The fur coat's first march

Turn 35 of 51

arrive at the rally at 9 to see a giant crowd. you all pull out the posters you all made and hold them high with one hand while the other holds the flyers. March into the rally with the Circle and hold formation in boots and turtlenecks. pass out the flyers during the rally. This goes on all day as people are chanting stuff about changing the system. you and the other 15 comrades chant the stuff.

The van drops you at the town square at nine and the crowd is enormous — thousands deep around the bandstand, signs rising above it like a second treeline, drums somewhere in the middle of it. The Circle stops at the square's edge and the posters come out, the ones you all made in the lounge, and then the flyers, one hand holding your sign high, the other stacked with the trustee's circled name. You march in as a block, sixteen boots and turtlenecks, and the crowd makes room for you because you look like one thing, and being looked at as one thing feels like armor.

You take formation near the front, close enough to the bandstand to see the speakers' mouths move, and the flyers start moving out. Hands take them from your stack all morning — union jackets, gray-bearded men, college kids, a woman with a stroller who reads the flyer right there and nods at you. The chanting rises in waves around you, the system has to go, the people have the power, and your voice joins it. It does not hesitate. It comes out of you level and loud with the fifteen around you, syllables wearing down into rhythm like the courthouse march, except this time there is no difference you can name between the words and yours.

The speakers rotate all day — a union president, a state-house challenger, a woman who lists what the other party has taken from workers, each one landing on the crowd like a match on dry grass. Between speakers the Circle chants and the crowd chants back, and when the crowd is thickest the pixie comrade's trustee video goes up on every account at once, the push timed to the drums. The flyer stack in your hand goes down, and down, until by mid-afternoon you're holding only the poster, two hundred names distributed into a crowd a few towns from home.

The cold comes in through the mesh of the day and you don't feel it. The chanting runs through you like the boots' rhythm ran through you at the courthouse, except now you are the rhythm's source and not its passenger. The leader's glance finds you once across the block and moves on, counted, clean. The sun drops behind the bandstand and the crowd holds, and the Circle holds with it, sixteen black figures in formation, one voice with a few thousand others, and the day's work is not done.