the Wheelchair Assassins named and framed

The theme's most feared cell given its full title and provenance: "the infamous Separatist 'Wheelchair Assassins' (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of southwestern Quebec," about whom "almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known" as about the Concavity's feral infants. The essay's opening gesture is the theme's own epistemics — the A.F.R. are half-legend, "one of the most feared cells in the annals of Canadian extremism," their credible sociohistory "regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of sources" until the "Freedom of Speculation Act." What is known is filtered through a drunk community-college pedant, which is the closest thing the insurgency has to a documented history.