The fur coat's first march

Turn 34 of 51

Tall and slender, appearing to be in her early 20s, she has a buzzed skull with pastel blue Bettie bangs framing her face and long pastle blue side pieces cascading past her jawline, culminating in a pastle blue nape tail. Her skin is fair and unadorned, devoid of makeup or jewelry. She wears black skinny jeans that fit snugly, black emo lug boots with buckles, and a black turtleneck that hugs her frame closely, completing her uniformed look as a comrade in the Circle.

you all change into the same black night gown and head to sleep at 10:30. wake up in unison at 7 and sing the marxism anthem like nuns, then dress in the rally outfit. first the black skinny jeans, then the black emo lug boots, then the turtleneck. everyone else dresses the same at the same time. at 7:30. you all leave for the same dining hall breakfast. today is raily day and you all leave at 8.

At ten-thirty the last light of the day's work goes out and the Circle changes in the gray room — sixteen black nightgowns pulled from the same boxes nobody remembers packing, identical to the hem, and you put yours on without a thought about who sewed it or chose it. The cots take you in a single tide and the barracks sleeps at 10:30 exactly.

You wake at seven with every other cot, the room surfacing as one body. The anthem rises in the dark, low and level, fifteen voices and yours singing it like nuns at office — no swing, no emphasis, just the words in unison about the workers and the dawn — and then the pledge, flat, to the struggle, to equality, to Marxism, until. The word ends the way it always ends, on nothing, and nobody fills the nothing.

The lids come off the boxes and today is rally day, so the paper's boots line governs: the black skinny jeans first, pulled on sitting on the cot's edge, then the emo lug boots, buckles cinched, heavy as verdicts, then the turtleneck over your head, close at the throat. Around you the room does the same thing at the same time — sixteen bodies, one silhouette, no mirror-checking, and when you all stand the barracks holds a single shape multiplied sixteen times, black to the floor, black to the neck.

At 7:30 the column walks to the dining hall through the frost and the trays assemble: toast, eggs, milk, the same serving on every tray. The table eats in the quiet of a working morning, and the talk is only logistics — the van, the drive, the rally's start time, the trustee video queued for the push when the crowd is thickest. You eat your portion to the same emptiness as every tray, and the emptiness is right.

At eight you all stand, sixteen chairs scraping back in one beat, and the leader counts you with a glance. 'Boots and turtlenecks,' she says, unnecessary, because there is no one in the room wearing anything else. The column files out into the cold morning toward the road and the ride a few towns over, sixteen identical figures walking as one, and the day's work is waiting at the end of it.