Free Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

we’re glad you care. But that is not how we go about this. If you want to be a part of this, then you need to learn there are some rules. We don’t interrupt. We don’t swear. We don’t—”
    “If I want to be part of what?” Victor said, interrupting again. “Getting my ass whupped?” He was laughing good-naturedly now. He didn’t need a fucking lecture from this guy. “And who said I care?”

11
    King looked at her friends laughing and talking on the cold concrete, laughing in the shadow of the hotel, talking while the cops nervously fingered their tear gas, sitting and laughing in a small circle that contained all the love you could ever hope to contain among four people sitting cross-legged at the corner of an intersection in a dying city, and she was surprised to feel a hitch in her throat.
    Here they were, one short for lockdown, and which one would it be?
    The youngest of them, the nineteen-year-old they called the Doctor, who lived on a garlic farm and went around everywhere barefoot.
    “A thousand years from now,” the Doctor was fond of saying (ecological apocalypse being one of his favorite subjects), “we’ll all be walking barefoot. All of us. Walking barefoot through the wreckage; barefoot through the swishing grass.”
    Grinning while he spoke, the Doctor in overalls, with his blond hair the color of cornstalks hanging neat to his OshKosh buttons, he was serious and self-mocking and there wasn’t much in the world that could make her laugh like one of the Doctor’s rants. They were exaggerated and informed and passionate and a joke and she believed it and half-believed it—ecological apocalypse—she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t feel it looming, and yet weirdly that was what made her laugh.
    Six months ago, the Doctor and a team of climbers had scaled the Golden Gate Bridge. They had climbed forty stories in the whipping wind while the cops watched and swore below. The fire department tried to reach them with their longest ladder trucks, but they were far too high for that, clinging to the cables. Finally they revealed the purpose of their climb. They dropped a sixty-foot banner for the cops and the firemen and Bay Area commuters to quickly read. For the news helicopters to linger on. The words of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatistas. It showed him in his black ski mask with his signature pipe protruding from the mouth hole. It read:
    WE SEEK A WORLD IN WHICH THERE IS ROOM
FOR MANY WORLDS
    Not the Doctor. He might be a bad-ass climber, but he wouldn’t make it in lockdown.
    Edie? Could it be Edie? Edie who didn’t make King laugh—she made her believe it might all be possible. Another world. Another way to live.
    Edie, whose gray hair shone damply, rain running across her deeply lined face, so much worrying, so much thinking and talking and planning, the mark of all those years engaged in the struggle, and yet they seemed not to make her old, but to light her from within, to saturate every word she spoke. Edie, who had been an AIDS activist back when people still thought you caught it from toilet seats.
    And what about John Henry? John Henry, her first trainer in nonviolence. John Henry who first gave her the courage to go into nonviolent lockdown when King had still been a red-eyed revolutionary living ten to a house out in West Seattle.
    John Henry who taught her the necessity of patience and struggle.
    John Henry who taught her how people changed their world—small brave groups willing to risk everything. Willing to sacrifice everything. John Henry who taught her the meaning of ordinary daily courage.
    No, not John Henry and his windy mattress in whatever abandoned building he had most recently decided to claim as home. Not John Henry and his political hands, his political beard, his political mouth that kissed her hips gently as if asking is this okay, even as he sucked and slurped hungrily in the cool clear light of another activist squat.
    The Doctor saying now,