The room seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief as the brute stormed away, each glancing furtively from face to face. “The boy called you dad?” Stanley finally asked with unapologetic calm, as though he wasn’t sharing the living room with the disemboweled carcass of his wife’s closest friend. The leader gave a disapproving […]
My name’s Walter. You probably don’t know me, but you may have heard me playing the guitar. You wouldn’t know it, though. I’m a studio musician, mostly playing at Modern Recording on Chicago’s South Side. When they want someone who can do that old Motown stuff, sometimes I get the call. I play live two […]
The sky is a deep, brooding red, as if the heavens themselves had been scorched by the flames that raged below. Smoke billows in thick, acrid plumes, curling around the remains of once-proud buildings reduced to skeletal shells by the relentless bombardment. The air is thick with the scent of burning fuel, melting metal, and […]
I clean the White House. On the skeleton-crew weeks—those when they have to shut off the government until they can agree on how they’re going to spend your money—I can only get maybe half of it done. I trade off between doing all the vacuuming, mopping, and glass cleaning throughout the whole house and getting […]