Revolutionary Fiction: "Chokepoints"

Today: short fiction on the topic of nonviolent civil disobedience, violent protest, and FBI suppression of activist movements.

Today is the last day of “Revolutions” month at Better Strangers, so I’m doing a new thing: I’m posting a piece of short fiction built off of the topics discussed this month, most notably the article on Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Footnotes are included explaining the real-world analogues. Because publishing fiction is new for me, this is and will forever be only available to paid subscribers. Upgrade to paid here:

“Filming,” Jake said, and Mark Kelly took a deep breath. He looked around once: the gallery was mildly busy, one other gentleman was next to them, hands behind his back, taking in the famous melting clocks, but he took no notice of the preparations happening next to him. Mark made eye contact with Marta, and together, they pulled the cans out of their pockets, popped off the lids, and tossed the contents – a tarry, black paint – on to the Dali¹.

The gentleman next to them let out a gurgling moan, and reeled back. Mark's hands began to shake. He unzipped his jacket revealing a bright orange DIVEST NOW shirt, fumbled a tube of Krazy Glue out of his other pocket, where it clattered to the ground. He bent down, picked it up, spurted the glue on his hand and slapped it on the wall underneath the painting, where Marta was already kneeling glued to the wall².