The fur coat's first march

Turn 39 of 51

you all finish and head to do work. you today work with three comrades. comrade with fully shaved sides and the top is dyed rose red. she has the converses on with the mesh top, comrade with split dyed hair colored white and sweet mint has converses with the faded union shirt, comrade with a shulllet thats dyed fluorescent orange has emo lug boots and cardigan. all have the same skinny jeans on.

The trays are stacked and the leader reads the day's assignments off her phone, and you draw a four: yourself, the comrade with the rose-red top over fully shaved sides in Converse and the mesh top, the comrade with the white-and-sweet-mint split dye in the faded union shirt, and the comrade with the fluorescent-orange shullet in the cardigan and the emo lug boots. Four pairs of skinny jeans, one silhouette, four different crowns of color above it like flags over the same army. She doesn't say where. She says 'Walk,' and the four of you walk.

The assignment turns out to be the quad in daylight, working bodies instead of screens. You pair with the rose-red comrade at the main crossroads with a fresh stack — not trustee flyers today but a half-page the Circle printed overnight, the rally footage's worst thirty seconds QR-coded into the corner, the caption above it reading THEY MARCHED AND THE POLICE BEAT THEM. ASK WHY. She works her side of the path, you work yours, and the flyers go out into morning traffic — gym bags, coffee cups, students late for Sunday study. Some take them without looking. Some read them standing. One girl reads it, looks at you, and says 'You were there,' and you say 'We were all there,' and she takes two.

The split-dye comrade and the orange shullet run the second post at the library steps, catching the weekend leavers, and every twenty minutes the four of you converge at the fountain to pool what's left and re-split it. The rose-red comrade counts out loud in the flat register. 'Forty each. Clean.' The work has a rhythm to it now, the same rhythm the boots had, the same rhythm the chant had — count, distribute, reconvene, count again — and the morning passes inside the rhythm without your noticing it go.

By early afternoon the stacks are gone, four hundred flyers distributed into a campus that watched the rally footage climb all night, and the four of you report at the fountain one last time. The rose-red comrade types the numbers to the leader and the reply comes back in seconds, one word: 'Clean.' The orange shullet comrade reads it aloud and the four of you turn back toward Halloran, and somewhere ahead of you the trustee file is sitting in a leader's phone, waiting for tonight, after reading.