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Oct 8, 2021 05:19
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:02 |
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Prompt: "Bluff" (1270 words wow sorry) Resistance The Little Tokyo police station was a glass and steel modernist box, immaculate, fluorescent. Camilla stepped out with a huge white grin on her freckled face. We leapt to our feet. Someone's thermos clanged against the pavement. We threw our fists to the sky and whooped. It had been hours of waiting. The sun was low and yellow. The air stank of exhaust and overripe pavement, but it was cooling down fast. She wore only a thin white t-shirt and cutoffs, and white Keds untied over bare feet. I took a step forward. Started to shrug off my cardigan. But someone else, someone tall and tan, with badly cut black hair, moved in close and murmured in her ear. I halted. Adjusted the lay of my collar. Shoved my hands in my pockets. Camilla nodded. The man unzipped his hoodie. Camilla gave him the clear plastic bag with her possessions to hold, and wriggled into his sweatshirt with a smile. She was even taller than he was. Her bony wrists popped out the sleeve ends. Ridiculous. Others swarmed her. Friends, comrades, Instagram followers. How did they treat you? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you have everything you came in with? The pigs didn't try to gently caress with you, did they? Do you have a court date? Do you have a place to stay tonight? Do you want to say a few words to everyone who came here to support you today? I looked harder at the woman who'd asked that last question. Compact, dark-skinned, with rounded features and a shallow line etched between her arched black brows. Miriam Tadesse. At every Black Lives Matter protest. Usually the one leading the chants. I'd love to, Camilla trilled, and received the proffered bullhorn with both hands splayed wide. I watched her, for a little while. Her beautiful, expressive, camera-ready face. Her thoughtful pauses, her choice of emphasis. Her sorrow, her compassion. Her moral indignation. Her golden hair. Her sun-speckled skin. In many ways, the perfect person to get roughed up and arrested. Perhaps Tadesse thought so too. I watched the crowd. Everyone's faces lifted up, looking. She was tall and bright and benevolent and the light of the setting sun caught and hung in her corkscrew curls that swung and bounced with every impassioned word, every fierce gesture. Camilla's voice rose to a shout. We come here for Black lives! Yeah, the crowd roared back. We come here to love and support one another! Yeah! Because we KNOW, she shouted, and then paused, and swept the crowd with her burning gaze. Her eyes caught the sun, and caught mine. Say it with me, she yelled. None of us are free— UNTIL ALL OF US ARE FREE, the crowd roared, and I roared, and they all loved her, we loved her, I loved her. And then Camilla handed the bullhorn back to Tadesse, and they exchanged some low words, and Tadesse clasped her hand, and I stood with locked knees and clenched fingers while the hoodie man swept her and Tadesse away into the back seat of a small gray car and I went home to my small gray studio apartment and ordered thai food through one of the last remaining apps offering a new user discount and ate it while poking through every mention of her on instagram, watching her perfectly shaped mouth shout for justice and freedom from forty different angles, over and over and over again. One protest later, she knew my name. Two protests later, she had my number. Alex, she said slowly, typing it into her ancient iPhone. Last name? Szilágyi, I said. See-lah, she repeated. Her forehead creased. How do you spell it? S-Z-I, I began. She smiled and handed me her phone. I smiled back, and placed my phone under hers so I could hold them both while I typed, and lifted my hands to my face and squinted, and tapped to accept the bluetooth file transfer. Sorry, it's just taking me a bit, I forgot how to pull up the accent for the Á. It's Hungarian, I explained. Oh, cool, Camilla chirped. I've never been to Hungary. I hear it's beautiful. I haven't either, I said, a little distractedly. I'll put my email in here too. She rolled her shoulders. Which org are you with, again? Uh, I do organizing and mutual aid in my own neighborhood. We don't even have a name yet, but it's been going for a little while. Community meals and stuff. We're working on sourcing a fridge. I finished configuring the keytracker install. Swiped back to the contact info. Typed in my email address in record time, thumbs shaking. Cool, Camilla said again. My family's too embittered to go back and visit Hungary, I said, and lowered my hands again so she could see me finish typing. They're still pissed off that their land got seized by the communists. That was like, sixty years ago. Talk about a grudge. Ha ha. I can see why that'd be painful for them, Camilla murmured, and held her hand out for her phone. I placed it back into her palm. Well, that's me, I said. Text if you need, um. Any help moving stuff around, or if you have extra food donations or anything. I'll get it to where it needs to go. Great, Camilla said, more warmly this time. She waggled her phone. I'll see you at the next BLM event? Miriam's asked for as many people as we can get. Yep, I said, too fast. I stuck my hands in my pockets. If you need a ride there, um. Let me know. Cool, she said, and smiled a good-bye sort of smile. Night, Alex. See you, I replied, and turned and slunk away. The next protest was in front of the mayor's house. Camilla didn't text me for a ride. She did text Miriam Tadesse. And someone named Antonio, who she responded to very quickly, and with a lot of exclamation points. She also texted her mother, explaining that it wasn't a big deal about the arrest, and to please not tell dad before she could tell him herself. She paid a quarterly student loan payment of $380.20 and a cell phone bill of $45. She ignored most emails. She got into an extremely gentle and well-mannered argument about white fragility in the comments of someone else's instagram post. She searched on the internet for Assata Shakur. She looked at wool socks. She looked at eco-friendly dishwasher soap. What had I expected? The fridge had been free. The U-Haul pickup truck cost $78. The guy I hired at Home Depot to help me carry it cost $50. The prepared couscous and veggie wrap meals that were about to expire from the grocery outlet cost $213.87. The local corner store refused to let me plug the fridge it in outside their place, so the meals all went into my fridge instead, and the craigslist fridge loomed unplugged outside my apartment door, a blank beige monument. I gave away two meals, to people living behind my apartment parking structure. The rest fermented and bubbled up the plastic lids. Finally I shoved them into a black plastic trash bag and drove to the dumpster behind the 7-11 and threw them away. Hey Alex, Camilla called to me from the pack, with her perfect, camera-friendly smile. The crowd chanted and sang and banged on pots and pans and tambourines. That's not my name, I said. What? she called, hands cupped to her ears, still smiling. I smiled back.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:59
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