Fifty naked women are marching down Fourteenth Street. Their bodies are a symphony, rounded like cellos or sleek and silver as flutes. Their chant is a chorus, rising to crescendo, their voices cured in oak. Through intersections and insults, over cigarette butts and tossed paper cups of cold coffee, the women swerve, swoop, resettle, a flock of starlings.

From the sidewalk, a man in a pinstripe suit and a starched cotton shirt is filming the march. He traps the women’s images for the same reasons he once trapped hibernating cicadas in a pickle jar: to rip them from context, to expose their hideous angles and ungainly bumps to his followers.

In her cubicle, the man’s assistant is watching the video. The naked women are a stand of trees, dappled and leafed, reforesting the gray city blocks. She wonders what it would be like to wear her skin like the women do, like it is a pinstripe suit or a starched cotton shirt. What it would be like to care about something so much that she would march her clotted thighs and the inked name of her dead mother past a man like her boss, knowing this presentation of herself and her nerve will make him want to fuck her and kill her in equal parts. Doing it anyway.

The march is rolling south, but before their bodies leave the camera’s view, she sees a woman lift her long, gray braid from where it hangs down her back. She flings it upward like it is a string on a kite, like it might catch the wind and send her sailing through sky.

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Header photograph by Holly Pelesky
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson