The fur coat's first march

Turn 23 of 51

Report back to comrade that the flyering is done. you and comrade meet up with the other comrades as they also finished you all then march to go make more and speard them in the town. while this happens, you and another comrade with a pixie mullet dyed dark forest green while wearing converses, skinny black jeans and black turtleneck create videos for different marxist groups. Soon, more are done.

You send it up the chain on the red app — Okafor done, two hundred, no contact, knuckle-tap given — and by eight the pairs are folding back into one body at the quad's edge, satchels flat, hands taped-raw and light. The leader reads the reports off her phone and nods once at each, and when yours comes up she looks at you over the blue bangs and says, 'Clean,' and that word goes into you like a coin into a machine.

'Town next,' she says. 'Main Street. Storefronts, notice boards, the bus shelter. The campus sees us every day — the town doesn't.' So you march, all fifteen down the hill and off campus, boots on wet asphalt in the early traffic, and it is the courthouse march in miniature except now you are the courier and not the tourist. You paper the laundromat window, the co-op's notice board, the bus shelter's plexiglass, and the town opens up to you in a way the campus never did: a man in a diner booth watching through glass, a woman walking a dog who reads a flyer all the way to the crosswalk before letting it go.

By late morning the flyers are gone and the Circle fragments again by assignment, and you end up in a corner of the union-friendly coffee shop off the square with a comrade you haven't worked beside before — pixie mullet dyed dark forest green, black turtleneck, black skinny jeans, scuffed Converse. She sets up two phones and a ring light she pulls from her bag like contraband, and the work has a new shape today: not one video for the Circle, but a dozen for other hands. 'Different groups want different cuts,' she explains, low, editing with her thumbs. 'Labor people get the dockworker numbers. Tenure people get Okafor. The downtown crew gets the boot print.' You cut and caption and push, and the videos go out one after another under names that aren't hers and aren't yours, into accounts you'll never hold.

Soon they're done — all of them, exported and sent, the whole morning's work distributed like seed. She knocks her knuckle on the table twice, the completion signal, and you knock back, and outside the window the town goes on not knowing what just passed through it. Your feed notifications are already stacking from the morning's posts, and you feel the warm structural hum in your chest start up again, patient, wanting more.