Sunil Yapa - Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Or was it the most clearheaded sanity — this last leap? The final decision you would have the power to make. Which would it be? Hurry now, the tanks are rolling in the street, the troops are at your door. Time to choose. Slavery or suicide? Surrender or fight?

But this time, no. She would not let her rage overcome her. Neither her despair. She would not meet violence with violence. She believed in the transcendent power of love, the overwhelming force of nonviolence, and it was love that had saved her long ago when the anger had burned her to nothing. Love that showed her another person to be, love that taught her how to recognize the rage and not be consumed by it.

Victor. Did she have enough love to include Victor?

Victor, who was now covered up on the pavement, leaking blood, while four cops stood above him beating his prone body with batons and measuring their blows as if what they needed to control the situation was more pain.

If only they could apply more pain.

A woman on the edge making soul-struck cries with every blow.

The way they measured the shots. The way those motherfuckers stood and lifted and paused and measured. The way they paused and calculated before driving their batons into his back. The way they stepped back to make room for the others who came rushing to join as if it were a form of sport.

How bright blood is when it leaves the body. How quickly it pools on the pavement. How it comes streaming out from the tiniest hole, comes out so fast it’s as if it was waiting to leap out of your body since you were born and bawling in your mother’s arms.

What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving within the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.

Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.

But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.

And the thing seemed prolonged, the seconds stretching out into eternity as they stood in a group and hammered at his face, smashed Victor where he lay huddled on the pavement, and King watching and witnessing and then she was running again. But not away. Running toward it this time. Running toward it as surely and swiftly as she once moved her arms in that small backwoods pond where her mother had taught her how to swim. The crowd chanting.

WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY LOOK LIKE???

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!

There was nothing in her mind save the batons falling and her body running. She could have been anywhere. Any dust-choked square on earth. Any running girl, running to save a friend. Look at her go. Headed straight for that fucking armored truck and the mangled motherfucker from this morning. The asshole who made the shot that took him down.

WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY LOOK LIKE???

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!

She dodged three officers, took two steps, one foot grabbed the front bumper of the armored vehicle and then she lifted into the air. The few scattered cops who were protecting the PeaceKeeper moved back in alarm. And then she was flying up toward the hood of the thing and there could have been nothing more surprising than what she saw before her.

The cop with the fucked-up face was not on the hood. He had suddenly disappeared with the Chief and who she saw in his place was a brown-skinned woman with a gun. Her body heavy with armor. King thinking, How did that happen, as she landed and saw her own body mirrored there. A body braced and armed.

WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY LOOK LIKE???

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!

She saw her own boots and her own legs and her own face mirrored in the boots and legs and face of this cop. Her hands. The long fingers. The chewed-to-the-nub fingertips. Yes, a mirror of her own scared and trembling hands. Except this cop was holding a gun.

And King was not.

The first baton went straight to the head, a stereophonic boom that seemed to blow out his ears. Victor tried to crawl away, but someone kicked him and flipped him on his back and then stepped onto his flailing hand. Time seemed to slow. He felt the boot pinning his upturned palm to the pavement, felt the pinch of gravel against his skin, and he felt the beginning of a knowledge. They were working on his body, but he was just a hand turned to the sky. He felt where the tread was worn and thin, felt where the sharp edges dug into his fingers as the cop bore down, felt in his palm every impress and contour of the hard rubber sole. It was as if his hand were the centering essence of his fluid being, he felt it wholly as if he were not a man and a body, but only a hand cradling a boot, open to receive a sky swollen with cloud.

He was both boot and hand. Black boot and brown man’s hand. His hand, skin the color of strong tea, the hard knobby knuckles pressed to the pavement. The warm pulse of blood in the veins, the lined white palm with his creased fortunes and folds. He looked at the storm clouds, blackness within blackness, and he felt something sliding from him.

Cops coming a-running to join in the fun.

The cop lifted his foot, releasing the pressure for a moment, and then smashed the boot down hard to stomp Victor’s hand where it lay on the pavement.

The sound was the crush of shovel on gravel that was the bones in his hand shattering.

Victor screamed. He couldn’t help it. He pulled his destroyed hand to his chest and felt it coming over him fast now, an ache inside his chest that he had felt forever and never named. He didn’t want to die. Simple things this young man loved. The color of the leaves in bright morning, how the green seemed lit from within and the sky so endlessly blue. The smell of woodsmoke high in the mountains. The mottled brown-gray of a river in flood. An open window and whatever sounds might drift through. The song of the world, taxicabs, laughter, birds. Just one bird washing herself in the rain gutter beneath his open window. The quality of attention, to idly watch a bird flutter and preen, to hear the soft whirr of her wings, to hear her whistle.

He did not want to leave this place yet, this planet of mountains and seas, the human body, the blood-heat of a hand pressed against your own. He felt a terrible sadness sweeping over him. There was something about meeting her, perhaps not apparent at first, but which revealed itself slowly, the way that a bell will strike and the awareness of it comes after the fact of the ringing, so too it came over you gradually while spending an afternoon with her digging in the veggie garden, or perhaps you spent your summer Saturdays from grade school on up working down in Beacon Hill, constructing those simple wooden frame houses that had not existed before her arrival, yet which were after such a part of the neighborhood, such a part of the character of the neighborhood and what the neighborhood thought of itself, that it could be said that perhaps she had not organized the men and women and materials, not cleared the lots, not spent every Saturday there with hammer and nails in her dark hands, but instead had arrived with the wooden frames already intact and existing fully built and had only set them down along the avenue in the same manner that she had arrived in Seattle with her young son and climbed the steps to their room and set down their suitcases.

Victor’s mother.

Perhaps you spent a cold and shivering morning opening the soup line, from the time you were eight on up, in the early morning hours before the first school bell, fed the men who would spend all morning, perhaps all day, shivering in their thin clothes from warmer weathers and waiting for a job to come by in the form of a pickup truck and a wave and a whistle. Not so different from the whistle of her own childhood, she had once said to him, the steam-kettle shriek that had called his grandfather to the factory. Maybe you spent a cold morning with her offering these men hot soup and rolls, so that they would have some food in their stomach to sustain the wait, something even to sustain the work were they lucky enough to get it.