Red Dawn

by Alice Webb-Smith

It was a riot, it was a revolution. I saw the bloodshed and heard the screaming but I was there, with my Swiss Army knife, thinking it was the right thing to do. And it seemed right, for a time. We had all been hungry. I wish I could say we had more of a reason to go down in the street with our flags and our screams but we didn’t, not really. We were angry, of course. At that time we were always angry, like there was a little ball of white-hot anger in our bellies instead of food. We were drunk on rage, mostly.

I remember the peaceful protests, people walking into the street, spontaneously. We didn’t say anything to anyone at that time, too afraid we would be seen for what we were. We hid from the watchful eye of the silver camera and tried to be certain nothing and nobody would ever see us as the menace we were. The menace we still are. They gassed the protestors. I saw my friends running, hiding their face in their scarves to protect themselves from the fumes, from the cameras that would record everything and hold it against them in court, hiding from the metallic voices that would have presented them with cold evidence and asked if they recognized the people in the picture.

I swung my knife around, again and again and again until I found a gun, and even then I made sure it was not one of their guns, the guns that made you into a soldier whether you wanted it or not, the guns that used your blood and your skin and your eyes until you were nothing but a gun, too, just another flesh projectile in the mass. But it was an old-fashioned one, not as reliable, not as precise but not entirely as enslaving.

In the street, blood coating the stones we had pulled to make barricades, surrounded by the screams of the dying, I fired until my fingers were sore, until my gun fell from my hand, until I was the last standing; and I took the red dawn and the red blood and made a flag out of them, a cloak in which I wrapped myself as they fired with their steel-cold eyes and their fingers, fired at me with the gun they had made out of their body.

Alice Webb-Smith studies dead people and unused languages, which, as she told a friend, would be a fantastic name for a band. She mostly lives off tea and stories. Despite her best efforts, she never managed to become an urban legend, so she settled with studying history and writing when something sticks in her head and refuses to leave, or when she sees a raven, or when it’s raining and she has nothing better to do and nothing to read.