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Scene: Swastikas Beneath the White Paint
The library’s bike racks glinted under the sun, their steel bars twisted like frozen screams. Snake wheeled his chair closer, squinting. There, etched into the metal—tiny swastikas, barely visible beneath streaks of fresh white paint. The librarian, Ms. Greer, stood nearby, brush in hand. Her smile was a locked door.
“Just graffiti,” she said, dabbing another layer of white paint over the symbols. “We keep things clean here.”
Snake’s fingers tightened on his book—Roads to Nowhere: Hitler’s Highways and the Ghosts They Carry. Learning to read had been like disarming a bomb; every word exposed another wire. The “Ordnung Public Library” was a vault of silence, its shelves curated to omit how Hitler’s Autobahn blueprint had metastasized into America’s car-cult, how asphalt became a weapon of displacement, how “Mr. Hitler’s Army on Four Wheels” now idled outside, guzzling lithium and gasoline to suffocate the globe.
“Why tell us to leave our wheelchairs outside??” Snake snarled. “You know they’ll get stolen. Or destroyed by the elements.”
Ms. Greer’s laugh was a dismissal. “Rules are rules. We can’t have clutter inside.”
Clutter. The word hissed. Snake saw the unspoken math: No bikes meant no access. No access meant no knowledge. No knowledge meant no resistance. The library’s glass walls reflected the parking lot—acres of cars, their engines growling like a reawakened war machine. Behind those walls, the forests were placed behind their glass, Gaza’s rubble reduced to a distant “conflict.”
Ms. Greer froze. The swastikas bled through her white paint like ghosts.
Snake wondered how many Black neighborhoods had been paved over to build that road.
Ms. Greer’s brush trembled. “This isn’t the place for… politics.”
“It’s always political,” Snake said. “You just painted yours white.”
