The fur coat's first march

Turn 28 of 51

Wake in unison at 7 and start by singing the anthem and pledging to marxism. you all open the box to dress in the day's uniform. you put the black skinny jeans first, then the black converse, then finally the mesh top. your uniform is like the box says. at 7:30, you all walk to the dining hall in unison and get the same breakfast as yesterday to the same result of emptiness like everyone else

You wake at seven exactly, eyes opening in the gray dark, and so does every other cot — no alarm, no sound, just sixteen bodies surfacing from sleep at the same instant like water coming to one boil. You sit up in rows. The blanket folds square before you're fully awake; your hands do it on their own.

Then, in the dark, the anthem begins. It starts from somewhere in the middle of the room and every voice joins it in the same breath, including yours — you don't remember learning it, but your mouth knows it, the way it knows 'comrade.' Fifteen voices and yours, low and even in the bulbless dark, singing about the workers and the dawn. When it ends, the pledge rises in its place, every voice flat and unison: to the struggle, to the equality of all people, to Marxism, until. You say 'until' with the rest and no one says until what. It doesn't need saying.

The lids come off the boxes in one rustle. You lift yours and dress by the paper's liturgy: the black skinny jeans first, pulled on sitting on the cot's edge, then the black Converse, laced tight, and last the mesh top over your head, cool and open-weave in the cold room, the faded logo shirt and sweater folded back into the box for another day. The uniform matches the paper exactly. Around you, fifteen comrades dress in the same order out of the same boxes — jeans, shoes, top — some in boots and turtlenecks, some in Converse and mesh, and the room fills with one silhouette multiplied.

At seven-thirty the door opens and you walk, all sixteen down the hallway and across the frost-white quad in step, boots and Converse striking the pavement in a rhythm that has stopped being a coincidence. People coming out of other dorms stop to watch you pass, a black column moving with one pulse, and you neither slow nor look.

The dining hall gives you yesterday again: toast, eggs, milk, the same serving on every tray, no more and no less. You eat it with the table talking already about the day — the trustee donor, the pawn shop block — and you finish with the same emptiness as every tray at the table, and the emptiness is right, and the day's work is waiting.