Da Revolution Begins

“So how much do you want to sell it for?” Peter asked, inspecting our collection of unwanted crap. We’d filled a few boxes by that point, full of plates, mugs, and old clothing. I was busily sorting through Silas’ toys.

“Nothing,” I declared. “We’re giving it away.” I pulled out a stuffed baby kiwi and tossed it in the box. Silas watched, giggling. He had no idea.

“We are?” Peter held up his CD collection. “But couldn’t we get a few bucks for all this?”

The baby crawled over and picked up his plastic saxophone, a hideous little toy that I’ve always hated. I yanked it away and threw it in the box. Silas looked down at his empty hand, confused. Then he started to cry. I rolled my eyes. “Here,” I told him. “Have a beer bottle. It’s empty. You can roll it.”

He took the bottle carefully, then held it upside down, a trickle of warm beer dripping down the front of his overalls. “Da da?” he asked, not quite sure what he was supposed to do with it.

I continued throwing away his toys. “DA!” I repeated. “That’s right! Da! Today, DA REVOLUTION BEGINS!”

Now Peter looked worried. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re not selling ANYTHING,” I told him. I had thought long and hard about this, and I knew what had to be done. “We’re giving it away. We will subvert the bourgeois supremacy!”

“By giving away our toaster?” Peter sounded skeptical.

My eyes blazed. “We are revolutionaries. We seek the abolition of all private property.”

Silas started rolling the beer bottle across the room, heading for the kitchen cabinets.

“But I was in Berlin just after the wall came down,” Peter protested. “People have tried this before, and it didn’t work.”

“Ha!” I scoffed. “You can’t intimidate me with your cheap intimidation tactics. I won’t be cowed. You can’t cow me with your Capitalist cattle prod, you Capitalist Cowpoke!"

The beer bottle made contact with the metal oven, then shattered into several pieces. His toy now destroyed, Silas started pulling cans of tomatoes out of the cabinets, enjoying the crunching sound they made against the shards of broken glass.

“Shouldn’t we put some shoes on the kid?” Peter was using his soft voice now, the one he employed when I was pregnant and drinking all the juice out of the pickle jar as though it were a mystical elixir.

“The proletariat must bathe in the blood of his convictions,” I insisted. “The boy needs no shoes.”

Peter picked up Silas and sat on the floor, in a slurry of warm beer and broken glass. The baby was no longer crying. He was playing with a fork he’d found on the ground, waving it about and occasionally making stabbing motions at his eye.

“Let me get this straight,” Peter continued in his softest voice. “You want to give away all our possessions in an effort to end Capitalist oppression.”

“Yes. You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.”

Peter ignored my pithy Stalin reference. “What about our money? All the savings we worked for, the past fifteen months in the asshole of the world?”

I considered this. “That’s different. We must control the means of production in order to successfully conclude the revolution. The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea!”

And then, just like a pig-dog, Peter seized on my one point of weakness. “Yeah, speaking of the sea. What about Sereia? Are we giving away our sailboat, too?”

“Um. Well, no,” I conceded. “But we can give away our teapot. And our chickens.”

Silas, for some reason, found this hilarious. He dropped his fork and started clapping his hands, giggling like a crazy baby. I took him in my arms and held him close. “That’s right,” I whispered in his ear. “Who cares if we give away all our stuff? We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

“Fuck that,” said Peter. “I’m keeping my chains. I need them to anchor my yacht.”