FICTION | Hannah Wilken Protest Story

FICTION

PROTEST STORY

By Hannah Wilken

At the gas station halfway between Winchester and Washington, Aunt Bobbi bought a pack of gummy bears, and another filled with chocolate-covered pretzels that tasted like plastic. Everyone on the bus was on their way to Washington for the protest. The adults kept commenting on how mature Emma was for going down to march. Somewhere along the highway in New Jersey, she fell asleep against Bobbi’s shoulder. When she woke in the capital, her neck was stiff and her fingers were covered in artificial sugar.

The bus pulled into Union Station as the sun rose over the monuments. They disembarked and a line formed to collect the backpacks and handmade signs stored under the bus. It was exciting to think about all the people coming in from all over to stand for the same thing. But as the crowd began to walk off toward the growing crowds, Bobbi pulled her in the opposite direction.

“Come on,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Let’s go visit them first.”

When they reached the front steps of the National Gallery of Art, Emma’s feet were already tired. She probably hadn’t tied her sneakers tight enough. Bobbi noticed and stopped at a hot dog cart. She talked to the man selling the food, complimented him on his paper hat, and bought each of them a pretzel and

a coffee. The drink was bitter and unfamiliar, but Emma drank it anyway. The pretzel tasted good, so she mimicked Bobbi and dunked hunks of it into her cup. They waited for the museum to open, eating breakfast on the marble steps.

“Bobbi, why are we here? I don’t see any protesters.”

Bobbi answered with a question. “Do you know I used to live here?”

Emma shook her head. All she knew about Bobbi was that she had lived in New York for a while. That her mother worried about her aunt and whispered to her dad late at night while Emma listened through the radiator.

“I spent a summer here in my twenties.” She paused. “I wasn’t happy back then, but I found these sculptures in the museum one day and visited them most mornings. They didn’t make me happy, but they did make me feel something.”

Emma didn’t understand what Bobbi was talking about but a tenderness in her aunt’s voice compelled her to put her hand on her aunt’s shaking shoulder. She looked around the empty Mall for a sign of the protest. It was clear that this visit was important to her aunt, but it felt strange to have traveled all this way to now be away from the activity. Emma asked again why they were there and if they could return to the people from the bus, but as Bobbi began to speak a guard opened the museum’s front doors.

It was empty inside except for a few guards and despite the morning sun, the entrance was cavernous and dark. Massive marble pillars held the heavy ceiling, reminding Emma of the trees behind her house. Without a map, Bobbi walked to the left-most side of the building. Emma half-ran to keep up as they passed sculptures missing arms and legs and religious paintings showing moments she knew from nursery school. She wanted to stop and see them but Bobbi barely paused between rooms.

They walked through a few more hallways until Bobbi stopped in a small, brightly lit side gallery.

Like the rest of the museum, the room was empty of visitors. The walls were painted eggshell blue and a wooden bench faced a gold-lined panel. Two wooden statues painted in fading pastels flanked the scene. Mary and the archangel. They were propped on two white pedestals and the effect placed the figures high enough that even Bobbi, tall for a woman, only reached their waists. As soon as Bobbi saw them, she stopped, closed her eyes, and then slowly approached them. Emma held back.

When Bobbi was a few feet away from the statue on the left, she stopped and stood, as if waiting for the young man to speak. She leaned her head back to gaze into his faded face, which was frozen in a slight smile. His lips parted as if in mid-thought. Draped in yellow-tinged robes, the man’s right hand wrapped around his chest while his left reached out to the woman next to him. Emma could see his delicate fingers curved in midmovement. Instead of reaching back to him, the woman’s right hand hovered over her chest as if she were saying, Me? Am I the one you came to see?

“After all these years, they still can’t take their eyes off each other,” her aunt said. Emma worried she would start crying, but Bobbi stretched her hand out, instead, as though she might touch the painted wood. At the last second, she stopped and brought her hand to her chest, mimicking Mary’s gesture.

Outside, her aunt seemed happy. In the distance, drums beat while loud music echoed off the monuments. Bobbi waved at the man who had sold them the salty pretzels. He didn’t wave back. As they walked along the Mall, protesters milled around with signs and banners and Emma tried to read all the messages.

Each group seemed to be headed to a different kind of protest. A few people held anti-war signs while others had giant flags with anti-surveillance slogans. She kept seeing things like “fair trade,” “pro-choice,” “anti-Israel,” and “environmental destruction.” Some people looked angry; others acted as though they were walking to a circus. Children wandered around, the parents chasing some and dragging others. She felt like such an adult to be there without anyone holding her hand.

Emma was relieved. They had finally made their way to the protest. Being away from the commotion had made her feel like she was breaking her promise to her mother. She hadn’t let Bobbi out of her sight but it did feel like she had done something wrong. Her aunt was becoming more and more energized. As the crowd grew bigger, the mass of people dictated which direction they walked. Chants started with one person and then passed along from group to group like a wave. Each time a new one started, Bobbi threw her fist in the air. She yelled, her voice cracking, and the farther they walked, the more animated she became.

A man stood with his young son, watching the protest from the sidewalk. The boy, not much younger than Emma, held a piece of cardboard with a hand-drawn peace sign and was cheering on the crowd.

“This isn’t a parade,” Bobbi screamed at the boy. Scared, Emma tried to pull her away and back into the crowd but she wasn’t strong enough. Bobbi turned to the confused looking father. “You should be teaching your son about the death and destruction, not bringing him here to smile at the suffering. Fuck you.” The boy started to cry and the father looked away, embarrassed this strange woman was making a scene. She pulled harder to move her aunt away from the family.

Emma was disoriented now, too short to see over people’s

shoulders. Maybe they stood on the Mall. Maybe they were walking by the National Gallery again. Maybe they were in a different city altogether and she had been confused about what Bobbi told her in the dark on the bus. The further the protest moved, the louder Bobbi’s chants became. Emma noticed the shifting glances around them. People held on to their bags tightly as Bobbi walked past, her fist now permanently in the air. Emma handed her aunt her water bottle, but Bobbi shoved it away, causing the precious water to spill out of Emma’s hand.

It was starting to feel as though Bobbi’s anger was wearing off on the crowd. The call and response shouts were getting louder. Through a gap, Emma could see the White House. Bush was supposedly home, and she imagined him standing with his hands in his suit pockets, looking out at the thousands of people screaming his name. She felt so angry she wanted to spit on the ground, but it felt performative, so she shook her head in his direction instead.

They turned onto another street and Emma realized that Bobbi wasn’t one of the people standing next to her. She pushed her way through a trio of ex-hippies to see if she somewhere up ahead but no. She stood still, trying to spot her aunt’s familiar lavender scarf and high ponytail. A tightness clammed hard on her lungs. Bobbi was gone.

Pushing away from the crowd, Emma remembered what her mother used to say when she got lost at the department store. Find a place and wait because her mother was out there, somewhere, looking for her. If they both wandered around the maze of stores, they would never find each other. Maybe Bobbi was also out there, standing in one place and waiting for Emma to find her.

Protesters lined a chain-link fence in front of the White

House. They shook the metal and screamed swear words at Bush. Would they get in? Would he run away? Was there a payphone nearby? Emma reached into her jean jacket pocket to find any change left over from the middle-of-the-night gas station stop. All she could find was a penny and a couple quarters. Even if it was enough to call home, something told her that reporting to her mother than she had lost Bobbi was worse than being abandoned in Washington.

Emma walked away from the protest, searching the faces for Bobbi’s familiar profile. Police stood around smoking, talking, unfazed by the mass of people. A group of teenagers laughed at an encampment on the side of the lawn. The September air was warm, but she felt a chill. She walked away from the crowd to get a better look at the whole. On the edge of a nearby Avenue, Emma watched the commotion at a distance. It was like watching a movie. Her stomach grumbled. The peanutbutter sandwiches her mom had made the day before were in the backpack Bobbi carried. Emma closed her eyes against the blue sky. She couldn’t do anything right.

When she finally did look up, she saw Bobbi, huddled under a statue of a man on a horse. Burning candles, discarded homemade signs, and trash were scattered around her aunt’s dirtied sneakers. Someone had graffitied Bush Lied Thousands Died in red spray paint across the belly of the horse. Bobbi looked so small.

Emma approached her aunt carefully in the same way Bobbi had approached the statues just a few hours before.

“Bobbi, the whole world’s ending, isn’t it?”

Her aunt picked up her head from between her hands, tears dripping from her chin.

“Honey, it already did.”