Amongst The Rush of Lake Street, I am rushing as I look at her. A contorted posture renders hers the only motionless body on the pavement. Her thick glasses cast back tiny fragments of cool afternoon sunlight. Silent, she seems completely lost within an aching, impenetrable disorientation. I look the lonely old woman square in the face, in the eyes and through the eyes. She has a trail of slime running out of her nose and down to her lips. I can’t tell if she is crying. There is a wilderness in her face, an undiscovered country in her gaze. It fixes itself skyward while she quietly murmurs an incoherent prayer.

Cubicle

In the middle of this story I find myself sitting. I’m sitting at a desk, or rather a cubicle. As of this moment, I cannot refer to this cubicle as my cubicle, because undoubtedly many have sat here before me, pecking at this keyboard landscape, mumbling office speak on the phone. And, without fail, long after my work here is done, this cubicle will be occupied by some or other modest soul. All around me, around the cubicle, the ladies are going on about insurance, for as I recall, this particular cubicle happens to be situated within an insurance office. So these ladies are occupied with their insurance work, while I, in a stolen moment, am occupied with a story. As I tempt myself further away from work and further into the story, the story begins to unfold itself. It turns out to be a story not about the past or future but about the present. In fact, it is about the immediate present, a stumbling afternoon moment when productivity is at a standstill and the mind begins to wander. I, as the principal character, can feel myself being pulled along in this moment like a gentle blind mule. The other I, the author I, is perhaps then a young barefoot boy who leads the lumbering beast onward.

I am standing on the Wells St. Bridge, my back to the sunrise, my back to the city skyline. Shaking as the traffic rumbles by, suspended here over the Chicago River. As a kid, my grandfather Edward used to swim in this river. He was also a Golden Gloves boxer, the boy, the one I never knew. The only grandfather Edward I knew was the one of a lifetime later, a pale old gentleman who lay dying in my bed. I know his stories though. I wear my own story over my body like a flowing robe. It both proceeds and follows from my nature. Standing on a bridge, I find myself looking towards the smokestack, towards where the river breaks north and the horizon ends, towards where I end. If I were to chase this horizon, another one would simply fold out in front of me, another ending. But this procession of time and events is not limitless. No, it is inevitably and tragically finite in fact, although, at certain moments, circular.

*** A LETTER TO THE EDITOR ABOUT NUNS AND CATHOLIC UPBRINGING ***

Puddin' Transcription
BY STEVE de SEVE

The New Intern Drought
BY P.A. LEONARDO IV

Palms for the Poor 2
BY JULIE LEE

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