The fur coat's first march

Turn 26 of 51

contiune working with the other comrades until 10 when you return to the room without comrade. you open it to see 16 very small beds with a cardboard box under each bed. the walls are gray. you open one box to see a uniform. one black emo lug boots and converse shoe. 7 pairs of black skinny jeans and one turtleneck, cardigan, faded logo shirt, lace-trimmed camisole top, flannel, sweater, mesh top.

You work on until ten, the lounge's hum thinning as comrades peel off one by one into the dark, until only the night owls remain and then only you, and the leader touches your shoulder once — 'Enough, comrade. Sleep is also work' — and you pack up and go. Your roommate comrade is already gone ahead of you, or went another way; the walk back is yours alone, boots on frost-slick pavement, the blue tail cold at your nape.

Your key turns and the room is wrong.

Not wrong the way the closet was wrong, not wrong the way the second bed was wrong. The room has become a dormitory. Sixteen beds stand in perfect rows where furniture used to be — very small beds, cot-narrow, iron-framed, gray blankets folded square as bricks, and under every bed a cardboard box, identical, stenciled with nothing at all. The walls are gray. Not pale, not off-white: gray, every wall, the posters and pamphlets gone as if they were never hung. The overhead light is a bare bulb. It smells faintly of soap and cardboard, like a barracks opened that afternoon.

You cross to the nearest bed and kneel and open the box. Inside, folded with military exactness, lies a uniform. One pair of black emo lug boots and one pair of black Converse, side by side. Seven pairs of black skinny jeans in a stack. One turtleneck. One cardigan. One faded logo shirt, one flannel, one sweater, one mesh top — and a lace-trimmed camisole, the single concession to anything soft, folded on top like a first layer. Everything black. Everything your size. Everything already yours, as far as your hands are concerned; you know these clothes, the way you knew the boots this morning, the way you know the name comrade.

You sit back on your heels on the gray floor and look down the row of sixteen beds, sixteen boxes, sixteen of the same folded uniform, and the arithmetic presents itself quietly: fifteen comrades and one of you, or sixteen of you, depending on how you count now. The bulb hums. Somewhere down the hall a door closes. There is no lavender left in this room, no gold, no before — there is only the next morning, and the box under your bed waiting to be worn.