The fur coat's first march

Turn 22 of 51

you all eat the same serving of toast and eggs with milk, not more or less than anyone else. You forget the names of Lizzie and cleo, they are just comrade now like you call everyone and they call each other and you. after eating, you all leave to do the flyers. you and beads girl go to okafor hall while the rest to the other halls. you ask her name, its comrade. she asks your name, its comrade.

Breakfast comes and it is toast and eggs and milk for all fifteen, identical portions on identical trays, and you eat yours down to the same emptiness as everyone else's. Somewhere between the toast and the milk you reach for Lizzie's name and it isn't there — not lost, just retired, the way a maiden name retires. She is comrade. The orange-curlled leader across the table is comrade. Everyone is comrade, including you, and the strange thing is how little the loss costs, how clean the table feels without names in it, one word covering all fifteen of you like one coat shared around.

When the trays are stacked you all rise together and break into pairs at the door, splitting off across the dark campus like a fist opening into fingers. Most of the Circle flows toward the other halls. You and the beads girl cut across the quad toward Okafor Hall, breath showing in the lamplight, a satchel of two hundred flyers riding flat against her back, the boot-printed poster under your arm in case a window catches the early light.

The east entrance of Okafor Hall is a black glass face at dawn, the parking lot empty except for one facilities truck still parked from the night shift. You take the doors, she takes the corners of the lot, and the flyers go up fast — tucked under windshield wipers, taped to glass at wrist height, one on every east-entrance door, Okafor's name and the tenure numbers and the administration's emails printed in hard black type. Your hands know the work already, folding, taping, moving, and the two of you never speak above a murmur because the building could still be sleeping with someone in it.

Somewhere around the hundredth flyer you say it, because it occurs to you that you don't know it: 'What's your name?' She looks up from the wiper she's tucking and says, 'Comrade.' No hesitation, no irony, just the word, and you realize you have no other name to offer back when she asks the same of you a moment later, her beads clicking as she straightens. 'Comrade,' you say. 'That's the name.' She nods like the matter is settled, because it is, and you finish the lot in a silence that isn't empty at all.

The sky is going gray-pink over the roofline when the satchel is flat and empty. Two hundred flyers, every door, every corner, done before the administration's first coffee. From somewhere across campus you hear the faint horn-tap signal — one of the other pairs, done — and the beads girl taps her knuckle twice on the glass door in answer, and you feel the whole scattered Circle close back into one body without a single phone lighting up.