New Fiction By M. Avery, 2026 Endure the cold. Soften the heart. Wake up.
New Fiction By M. Avery, 2026 Endure the cold. Soften the heart. Wake up.
The air in Minneapolis tasted of burnt rubber and wet ash. Not from fire—not exactly. It was the smell of rubber soles scuffed raw on pavement, of tear gas canisters cooled too late, of rain meeting blood and something older: the metallic tang of fear, ancient as bones. They said it started with a song. Not a whisper. Not a hymn. A roar. Bruce Springsteen didn’t write it in a studio. Didn’t book studio time, didn’t run it by management, didn’t clear it with lawyers. He wrote it on the back of a diner napkin at 3:17 a.m., in a greasy spoon just off Hennepin Avenue, where the coffee tasted like grief and the waitress—her name tag read Mira—hadn’t slept since Alex Pretti was shot in front of his daughter’s school. The feds called it a removal. A routine operation. Words stripped of teeth, polished until they gleamed like handcuffs. Springsteen called it what it was. He didn’t mince. Didn’t wrap it in metaphor, didn’t bury the names in allegory. Alex Pretti. Renée Good. He sang them like saints in a sermon, like names carved into stone, like ghosts riding the feedback of a Fender guitar tuned to wrath. King Trump’s private army from the DHS Draggin’ kids down in the cold of three Renée scream no, but they cover her mouth Like she’s just trash on a dirt road south— It dropped at midnight. No announcement. No press release. Just a YouTube video—black screen, white text: "Streets of Minneapolis." Bruce Springsteen. Live. Unmixed. Unforgiven. And then the growl of the E Street Band, not joyful now, but wounded, feral, like a dog that’s been kicked too long. The internet caught fire. Not metaphorically.
Oakland. A protest that spilled like floodwater into the Denver ICE office. In Baltimore, someone painted ICE OUT NOW in red across the courthouse steps—only it wasn’t paint. It was beet juice and something darker. Rumors said it wouldn’t wash off. Said the stone absorbed it. But the song. The song moved like a virus. A prayer. A curse. It wasn’t just the lyrics. It was the way he sang them. Bruce, voice cracked like old pavement, singing not to an audience, but to the dead. Like he was standing at the foot of their beds, bearing witness. I hear their names in the whistle of trains In the hum of the overpass, in the rust on the chains And the city won’t sleep, and the city won’t kneel— *It just chants in the dark: Justice is real. People taped it to their windows. Played it from car stereos blaring down Main Street. Teachers let students listen during homeroom until administration shut it down. Then they played it on cellphones, under desks, like contraband scripture. The backlash came fast. Fox called it treason set to a backbeat. A senator from Texas said Springsteen should be deported himself. Online, bots swarmed— flooding comment sections, spreading doctored clips of him burning an American flag, of him kissing a hammer and sickle. Lies, but sticky ones. The kind that cling, like tar. But something else happened, too. In Grand Forks, a group of Lutheran teens sang the chorus during communion. In El Paso, a mural sprouted overnight: Springsteen’s face, half-saint, half-ghost, with the words "He Named Them" beneath. In rural Wisconsin, a cop turned in his badge. Posted a video. Just said, "I can’t unhear that song." Was it the music? Or was it that, for the first time in years, someone with a megaphone had spoken plainly?
Just: This happened. You were silent. No more. And then, the dreams started. That’s the part the papers don’t mention. People—no pattern, no demographic—began dreaming of a man in a leather jacket, walking empty streets at dawn. He’s playing a guitar with no strings. But the music plays anyway. And behind him, shadows rise—Alex, Renée, and dozens more, nameless, their mouths open, not screaming, but singing. The same song. One woman in Boise woke up reciting the lyrics in her sleep, her hands clasped like in prayer. A boy in Minneapolis swore he saw Springsteen standing on the roof of the 4th Precinct the night after the song dropped—just standing there, silhouetted against the moon, not moving, not singing. Just watching. No one could prove it. But the next day, someone spray-painted "The Ghosts Are Listening" on the wall. Now the song is banned in three states. Schools can’t play it. Radio stations risk fines. But it spreads anyway—through AirDrop, USB drives, handwritten lyrics passed in classrooms like matchbooks of rebellion. They say art can’t change the world. But this wasn’t art, not anymore. It was an incantation. A summoning. And the streets—oh, the streets—they’re singing back. So listen. Can’t you hear it?
Under the drone of the nightly news. In the quiet between heartbeats. ICE out now! ICE out now! We are not afraid of your law— We are the law of the people, and we Say NO. And somewhere, in a diner that may or may not exist, a napkin burns—slowly, from the inside out—while a man in a denim shirt scribbles the first line of the next one.
Winter had never been a polite season in Minneapolis. It came in thick, silver sheets, a relentless plaster that dulled the city’s neon veins and turned the river into a sheet of glass that cracked under the weight of a single boot. On Nicol Michaels Avenue—once Nicollet, now a name the city had altered to hide its own sins—the pavement was a frozen ledger, each footfall a ledger entry of blood and ice. It began on a night the sky was so black it seemed to have swallowed the moon. The wind whistled through the skeletal skeletons of the old warehouses, a sound like a dying animal trying to speak. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed—a note of warning that no one in the city had ever learned to heed. It was a warning that came too late. The Commander's men arrived through the night like a swarm of hornets, their black uniforms stitched with the emblem of a phoenix that had never risen. They called themselves the Department of Homeland Security, but their badge was a badge of iron, a cold imprint that seemed to press into the skin of anyone it touched. Their rifles were tucked into the folds of their coats, the metal glinting under the streetlights like the teeth of a predator. They moved in perfect, rehearsed formation, boots thudding on the ice with a rhythm that could have been a marching song if anyone still sang in these streets. Miriam had been standing on the corner of Nicol Michaels and 6th for as long as she could remember, a habit formed from years of watching the city breathe and choke. She was a mother of two, a schoolteacher, a poet who kept a notebook tucked under her coat like a secret prayer. She watched the arrival of the men with a heart that beat in staccato, each thump a question: What will they take? The first clash was a burst of sound that shattered the midnight hush—rubber bullets, a rain of knuckles, metal striking metal. The officers shouted commands that fell off the wind like dead leaves: “Disperse! Disperse!” Yet the crowd did not move. They were a river of faces, shoulders huddled against each other, eyes bright with a fierce, almost holy resolve. They held up signs that read, in a hand
fallen”. The air grew thin, each breath an icy dagger that lodged in the throat. And then the first scream cut through the night—a scream that seemed to come from the very concrete, as if the city itself had been wounded. Alex Pretti lay in the snow, his coat opened like the wings of a fallen bird. The white of his shirt was stained with the ruby of his own blood, which seeped into the already saturated ice, turning a patch of the street a dark, glistening mirror. His eyes were open, the pupils wide, staring at the hollow sky as if trying to catch a last glimpse of something that would never return. A short while later, a woman named Renee Good was found on the other side of the intersection, her throat bruised by a bullet that seemed to have come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Her hands were still clasped around a small notebook, the pages torn and fluttering in the wind like wounded birds—one of them, Miriam realized with a sickening certainty, had a faint, half written line: “We will not go quiet.” The city, already a furnace of anger, turned into a furnace of ash. Fires sprouted in abandoned storefronts, the flames licking the sky, painting it a frantic orange that clashed with the relentless white. Through the blaze, the men in black moved like ghosts, their faces hidden under cheap helmets, their eyes reflecting the fire as though they were drinking it in. Their presence was a cold in the heat—a horror that seemed to have been plucked from a nightmare that Stephen King might have whispered into a child’s ear at bedtime. Miriam crouched behind a broken lamppost, her breath a cloud that vanished the moment she exhaled. In her hands, she pressed the notebook against her chest, the weight of the pages like a stone. She could hear the distant thud of a heart that was not hers— perhaps the heart of a young boy begging for his mother, perhaps the heart of the city itself, trying to keep time amidst the chaos. ‑ ‑ ‑ The men began to claim they had acted in self defence. The Commander’s spokesperson, a smooth voiced woman with the smile of a corporate lawyer, appeared on the flickering television
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