Story: Palma (part two)

Palma

(part two)

Palma kept her door stoppered open. Her message: that if they surveilled everything, she had no secrets and couldn’t care. She had pretty clothes and never wore them. She had keepsakes of her mother’s and would let them be smashed to the street below. This smashing of treasures was G.R.A. propaganda, filtered into consciousness through a video, that had flickered up on the huge screen. They had mounted the screens on housetops ringing Palma’s territory; video news clips glared their music and speech, their bright colors, nightlong, through every window.

Some benign woman interviewed.

The reporter empathetic. “Oh, no! But the sergeant helped you. You say you’d been afraid to ask…”

“He was decent, that’s right. He walked us down, and the office was closed, but…”

She got her purse back, whatever. The filtering lay in the background, another conversation, two exclaiming passersby…he threw everything on the street. He told me a person with nice things needs a nice place to keep them, that’s not you. Now you can move along, since you wouldn’t

Palma urged her followers not to pay the new rents, to hold their rights to their own expropriated property.

At somewhere near the three-months’ mark, on schedule, after the food shortages were ended, the new landlords had doubled rents. You see, she wanted to write to Anton, will you see, how this cheeseparing efficiency informs their process. They want to avoid spending resources, the four of them having to agree, and settle out the equity, so they break us in cycles. You say heart to me, and I say, there is no such thing.

However, the capital had a heart.

And when the G.R.A. wanted to clear this district of squatters, having made these of its inheritors; when they wanted to knock down the houses for their new apartment blocks, they would begin by making everyone ill.

“Do you have complaints today?” she asked Frederick.

His answer was no answer. “You?”

“Steady.”

A knock at the doorframe. Mary Wainwright, her hands ushering the Hidtha Ftheorde.

“Ah, now you’re here, will you help move the sofa?”

Palma found it best setting Mary to work. The Ftheorde in silence hoisted one end; Frederick crouched and raised the other.

Mary fluttered. “Oh, but. You’re not going to put that across the door?”

Then: “I guess, why not, if you think so.”

Palma went to the window, a figure in black. She made her back straight, and stared. They could measure that stare; they would learn she looked only at the snow-capped mountains cordoning the peninsula. She gave her place to Frederick. He chose, hearing a horn from the pavement, to follow this car, shifting his glower in a slow and deliberate way, up the street.

2

Tourmaline

Tourmaline (part three)

(2016, Stephanie Foster)