The Oath Remains - Scene 6

The Tension Builds

This is Scene Six of The Oath Remains, a speculative fiction novella about family, fracture, and what we’re willing to lose when everything’s on the line.

New scenes drop every Wednesday.

The Tension Builds

It started small.

The pharmacy closed an hour early. No warning. Just a handwritten sign taped inside the door: “Due to staffing.”

At first, I didn’t think much of it. Things close early. People get sick. But that was Monday.

On Tuesday, the library boarded its windows. From the inside.

The glass went dark behind sheets of plywood, and no one said why. No notices. No press release. Just hammering in the early light and a silence that spread outward like a ripple.

By Wednesday, the grocery store had reduced its hours. Shelves were half-stocked, but the aisles felt emptier than the inventory. People didn’t talk. No one asked questions out loud.

The post office said “maintenance” and locked its doors. But no one saw a truck arrive. No mail went out. I stood outside it for a full minute, staring at the red, white, and blue sign that no longer meant anything, and wondered if silence could be contagious.

No one said the word.

But everyone felt it.

The air got heavier. Still. Like the town was holding its breath.

At the co-op, a girl I didn’t know slipped me a folded flyer while I stood in line for eggs. Her voice was careful, almost shy. The way you speak when you don’t know which way someone leans.

I didn’t look at it until I was back in the car.

Nonviolent Witness Training – All Welcome.
Friday, 9AM. Courthouse steps.

The paper still held the warmth of her hand.

I stared at it for too long, until the ink blurred, and the lines folded into one another like they were trying to disappear.

I placed it gently in the glovebox. Not hidden. Not displayed. Just… kept.

Elaine called that afternoon. No preamble.

“They’re saying it’s happening Friday,” she said.

I told her I knew.

We didn’t say how.

We didn’t have to.

That night, I walked the neighborhood.

Not far—just our block. I needed to feel the air. To remind myself the sky was still above us.

It was unusually quiet.

Two teenagers rode by on bikes. No earbuds. No banter. They didn’t look at me. They didn’t look at each other. One wore his backpack over both shoulders. I couldn’t tell if he was going to school or away from it.

Across the street, someone had spray-painted a message on the sidewalk.

WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY.

Block letters. White paint. Still fresh enough to sting the air.

I stopped and read it twice.

Not because I disagreed.

But because I needed to believe someone else still remembered how to speak without hiding.

No one had scrubbed it away. And that, somehow, was its own kind of resistance.

The next morning, the gas station switched to prepay only. The butcher I’d known for ten years avoided my eyes when I asked about Friday. His hands wrapped the chicken in brown paper quickly. Too quickly. His wedding ring tapped against the scale with nervous rhythm.

I wanted to ask him if he had family in uniform. I wanted to ask if he’d seen the footage. If he knew what it was like to watch someone you loved turn into a silence with a weapon.

But I said nothing.

Because that’s what this town had taught us to do lately—nothing out loud.

Doors opened slower. Windows stayed closed even in the heat. The stillness wasn’t calm. It was the kind of hush before something breaks.

At home, I stood on the porch.

The wind moved the trees like they were signaling to one another. Fast, then still. Fast again. Like breath.

I watched a flag on the neighbor’s lawn droop on a splintered pole.

I used to think flags were supposed to flutter.

But now it just looked tired.

I didn’t turn on the radio while I cooked.

The silence was easier. More honest.

I sliced vegetables with too much care. Counted the rhythm of the knife against the cutting board like it was a prayer. Something to keep my hands steady.

At dinner, I didn’t finish my plate. Wrapped it and left it in the fridge without labeling the container. It felt presumptuous, assuming I’d want it later.

That night, I couldn’t sleep.

I sat in the dark at the kitchen table with a mug of warm water I didn’t drink. The only light came from the stove clock—3:08. Then 3:12. Then 3:19.

Time stopped making sense after that.

I thought about the phrase James used in his last letter. “Stabilizing elements.” The way the word felt clinical. Stripped.

I wondered if he even thought about who those “elements” were.

If he remembered that once, when he was ten, he refused to leave a protest until everyone around us had been accounted for—even strangers.

That used to be the boy who stood beside me.

And now?

Now he was likely marching toward people like us.

Friday came too fast.

I woke early. Showered without hot water. The heater had gone out sometime in the night. I didn’t bother to fix it.

I put on jeans, an old sweater, and the jacket James used to tease me about—the one with the missing button on the sleeve. It still smelled like cedar and lavender detergent.

I didn’t eat.

I tucked the flyer from the glovebox into my back pocket, folded once and soft at the edges from my hands.

As I walked to the courthouse, I saw other figures moving down the sidewalk. No one spoke. Just a procession of silence.

The sky was flat. Gray. Not heavy, just hollow.

At the steps, people were already gathered.

No signs. No chants.

Just presence.

Just the kind of weight that only grief and witness can bring.

Elaine met me by the fountain.

She wore her son’s old hoodie and had a candle in her hand. Her eyes didn’t meet mine at first. We just stood there, shoulder to shoulder, as more people arrived.

Some knelt. Some stood with hands clasped. Some carried folded papers. I wondered how many of them had letters like mine. How many of them had sons or daughters who might be standing on the other side when the line finally formed.

There was no leader. No speech.

Just the quiet.

Just the bodies holding space for something none of us could name without unraveling.

Someone passed around candles.

The man next to me handed me one without speaking.

I held it, unlit, for a long while.

Eventually, the woman across from me lit hers and touched the flame to mine.

It flickered, then held.

I thought of James.

How he used to be afraid of fire. How he once cried when he burned his finger on a marshmallow stick and refused to go near the flames again for a whole summer.

I held that memory like a charm.

The wind picked up and tried to steal the flames, but they stayed.

I looked across the street.

No one had arrived yet.

No boots. No helmets.

But we knew they were coming.

They always did.

The courthouse steps felt sacred, somehow. Not because of law, but because of us.

Because of what we refused to stop remembering.

Someone began humming.

No tune I recognized. Just a low, steady tone that rippled through the crowd.

Elaine reached out and touched my hand.

I let her.

The candle between us burned steady.

For once, nothing cracked.

Nothing shouted.

Nothing begged.

It just was.

And in that stillness, I understood something I hadn’t before.

Bearing witness wasn’t passive.

It was defiant.

It said: *I still see you. I still know who you were. I will not let them erase it.*

Even if he never turned around.

Even if his face never came back to me.

I would be here.

On the steps.

With the others.

With the flame.

Waiting, yes.

But more than that—

Refusing to vanish.

When the first official showed up, we recognized the uniform before the man.

It was always the boots that arrived first.

Black, reinforced, polished to a dull shine. They stepped out of the black SUV like punctuation marks. No rush. No posture of aggression. Just presence.

That was the tactic now: appear calm, appear lawful, appear unbothered—until the moment you weren’t.

He didn’t speak to us. Didn’t even glance across the street.

Just stood on the sidewalk, speaking into a radio clipped to his shoulder.

Two more officers joined him.

None of them wore riot gear yet. But we knew that didn’t mean anything.

I watched the way Elaine’s jaw clenched.

Watched the way the woman beside her straightened her spine.

No one moved.

No one flinched.

This was the line they wanted us to cross.

Instead, we held our place.

The humming grew louder. Someone added harmony without realizing it.

And I thought: this is what memory sounds like.

A few people had begun to kneel.

I stayed standing.

Not because kneeling wasn’t powerful.

But because I needed to be upright. I needed him to see me—if he came. If he walked around that corner like he had in the video, like he had in every dream since.

A woman placed a stone at the edge of the steps. Just one.

Then another did the same.

And another.

Soon there was a small pile. Like an altar.

No one had coordinated it. But somehow, we all understood.

That grief requires shape. That memory needs a place to rest.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the flyer.

Folded. Soft. Thumb-worn.

I placed it beneath a flat, pale stone from my garden.

Not because I needed to mark the spot.

But because I needed to mark the moment.

And when I turned back to the line—

They were still watching.

Still waiting.

Still learning nothing from our silence.

But maybe, just maybe, they’d remember how we looked.

Unafraid.

Unmoving.

Unwilling to forget.

As the line of officers grew, so did the sense that something had shifted.

Not in noise. Not in motion.

But in attention.

They were watching us now—not to react, not to intervene. Just to log the moment. To record faces. To learn patterns.

We weren’t being heard.

We were being studied.

I felt it settle in my chest like a second heartbeat. Thudding against my ribs in time with every breath I didn’t want to take.

Someone near the back whispered, “That one’s a local.”

No one answered.

We didn’t want names.

Names made it personal. Names made it harder when the line advanced.

Because we knew, eventually, it would.

But we also knew something else:

There is a kind of resistance that happens just by standing still long enough.

By refusing to vanish.

By refusing to answer silence with silence.

Behind me, a mother held her child close. The little girl was maybe five, wrapped in a green sweater, her dark curls pressed into her mother’s shoulder. I watched her tiny hand reach for the candle and rest there, steady.

I thought of James at that age.

The way he used to fall asleep during car rides, one hand still gripping the toy he refused to leave behind. How even in sleep, he held on.

And I wondered—if I reached across that line, would he still reach back?

Or had the grip loosened?

Across the plaza, I saw someone lift a phone and film. Just a quick sweep of the crowd.

I didn’t duck.

Let them see me.

Let them record what it looks like when a town remembers its children before the children forget the town.

The officers didn’t move.

But neither did we.

And eventually, the sun began to fall.

Long shadows stretched across the courthouse steps. The candlelight grew bolder in the dim.

I stayed until the wax melted onto my skin and cooled there.

Until my spine ached from standing.

Until I could no longer tell if the hum I heard was from the people—

or from my own body, refusing to back down.

That was when I knew:

We may not stop what’s coming.

But we will be remembered for how we stood when it arrived.