Written by Cole Beauchamp
For Barb
A THOUSAND WISHES | Photography by Joanne Macias
I don’t expect her to be so loud. She wasn’t in real life. Is it fair to say real life? Cause she’s clearly got a post-death thing going on here, wrapped tight in her purple Helly Hansen parka with its fur-lined hood.
Give em hell, she shouts, breath puffing in the blue blue sky of a Minnesota winter. We need to make noise. Plenty of time for quiet on the other side.
That’s what she calls it, the other side. I throw my arms around her tiny frame. She looks a good forty years younger than when she died two months ago. Her red hair is tightly coiled around her head, her bangs a bold line, level with her eyebrows. That wicked look she always had in her eyes, even when frailed by advanced kidney disease, even when memory-skipped by age, is like looking into fire.
There’s a man marching next to us, goatee and John Lennon glasses. He starts singing, Stop children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.
We sing. We’re here because we won’t look away from what this administration is doing. We are longjohnned, hatted, scarved, gloved, booted. We are ready.
My aunt and I link arms and start chanting ICE OUT! ICE OUT! The whole crowd roars. It feels good, pumping our arms and shouting together into the subzero air.
We round a corner and slam into a wall of people. Noise explodes. Screaming. Someone comes hurtling toward my aunt but she braces and pushes back. The person stabilizes, stays upright, says thanks and rushes forward again.
Another person hurtles into goatee man, who tries to catch him. They both hit the ground, hard.
Don’t absorb, DEFLECT, shouts my aunt.
I think about her as a student in the sixties, rebel girl before her career as a teacher, then a probation officer. Always seeking justice. Always a black sheep. Always my role model.
We help goatee man up. Blood glistens as it drips from his forehead into his scarf.
We are jostled, elbowed, tugged with the crowd. People have their phones up, recording. I see a woman in a sunflower yellow coat, hood pulled tight, screaming and screaming, her mouth a round O as masked agents in camo take down a woman next to her. Two on one. Knees on her back, face shoved into the asphalt and snow.
I don’t know where to look. What to do. I promised myself when my aunt died that I’d do more to follow my convictions, to make my time on this planet count. But now I’m blood pumping, rage thumping, ready to throw myself on an agent or run away.
STEADY, my dead aunt says. Her voice is firm, like when she used to talk down these huge, hulking guys at work. They don’t want you to see. This is what we’re here for.
Assault rifles. Torsos strapped with cannisters and pulls and gas masks. Little brown backpacks. Think—who are these agents targeting and why? Another person disappears, a bright orange hunting cap flying into the air like a flare.
What’s going on, I shout. WHAT’S GOING ON?
Noise explodes again and the air around us hazes. TEAR GAS, my aunt shouts and shoves me in the back. She pounds hard little punches to propel me forward and I want to scream STOP but my face is on fire, my eyes and nose streaming and I can’t swallow and even though the air is clear now I have no idea where I am.
DON’T RUB, my aunt shouts, splashing her water bottle in my face and I’m wheezing when she puts her face an inch from mine and says FILM IT and then she’s gone and I hit video and hold my phone out, not even sure what I’m filming, people are a blur and there’s a concrete wall at the other end with water stains dripping down like tears.
Steady, I tell myself. Steady.
When I finally look at the screen, there’s my aunt, putting a traffic cone over a tear gas cannister and dumping water on it, pushing people out of harm’s way. When the air clears, I see her on screen, smiling, fur hood framing her face. She sketches a jaunty salute and disappears.
.
Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Monarch, and Best Microfiction. She’s a 2026 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow and contributing editor of New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children.