Free Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud

thinking the procession merely a demonstration of strength—but the mood soon changed when, after arriving at the Ford building, the first troops stopped abruptly and fixed their bayonets at a crowd of veterans, just then lining up for mess call.
    The last time I saw bayonets I was going through Marne, came the shout of one veteran.
    A whistle rose through the crowd. A few men laughed.
    You got three minutes! yelled an officer. Three minutes, I warn you! And then what? a veteran called.
    Then it’s the Marne all over again, another replied.
    A stone soared through the crowd. At first it looked like a bird. Then the riot began. The infantrymen donned gas masks and approached the billets, tossing tear gas grenades behind them as they went. The recently evacuated buildings were set on fire, and before long the entire city seemed engulfed in gas and flame. An officer moving between his ranks said, Be careful, men, don’t burn any flags. But everything was burned. The scraps of wood and other materials that had been used as shelters for those billeted outside the government houses—everything.
    The veterans retreated. There was nothing else to do. A few stood their ground and were grazed in warning by the sabers of approaching soldiers. One man, blood streaming from his ear and holding aloft a tattered flag, screamed, Hit me! Hit me, you yellow bastards! I took it then and I can take it now!
    And somewhere—amid it all—Arthur and Douglas were moving, Alden with them. Somewhere, Chet. Somewhere, John and Aida. This more than anything was difficult for Sutton, later, to imagine. The child pressed tightly against Aida’s breast to protect it from the choking gas. The child, breathing in terrified gasps, forcing her head against her mother’s hand—unable to tell the difference any longer between the protection, which the hand delivered, and the smothering air.
    What thoughts would have flickered through the mind of the tall Indian as he pressed himself, along with his young wife and child, to the outer limits of the crowd? Only to find that everyone else was pressing in the same direction. Only to find that there was, therefore, no outside or inside any longer to press toward, and that likewise it was impossible to discern between the shouts of the veterans and the shouts of the soldiers; between his own thoughts and the noise of the street—or even, indeed, between the future and the past. So that the stories of his ancestors(which had been passed down from generation to generation, and which now, as ever—so profoundly had they been etched there as to become nearly a physical trait—trembled in his brain) mixed indistinguishably with his own deeply personal and most ardent desires. How they had once been driven by cattle prod, from the fertile Mississippi River Delta over seven hundred miles, through fire and flood and driving hail, into the dusty center of the beleaguered continent where nothing grew, and how they would, at last, be relieved of that history, became one, a single element, which the Indian moved through then; his arms stretched out as far as he could extend them, as though moving—or attempting to move—through the impassable space of a uninterpretable dream.
    Finally, though, there would have been—there would have had to have been—some sudden, dramatic shift in pressure. By whatever outside force: some change, some slight shift, and then—no more resistance. The crowd, unexpectedly released from whatever it was that had kept them knotted, both pressed upon and pressing against one another, suddenly free to move in any direction they chose.
    Without pausing to consider any other option, the Indian, his wife and child—absorbed by the singular determination of the crowd— would have turned, then, as one, and headed back toward the camp. There was something irresistible about it. That final blaze on the horizon: so big it lit up the whole