Nationalism, identity, and the banners people die for.
Late summer, and the creek ran slower than it had in June.
He floated on his back in the deep pool, the one where the water collected before spilling over rocks into the shallows below. The sun was directly overhead, burning through his closed eyelids, turning the world red and gold. His body drifted with the small current, arms loose at his sides, cock soft against his thigh, everything warm and weightless and present.
A dragonfly landed on his chest. He felt the tiny grip of its legs, the whisper of wings folding. It stayed for three breaths, then lifted off and was gone.
He’d been at the camp for months now. Or near it—his shack was in the opposite direction from town, hidden in the undergrowth where no trail led, but he came to the camp most days. For the fire, for the company when he wanted it, for the creek that ran through the clearing and pooled here, deep enough to swim.
The shame was quiet these days. Not gone—he could still feel it sometimes, a distant muttering when he walked naked past strangers or touched himself in the open air. But it had lost its authority. It made predictions that never came true. It promised catastrophe and delivered only another ordinary day.
He let his feet sink, found the rocky bottom, stood in chest-deep water. The pool was surrounded by flat stones, sun-warmed, good for lying on afterward. He climbed out onto one of them, the water streaming off his body, and stretched out on his back to dry.
The stone was almost too hot. He shifted, finding the angle where warmth became pleasure rather than pain. His skin tightened as the water evaporated, leaving a faint mineral smell, the taste of the creek on his lips when he licked them.
His cock stirred. The sun, the warmth, the good animal feeling of a body that had been swimming and was now resting. He let his hand drift down, not urgent, not purposeful, just following what the body wanted. The touch was easy, familiar. He’d done this here before, many times. The flat rocks remembered.
He stroked slowly, watching the clouds move overhead, feeling the heat of the stone against his back and the different heat building in his belly. A bird called somewhere in the trees—a jay, harsh and bright. His hips lifted slightly, pressing into his own grip. The pleasure built in its own time, unhurried, spreading outward from his center until it reached his fingers, his toes, the top of his skull.
He came onto his stomach with a long exhale, his body clenching and releasing, the tension dissolving into the warm stone beneath him. For a while he just lay there, breathing, letting the sun dry the spend on his skin. Then he slid back into the pool and washed himself clean and climbed out again to dry a second time.
This was his life now. The rhythms of the body—hunger, rest, pleasure, motion. The rhythms of the forest—dawn, noon, dusk, dark. He carved spoons and ladles and sold them at the hardware store for cash. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he was tired, swam when the day was hot. He talked to people when he wanted to and was silent when he didn’t.
The book was still on Ruth’s shelf, in the cafe in town. He hadn’t touched it in weeks. Didn’t need to. Whatever it had given him was inside now, part of how he moved through the world. He couldn’t have explained it if anyone asked—and no one asked—but he could feel it in the way he met people’s eyes, in the way he didn’t apologize, in the way he let his body be what it was without trying to make it something else.
He walked back to camp in the late afternoon, following the creek downstream to where it widened into the clearing. The camp was busier now than it had been in spring—thirty, maybe forty people, tents and tarps and vehicles scattered among the trees. The purple bus was back, parked in its usual spot near the big fire ring, its occupants a rotating cast he’d stopped trying to track.
Arthur was sitting outside his van, playing guitar. The old man—he’d never learned his name, never asked—was mending a fishing net with careful, practiced hands. A woman with long grey hair was hanging laundry on a line strung between two pines. The ordinary life of the camp, continuing as it continued, asking nothing of anyone.
He nodded to the people he passed, received nods in return. His nakedness was unremarkable here. Some people wore clothes, some didn’t, most wore some combination depending on weather and mood. No one commented. No one stared. The body was just the body, doing what bodies did.
He stopped at the communal fire, where a pot of something—beans, maybe, or stew—was simmering on a grate over low coals. He found a bowl, filled it, ate standing up, watching the afternoon light filter through the trees. The food was plain and good. Someone had added rosemary; he could taste it under the salt.
A van came down the dirt track.
He noticed it without paying much attention—vehicles came and went all the time. But this one was different, somehow. Louder, maybe. More certain of itself. It pulled into the clearing and stopped near the fire ring, and for a moment nothing happened, the engine ticking as it cooled, dust settling around the wheels.
Then the doors opened and four people got out.
Young. Early twenties, maybe. Two women, two men. They moved with the confidence of people who knew things—who had positions, who had figured out how the world worked and what needed to be done about it. They were dressed in black, mostly, with patches on their jackets, slogans he couldn’t read from this distance. One of them had a bullhorn clipped to her belt.
They looked around the camp, assessing. Their eyes passed over him without lingering—a naked man eating beans from a bowl, just part of the scenery. They were looking for something else. A place to set up, maybe. A place to make their presence felt.
One of the men went to the back of the van and opened it. He started pulling out poles, fabric, equipment. The others moved to help. Within minutes they had a canopy up, a table beneath it, a banner stretched between two trees.
The banner was a flag. Green, white, black, with a red triangle.
He watched them work. They were efficient, practiced—they’d done this before, many times, in many places. More flags came out of the van. Smaller ones, on sticks, planted in the ground around their encampment. One went up on a pole at the corner of their canopy, snapping in the light breeze.
The old man looked up from his fishing net. Arthur’s guitar went quiet for a moment, then resumed, something slower, more contemplative. The woman with grey hair finished hanging her laundry and walked back to her tent without comment.
The camp absorbed them, as it absorbed everyone. Another group, another set of transients, here for a while and then gone. He finished his beans, rinsed the bowl in the bucket by the fire, and walked back toward the trail that led to his shack.
The flags were visible through the trees for a long time. Green, white, black, red.
The forest closed around him. The trail narrowed to nothing, the way it always did, and he pushed through the undergrowth to the hidden clearing where his shack waited. Home, or something like it. A roof, a floor, a shelf with his carvings on it. The butter spreader he’d finished months ago, still glowing with the oil he’d worked into the holly.
He lit a candle. The evening came down. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear voices from the camp—louder than usual, more emphatic. The new arrivals, probably, finding their place in the social order. Making themselves known.
He lay on his pad and listened to the night sounds rising—the insects, the frogs, the occasional owl. The flag-people would do what flag-people did. He would do what he did. Tomorrow the sun would rise and the creek would be there and the stones would be warm and the body would want what it wanted.
The shape was already in there.
Morning, and he was carving.
He’d found a piece of cherry in the woodpile—someone had cut down a tree and left the scraps, not knowing what they had. Cherry was good wood, forgiving, the grain tight and even. He was making a bowl this time, hollowing out the center with a hook knife, taking small curls that fell between his bare feet and caught the early light.
The camp was waking around him. Smoke from the first fires, the smell of coffee, voices low and sleep-rough. He’d slept at the camp last night instead of walking back to his shack—it happened sometimes, when the fire burned late and the walk seemed far. He’d found a spot near Arthur’s van and stretched out on the ground and woken with dew on his skin.
The anarchists were awake too. He could hear them from across the clearing—not the words, just the tone. Emphatic. Certain. One of them was wearing a keffiyeh, the black-and-white pattern crisp and new, the fabric stiff with factory sizing. The tag was still visible at one corner, a small white rectangle with characters he couldn’t read from here. The flags above their canopy stirred in the morning breeze, the fabric making a soft sound—not quite snapping, more a whisper, a rustle. Polyester, probably. The colors too bright, too even, the kind of saturation that came from industrial dyes.
He returned to the bowl. The hook knife bit into the cherry, lifted another curl. The hollow was deepening, finding its shape. He thought about nothing. The wood, the knife, the motion of his hands.
A shadow fell across his work.
He looked up. One of the young men from the van—thin, intense, a beard that was still deciding what it wanted to be. He was holding a stack of papers, flyers maybe, something with printing on it. His keffiyeh was draped around his neck like a scarf, the folds careful, arranged. The fringe was perfectly even—machine-cut, not hand-tied.
“Morning,” the young man said. “You’ve been here a while, right? At the camp?”
He nodded, returned to carving.
“We’re organizing a discussion tonight. About what’s happening in Palestine. The genocide. I wanted to make sure everyone knew.”
He lifted another curl of cherry, examined the hollow. The wood smelled sweet where the knife had opened it, a faint honey scent that rose in the warming air.
“You should come,” the young man said. “It’s important. People need to understand what’s being done in their name.”
He didn’t look up. The curl fell, landed on his foot, warm and dry.
The young man stood there a moment longer. Then he thrust a flyer forward. “Take one of these.”
He glanced at the paper. Glossy, full-color, the flag reproduced in that same too-bright saturation. A fist. Text in fonts designed to look urgent. He returned to the bowl.
“I’ll be here,” he said. “If I’m here, I’ll hear it.”
The young man walked away. His footsteps were soft on the packed earth, then gone.
The afternoon was hot, and he went to the creek.
The pool was empty—midday, most people stayed in the shade. He waded in, felt the cold water climb his legs, his thighs, his waist. The stones on the bottom were slick with algae, and he placed his feet carefully, feeling for the flat ones, the stable ones. Then he pushed off and swam, slow strokes that took him from one end of the pool to the other and back again.
His body moved through the water the way it had learned to move years ago, when swimming was work, when diving was his job. The training was still in his muscles—the efficiency, the breath control, the awareness of his own buoyancy. A water strider skated past, its legs dimpling the surface, casting tiny shadows on the sand below. He watched it until it reached the far bank and disappeared into the reeds.
He floated on his back, arms spread, face to the sky. The sun was a white disc behind his closed eyelids, and he could feel his pulse in his temples, slow and steady. His cock rested against his thigh, soft, the water cool around it. A jay called from somewhere in the trees—harsh, territorial, answered by another further off.
Footsteps on the rocks.
He didn’t open his eyes. The footsteps stopped. He could feel someone looking at him—the particular weight of attention, the displacement of air or sound or something he couldn’t name.
The footsteps retreated.
He floated for a while longer, then swam to the rocks and climbed out. The stone was almost too hot, and he shifted until he found a spot where the heat was pleasure rather than pain. Water pooled in the hollow of his throat, evaporated slowly. His skin tightened as it dried.
The discussion happened at eight.
He was at the fire, not because he’d decided to attend but because he was at the fire most nights. It was where the camp gathered, where food was shared, where Arthur played guitar and people talked or didn’t talk as they chose.
The four anarchists had arranged themselves on one side of the fire, facing outward. They’d brought their banner, propped it against a log—the same flag as the one on the pole, but larger, the grommets at the corners bright brass, machine-punched. The fabric was synthetic, shiny where the firelight caught it. One of the women was speaking, her voice carrying across the clearing, and he noticed the keffiyeh around her shoulders, the same pattern as the others, the same stiff newness, the same machine-cut fringe.
He carved. The bowl was nearly done now, the hollow smooth, the rim wanting only a final pass with the knife. The cherry had darkened where his hands had held it, the oils of his skin working into the grain.
“—systematic ethnic cleansing, backed by the largest military power in the world. This isn’t a conflict. It’s not a war. It’s genocide, and it’s happening right now, while we sit here.”
The flags above the canopy hung limp in the still evening air. One of them had a small tear near the top—a seam giving way, the stitching unraveling where the grommet pulled at the fabric. Factory work, done fast, done cheap. The red triangle was a slightly different shade than the red on the other flags, a batch variation, dye lots that didn’t quite match.
“We need everyone to understand,” the woman continued. “This affects all of us. Silence is complicity. If you’re not actively opposing the genocide, you’re supporting it.”
Arthur had stopped playing. The old man with the fishing net was watching, his face unreadable in the firelight. Sparks rose from the fire and died in the darkness above.
“You.” The woman was looking at him. “You’ve been carving all night. Do you have anything to say?”
He looked up. Her face was lit from below, shadows pooling in her eye sockets, her jaw sharp. The keffiyeh had slipped, and she adjusted it with a practiced motion, settling it back into place.
“You’re anarchists?” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at the flag behind her. The too-bright colors, the brass grommets, the torn seam. Then back at her.
“That’s a state’s flag.”
He returned to carving. The knife found the last rough spot on the rim, shaved it smooth.
Someone was talking—the thin young man, something about liberation movements, about symbols of resistance. The fire popped. A log shifted, sent up a shower of sparks. The flags stirred in some breath of wind too faint to feel, the polyester whispering against itself.
“You sound like a Zionist.”
He didn’t look up. The bowl was finished. He held it in his hands, felt the weight of it, the warmth where the firelight touched the cherry. Then he stood, tucked it under his arm, and walked away.
Behind him, the discussion continued. Their voices rose and fell, emphatic, certain. The flags rustled. Arthur picked up his guitar, started playing something quiet, something that wove under their words and through them and past them into the dark.
Rain came in the night.
He woke to the sound of it on the metal roof, a drumming that rose and fell with the wind. The shack leaked in three places—he knew them now, had learned to arrange his sleeping pad around them. Water dripped into the darkness, finding its paths, and he lay there listening until the grey light came.
By morning the rain had softened to a drizzle. He walked to camp anyway, the wet undergrowth soaking his legs, the air thick with the smell of earth and green things growing. His feet knew the way now—through the gap in the brush, along the deer trail, down to where the trees opened into the clearing.
The camp was subdued. Fires hissed and smoked, struggling against the damp. People huddled under tarps, under awnings, under the eaves of their vehicles. The anarchists’ canopy sagged with collected water, and as he watched, one of the men went out with a pole and pushed the fabric up, sending a cascade splashing down.
Their flags hung limp on their poles. Wet cloth, heavy with rain, dripping onto the muddy ground.
He found the old man sitting under a tarp stretched between two trees, mending something—a tarp, another tarp, a patch of canvas that needed stitching. The old man’s hands moved steadily, needle and thread, the work continuing regardless of weather.
“Morning,” the old man said without looking up.
He sat down on a log nearby, out of the drizzle, and watched the hands work. The old man was maybe sixty, maybe seventy—hard to tell. His face was weathered in a way that spoke of years outdoors, and there was something in how he held himself, a stillness that was familiar.
“You were in,” he said.
The old man glanced up. “Sixty-eight to seventy-one. Mekong Delta, mostly.”
He nodded. They sat in silence for a while. The rain continued, softer now, almost a mist.
“Those kids,” the old man said eventually. “The ones with the flags.”
“What about them?”
“They came by yesterday. Wanted to know if I’d sign something. A petition. For the people in—wherever it is. Gaza.”
“Did you sign?”
The old man’s needle paused. “I asked them if they’d ever seen a body. A dead one, I mean. Someone who’d been alive and then wasn’t.”
“What did they say?”
“The girl—the one who does most of the talking—she said that was the point. That there were bodies. Children’s bodies. That’s why we had to act.”
“And?”
The old man resumed stitching. “I asked her if she’d seen one. Touched one. Smelled one. She didn’t answer. Just looked at me like I was the problem.”
The drizzle was stopping. Somewhere in the camp, someone was trying to coax a fire back to life, blowing on embers, feeding small sticks to the struggling flame.
“I killed people,” the old man said. “For a flag. Believed in it too, at the time. Had to, or you couldn’t do it. You had to believe the flag meant something, that the people under it were your people and the people under the other flag were—something else. Not quite people. Or people who’d made the wrong choice and had to be corrected.”
He listened. The old man wasn’t looking at him, was looking at his own hands, at the needle moving through the canvas.
“Took me years to come back from that. Some of us never did. And now these kids—” He shook his head. “They got a different flag, that’s all. Same certainty. Same sorting. Same idea that the flag makes it clear who’s right and who’s wrong.”
“You tell them that?”
“I tried. They didn’t hear it. Or they heard it and decided I was the enemy. One of them called me a colonizer.” The old man almost smiled. “I was a kid from Arkansas. Drafted. Didn’t know where Vietnam was on a map until they sent me there.”
The fire across the clearing finally caught, sending a thin column of smoke into the wet air. People began to emerge from their shelters, drawn by the promise of warmth, of coffee, of the camp coming back to life.
“Anyway,” the old man said. “You asked the right questions last night. About the states, the flags. They didn’t like it, but they were the right questions.”
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
The afternoon was warmer, the clouds breaking, patches of blue showing through. Steam rose from the wet ground, from the tarps and tents, from the flags that still hung on their poles.
He went to the creek, but the pool was swollen and brown with runoff, too murky to swim. Instead he sat on the bank and watched the water move, faster than usual, carrying leaves and sticks and small debris from upstream. His body was quiet, resting, not wanting anything in particular.
When he came back to camp, something had happened.
A small crowd had gathered near the anarchists’ canopy. Voices were raised—not shouting, not yet, but the pitch that came before shouting. He approached, saw what they were looking at.
One of the flags was missing from its pole. The pole stood bare, the clips that had held the fabric hanging empty.
“—asking you where it is.” The woman, the one who did the talking, was facing the old man with the fishing net. Her body was rigid, her hands clenched at her sides.
“And I told you.” The old man was calm, unruffled. “It was on the ground. In the mud. I picked it up, wrung it out, used it to cover the woodpile. Kept the dry wood dry.”
“That’s not just fabric. That’s a symbol. A symbol of resistance, of people fighting for their lives—”
“It’s cloth. It was getting wet.”
“You can’t just—” She turned, looking for support, found the thin young man and the other two. “This is exactly what we’re talking about. This is how oppression works. Through erasure, through disrespect—”
“I didn’t erase anything. I covered some firewood.” The old man gestured toward the edge of the clearing, where a tarp—and yes, the flag—was draped over a pile of split logs. “It’s right there. Take it back if you want.”
“It’s not about taking it back. It’s about what you did. What it means.”
“It means the wood is dry.”
The woman made a sound of frustration. She looked around the gathered crowd, searching for allies, for anyone who understood. Her eyes found him, standing at the edge of the group, and moved past without stopping. He was already sorted. Already the enemy.
“This is a safe space,” she said, addressing everyone now. “Or it’s supposed to be. A place where people who share our values can come together. And if someone here doesn’t share those values—if someone here thinks it’s okay to desecrate a symbol of liberation—”
“It was on the ground,” the old man said again. “In the mud.”
“Why was it on the ground?” one of the other anarchists asked. “Who took it off the pole?”
“Wind, probably. The storm last night. I didn’t take it down. I just found it there this morning, stepped on and dirty, and I thought—this is a piece of cloth, it can be useful, so I used it.”
“You thought.” The woman’s voice was cold. “You thought it was just cloth.”
“It is just cloth.”
“It represents—”
“I know what it represents. You’ve told us about six times now. But the representing doesn’t keep the wood dry. The cloth keeps the wood dry.”
Someone in the crowd laughed—a short, involuntary sound, quickly stifled. The woman’s head snapped toward the sound, but whoever had made it was invisible now, face carefully neutral.
He watched her struggle. She was right, in her own frame—the flag did represent something, did matter to people, was a symbol worth defending. But the old man was right too, in a different frame—it was also cloth, also material, also something that could cover a woodpile.
The question was which frame held. Which way of seeing got to be real.
“I want it back,” she said finally. “Now.”
The old man shrugged. “Go get it. I said it’s right there.”
She walked to the woodpile, pulled the flag free, shook off the bits of bark and sawdust that clung to it. Held it in her hands, looking down at the green and white and black and red. The cloth was wrinkled now, stained in places, one corner still damp with mud.
“This is not okay,” she said, but quieter now, the fight draining out of her. “This is not how we treat each other.”
She carried the flag back to their canopy, began the work of reattaching it to its pole. Her comrades clustered around her, speaking in low voices. The crowd dispersed, drifting back to their own concerns—fires to tend, meals to prepare, the ordinary business of living.
The old man caught his eye across the clearing, gave a small nod. Then he picked up his fishing net and resumed mending.
He walked to his shack. The sun was setting, turning the wet forest gold and amber, steam still rising from the undergrowth. His body was tired—good tired, the kind that came from a day spent outside, from walking and sitting and watching things happen.
The flags were back on their poles when he passed. He didn’t stop to look.
The sun returned, and with it the heat.
He spent the morning at his shack, oiling the cherry bowl, working the finish into the grain until it glowed. The wood had dried well—no cracks, no warping. He held it up to the light that came through the gaps in the walls, turned it slowly. The hollow caught the light differently than the rim, deeper, more saturated. He set it on the shelf beside the others.
By noon he was hungry. He walked to camp, following the deer trail, pushing through the undergrowth where it closed in. The leaves were dusty with summer, a fine powder that rose when he brushed past and settled on his skin. A spider had built a web across the trail overnight, and he felt it break against his chest, the silk clinging, the spider dropping away into the undergrowth.
The clearing opened before him, bright with midday sun, and he saw immediately that something was wrong.
A small group had gathered near the purple bus. Not the anarchists—other people, camp regulars, their bodies arranged in that particular way that meant trouble. He walked closer. The grass was dry underfoot, brittle, crunching with each step.
A man was sitting on the ground, his back against the bus’s wheel. Fifty, maybe, with a grey beard and clothes that had seen too many seasons. His face was the color of old paper, and he was breathing in shallow gasps, one hand pressed to his chest. His fingernails were bluish. His lips too.
“—been like this since this morning,” someone was saying. “Won’t let us call anyone.”
“No hospitals.” The man’s voice was thin, strained. “No doctors. I’m fine.”
He crouched down. The man’s eyes were unfocused, looking at something that wasn’t there. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the shade of the bus. His hand trembled where it pressed against his chest.
The group stood around, uncertain. A fly landed on the man’s shoulder, walked a few steps, flew off. The bus ticked in the heat, metal expanding, contracting.
He stood and walked across the clearing.
The anarchists were at their canopy, seated around their table, papers spread before them. Planning something—the march, maybe, or something else. Their keffiyehs were draped over chair backs, folded on the table, one still wrapped around a neck despite the heat. The flags overhead hung motionless in the still air. He could see the white tag on the nearest one, the small print, the characters that might have been Chinese.
“There’s a man,” he said. “By the purple bus.”
They looked up. The woman’s face tightened when she saw who it was.
“He’s having chest pains. Can’t afford a hospital.”
“Is someone calling an ambulance?” the thin young man asked.
“He won’t go.”
They looked at each other. The papers on the table stirred in some faint movement of air—a flyer, the same glossy print, the same flag, the same fist. Someone had been writing on a clipboard. Someone else had a laptop open, the screen dim in the bright daylight.
“You have a van,” he said.
The woman’s mouth opened, closed. The thin young man shifted in his seat.
“We’re in the middle of—” He gestured at the papers, the laptop, the work spread before them. “We can’t just—”
He waited.
“There’s a clinic in town,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
No one moved. The flags rustled—a breath of wind, finally, hot and dry, carrying the smell of dust and dry grass. One of them twisted on its pole, the fabric wrapping, unwrapping, the polyester catching the light.
He turned and walked back across the clearing.
The woman with grey hair was standing near the purple bus now, keys in her hand. She drove a station wagon, old, the paint oxidized to a flat finish. She looked at him as he approached.
“I can take him,” she said. “If someone helps me get him in the car.”
He helped. The man was heavier than he looked, and his legs wouldn’t hold him. They half-carried him to the car, eased him into the back seat. His breathing was worse now, a wet sound under each inhale. His hand was still pressed to his chest.
“You coming?” she asked.
He nodded. He’d left his shirt at the shack this morning, hadn’t planned on going to town. But the man’s face was grey, and the clinic was ten minutes, and the anarchists were still at their table, still surrounded by their papers and their flags and their plans for people far away.
He got in the passenger seat. The vinyl was hot, stuck to his bare skin. The woman started the engine, pulled out of the clearing, drove down the dirt track toward the road. In the rearview mirror, he could see the camp shrinking, the purple bus, the canopy with its flags, the people going about their ordinary lives.
The man in the back seat made a sound—not words, just a sound. The woman drove faster.
The clinic was in a converted house on a side street, three blocks from the hardware store. White paint, green trim, a sign that said COMMUNITY HEALTH in letters that had once been black and were now grey with sun and age. A ramp led up to the door. Pots with dead flowers sat on either side—someone had stopped watering them weeks ago.
They helped the man inside. A woman at the desk looked up, saw Dale’s face, then looked at him—naked, dusty, his skin still damp from the morning swim. Her eyes moved down and up again, quick, professional.
“No time to get dressed, huh?”
She opened a cupboard behind her, pulled out a towel, handed it to him. He wrapped it around his waist.
Then Dale was being taken back, through a door, gone, and there was nothing to do but wait.
The woman with grey hair sat in a plastic chair. He went outside.
The porch was shaded, cooler than the car. He sat on the steps, his bare back against the railing, and watched the street. A pickup truck passed, then nothing for a long time. A dog trotted by on some errand of its own, didn’t look at him. The flag outside the post office hung limp—stars and stripes, faded, frayed at the edge where the wind had worked at it. Another flag. Another piece of cloth on a pole.
An hour passed. The shadows moved. A car pulled into the clinic’s lot, and an old woman got out, walked slowly up the ramp, went inside.
The woman with grey hair came out.
“They’re keeping him,” she said. “Something with his blood pressure. His medication. He’ll be okay, probably.”
He nodded.
“Thanks,” she said. “For pushing.”
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
She drove back to camp. He stayed in town.
Ruth’s cafe was cool inside, the stone walls holding the morning chill even as the afternoon blazed outside. He pushed through the door, heard the small bell ring, felt Ruth’s eyes on him as he crossed to the counter.
She looked at him—the towel around his waist, his bare chest, the dust on his skin. Her face didn’t change.
“Coffee,” she said.
“Please.”
She poured it without asking how he took it. Black, no sugar. She remembered.
He took the cup to the alcove, to Michael’s armchair, to the fireplace that wasn’t lit in summer. The leather was warm from the afternoon sun that slanted through the window. He sank into it, drew his legs up, the towel shifting, covering what it covered.
The couple at the table near the window didn’t look up. The old man reading a newspaper didn’t notice or didn’t care.
He drank his coffee. The afternoon light moved slowly across the floor, catching dust motes, warming the stones. Outside, the town continued—a car passing, someone walking by, the ordinary life of a place that had learned not to notice him.
The bookshelf was there, beside the fireplace. The same jumble of paperbacks and hardcovers, the same lack of organization. He didn’t look for the Stirner. It was where he’d left it, on the lower shelf. Waiting.
He closed his eyes.
The man’s face—grey, sweating, the blue lips. The anarchists at their table, surrounded by their papers. The flags rustling in the hot wind.
He let it go. The chair held him. The stone walls held the cool. Ruth moved behind the counter, the small sounds of her work—water running, a cup set down, the quiet rhythm of a life.
Three days passed.
Dale came back from the clinic with a paper bag full of pills and instructions he probably wouldn’t follow. The bag was white, the pills inside rattling when he moved. He sat outside his van most of the day now, not doing much, letting people bring him things. The camp took care of him the way the camp took care of everyone—without discussion, without organization. Someone brought soup. Someone brought water. Someone sat with him when the evening came down and the loneliness got bad.
The anarchists kept to themselves.
He noticed them at a distance—their canopy, their flags, their table covered with papers. The keffiyehs had softened now, been washed or just worn, the factory stiffness working out of them. One of the flags had been repaired, the torn seam stitched with thread that didn’t quite match, a darker green against the pale green of the original. Someone had done it by hand, the stitches uneven, pulling slightly where the tension wasn’t right.
The morning of the fourth day, he woke before dawn.
The shack was dark, the only sound his own breathing and the creek in the distance. He lay on his pad, feeling the packed earth beneath him, the chill that had settled in the night. Then he rose and walked.
The undergrowth was wet with dew. It soaked his legs as he pushed through, cold, leaving trails down his skin that caught the first grey light. A bird called—one note, repeated, questioning. Another answered from further off.
The creek pool was still, the surface like metal in the pre-dawn dimness. He waded in without pausing, gasping at the cold, and swam. His strokes were rough at first, the body resisting, then smoothing as the muscles warmed and remembered. He swam until his breath came hard, then floated, looking up at the sky as it lightened.
His hand drifted down. The cold water made everything tight, contracted, but the touch was warm, his own heat against the chill. He stroked slowly, not chasing anything, just following what the body wanted. The pleasure built in layers—the cold, the warmth, the stillness, the growing light. He came with his face to the sky, his body clenching in the water, and lay there afterward, floating, empty, the sun breaking over the treeline and turning the pool to gold.
Footsteps on the rocks.
He opened his eyes. The woman from the van was standing at the edge of the pool, looking down at him. The light was behind her, her face in shadow.
“We’re leaving today,” she said. “The march is tomorrow.”
He floated. The water moved against his skin in small currents, the aftermath of his swimming, settling now toward stillness.
“You could come,” she said.
He didn’t answer. A dragonfly crossed the pool, its wings catching the new sun, and landed on a rock near her feet.
“You could see what it’s like. Being part of something larger than yourself.”
He stood. The water came to his waist. He walked toward the rocks, toward her, climbed out. The stone was cold yet, no sun on it, and he stood there dripping, naked, looking at her.
She looked back. Her eyes moved down his body, up again, not lingering, just seeing.
“No,” he said.
She nodded. He couldn’t tell if she was surprised or not. Her face had learned to hold things in.
“Okay,” she said.
She turned and walked back toward the camp. He watched her go—the careful steps on the uneven ground, the keffiyeh around her neck, the way she held her shoulders. Then he lay down on the stone and closed his eyes and let the sun warm him as it rose.
By noon they were gone.
He watched them pack from across the clearing. The canopy came down first, folded with practiced motions, stowed in the back of the van. Then the table, the chairs, the boxes of flyers and pamphlets and clipboards. The flags came last—unclipped from their poles, folded into triangles the way flags were folded, tucked away.
The van’s engine started, coughed, caught. Someone revved it once, checking. Exhaust rose in the still air, blue-grey, dissipating.
The thin young man walked over.
He was standing by the fire pit, not doing anything in particular, just standing. The young man stopped a few feet away, hands in his pockets.
“Thanks for—” He stopped. “I mean. The thing with the van. And the—” He stopped again.
They stood there. A bird called. The van’s engine idled, a low rumble across the clearing.
“Good luck,” the young man said finally. “With the—whatever it is you do.”
He nodded.
The young man walked back to the van, climbed in. The doors closed. The engine revved again, and then the van was moving, pulling out of the clearing, down the dirt track. The sound faded—engine noise, then tires on gravel, then nothing.
The clearing was quiet.
The poles where the flags had hung were still there, stuck in the ground. Empty now, bare wood, the clips at the top glinting in the sun. Someone would pull them up eventually. Or they’d stay there until the next group came, the next flags, the next cause.
Arthur picked up his guitar.
The first notes came slow, tentative, finding a melody. Then it settled into something—not a song, exactly, more a pattern, repeating, varying, going nowhere and everywhere at once. He sat down on a log near the fire and listened.
The old man came over, sat nearby. His fishing net was finished, neatly folded, resting on his knee. He didn’t say anything. Neither did anyone else.
The music continued. The sun moved. Somewhere in the camp, someone was cooking—the smell of onions, of garlic, drifting on the warm air. Dale was sitting outside his van, his paper bag of pills on the step beside him. He was watching the empty space where the anarchists had been.
The shape was already in there.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
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