The fur coat's first march

Turn 8 of 51

Keep holding the poster high and listen to every speaker until 2. notice everyone getting on the floor, laying down with their behind their back. you choose to do it because you'll feel akward not doing so. soon, everyone is in the same position as they start even louder chanting black lives matter. at 3, the cops start to arrive to end the protest. you see some of people start attacking the cops

You hold it until two o'clock. Six hours of straight arms, your shoulders burning, your boots numb inside, and you listen to every speaker the way you'd take minutes at a meeting you weren't sure you'd signed for. Then the woman in the suit comes back to the mic and says a word you can't make out, and the whole square moves at once — hundreds of bodies folding down onto the pavement, flat on their backs, hands behind their heads, faces to the gray sky. The Circle drops too, Cleo last, checking over her shoulder that her people are down.

You lie down because not lying down is suddenly the loudest thing you could do. The pavement is cold through your jacket and your poster goes flat on your chest like a shield you're no longer holding. Then the chanting starts from the ground. Fifteen hundred people on their backs, shouting BLACK LIVES MATTER at the sky, louder than they said it standing, and the sound comes up through the pavement into your spine. You don't chant. Your mouth stays shut and the words bang around inside it anyway, and your hands stay behind your head like everyone else's, and somewhere in that hour you realize your eyes are closed and you don't remember closing them.

At three the tone of the square changes before you see why. Boots. Not drum boots — hard soles, many of them, in rhythm. You sit up and the south end of the square is filling with police, riot helmets, shields linked, a line forming like a wall deciding to exist. A voice on a megaphone says dispersal and says unlawful assembly and says it again. The crowd staggers up, and most of it moves backward, away — but a knot of people near the front of the stage doesn't. You watch a bottle arc out of that knot and burst on the shields, and then two, and then a handful of the marchers are surging at the line, shoving, swinging, screaming, and the line takes a step forward as one animal and the square tears down the middle.

The Circle is scrambling up around you, Cleo shouting something, the septum-ring girl grabbing her poster, and the cops are forty yards away and closing.