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

“You’re entitled to believe what you want to believe. But for me walking among those trees, the smell of wet earth, the light filtering down through the canopy, the branches bearded with moss? It was so quiet and peaceful you could hear individual raindrops dripping. Say what you want. For me that place was as close as I come to believing in a god. That place, among those trees, it was a holy place. It was sacred.”
    “But our fight isn’t with the loggers,” Edie said.
    “Or the cops,” John Henry said.
    “If you bring class into the equation,” Edie said, “then they’re victims of the same political-economic system. If we want this to be a truly democratic revolution, we need to understand our fight is not with the working class at all.”
    King nodded. She believed in the power of love. Love was the animating force that filled her body. She let it move her arms, her legs, her lungs. It was love that governed the workings of her mouth, the words called forth from her larynx. And yet it was a weight on her heart, pressing down, because while she knew any one of these folks would joyfully join their brothers and sisters in lockdown, to let the force of their community confront face-to-face the force of the police, King herself was less eager. She knew what could happen. She was not afraid to take the gas—it was just that in some way her love for these people made her want it to not be so goddamn necessary.
    For the country to change, did blood always have to be spilled?
    One short for lockdown. And who would it be?

12
    When the Doctor had started talking about holy places, a memory had stolen unbidden into Victor’s mind. A memory of his mother and father’s basement. A memory of his mother who died when he was still a boy. She absconded for better climes, set sail for the never-never—but he didn’t, truthfully, harbor any grudge against the shitball world for taking her. Nor her for letting it. Because when Mom jumped ship and left a half-orphaned brown boy at sea, the other thing she left behind balanced the scales in Victor’s mind. Boxes and boxes of books. Cardboard boxes of books stacked floor to ceiling in the darkest, dustiest corner of the basement.
    Victor’s mother had been an activist, an unrepentant hippie, a teacher and an artist, a black woman who had a child with a white man, and when he left, years on she married a different white man. Whatever any of that meant, she had been a woman who had a heart which could not turn away any stray, any of the bad-luck bodies the world kicked around, and for that Victor loved her and did not worry once about the first father who never was. His mother was father and mother both. A tremendous force that even he recognized. She was also a painter and there in her studio, in the girdered half-light beneath the underpass, his mother had painted abstract acrylics, huge canvases of a shimmering gray which she then defaced with a stub of charcoal, the first thing that found her hand. Victor had never known quite what to make of his mother’s art, but he loved her for it, loved watching as she scrawled collapsed apartment blocks and smoldering cars, McDonald’s crushed beneath the rubble, trees growing from the craters. Working fast, she drew stick-figure dogs eating garbage in the rain, except the dogs were maybe people.
    She painted a canvas gray and then sketched great sailing ships; drew dark outlines of exploded city buses, charred bodies climbing from the windows, throngs of black charcoal people in piles of slashes and lines, wide gaping charcoal mouths, black charcoal X’s for the sightless eyes of the dead.
    Victor had decided when he was about ten that the dogs eating garbage were definitely people.
    His mother, the woman who had raised him and taught him, holding her stub of charcoal and thinking, wiping her chin with one ash-stained wrist, the woman whose blood ran in his veins, physically present on some other continent of being and emotion