Turn 38 · The fur coat's first march

Wake at 7, sing, pledge and dress per the rotation, and go to breakfast. todays outfit is the converse, skinny black jeans and the black sweater. only 8 comrades are wearing the converse and only 8 are wearing the emo lug boots. everyone looks in the mirror and see themsleves more marxist and left then last week. thats good. 7:30, same breakfast at the dining hall, emptiness in everybodys stomatch

Seven o'clock arrives in the gray room as one event: sixteen cots exhaling at the same instant, the anthem rising before your eyes are fully open, nun-even in the cold. The pledge follows it — to the struggle, to equality, to Marxism, until — and the nothing after 'until' has stopped being a hole and become a door you all face together. The lids come off the boxes and today's rotation is yours: the skinny jeans first, then the Converse, then the black sweater, close-knit and heavy on your shoulders. The note on the door holds — you count without meaning to, and it comes out even, eight in Converse, eight in the emo lug boots, the Circle split down the middle of itself like a page torn cleanly. You are in the first eight. The boots line stands to the other side of the room, and between the two halves there is no difference at all except the soles. The mirror over the washbasin takes the Circle one at a time before the walk, and when your turn comes you stop a half-second longer than you expect. The blue chelsea cut, the bare face, the black to the neck and the black to the floor, the posture squared the way comrades is squared, the voice trained down to its flat register. Last week there was a girl in a fur coat with lavender sheets and a platinum card. The person in the mirror is a comrade, and you can see it plainly, and it is good — the thought arrives already finished, needing no argument, and you step aside for the next of the eight. At 7:30 the column crosses the frost and the west long table assembles: toast, eggs, milk, identical portions on identical trays. You eat to the same emptiness as every tray, and the emptiness sits right, the stomach quiet the way the room is quiet, everything accounted for. Halfway through the milk the leader sets her phone face-up on the table. 'The trustee file is ready,' she says, and the table goes still around the cookies. 'Details tonight. After reading.' She picks the phone back up and eats, and the circled surname waits somewhere in Halloran with its figure under it, and the table finishes breakfast as one body with the day's work standing open in front of it.