The fur coat's first march

Turn 36 of 51

Keep chanting and hold the block's formation as the rally runs into evening. soon the cops arrive and start attacking everyone. you and your comrades flim it while running to escape and hide. the van picks you up and returns you to campus. you all have viideos of it and post it to social media talking about peaceful protests getting violent by the cops and you all put acab. dinner at 6, same meal

The light goes amber over the bandstand and the crowd holds, and you hold with it, the chant passing through the block in one breath at a time. Then the sound changes the way it changed at the courthouse — hard soles, many of them, in rhythm — and the north end of the square fills with helmets and shields, a line forming like a wall deciding to exist. The megaphone says unlawful assembly. The crowd surges backward, and somewhere near the front a bottle arcs, and then the line moves forward and it moves into everyone.

'Circle — north — move,' the leader's voice cuts through, and the block breaks formation and runs. Your boots are heavy and the crowd is a river against you and someone's elbow catches your shoulder, and you run with the fifteen, filming as you go — phone up over your own shoulder, recording the shields advancing into the retreating crowd, a woman knocked down and hauled up by strangers, the batons coming down on people who were chanting minutes ago. The mullet comrade films the line itself; the pixie comrade films the megaphone; between the sixteen of you the whole attack is covered from the inside.

You slip into a parking garage two streets north, breathing hard, sixteen black figures between concrete pillars, and the leader counts you twice with her eyes and once out loud. 'Clean. Nobody taken.' The van collects you in the loading lane and the square slides away behind you through the rear window, lights and noise, still burning.

On the ride the footage is already moving between phones. By the time the van crosses back into campus the posts are up from every account at once — the clips cut together, shields into retreating people, the caption flat and unanswerable: they called it peaceful until they decided it was ours. Peaceful protest met with police violence. ACAB. You post yours with your own thumbs and watch the validation climb in your pocket, and it feels less like winning an argument tonight than like testifying.

The dining hall at six is nearly empty and the trays assemble the same as ever: pasta, salad, potatoes, water, one identical sugar cookie. The table eats in the quiet of people who have run all day, and nobody performs outrage — the videos are the statement; the meal is the Circle's. You eat to the same emptiness as every tray, the cookie last, and the footage keeps climbing in your pocket like a second pulse.