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 […]
The explosion shatters the night. The room shudders; windowpanes rattle like the chains of the damned. Another mortar attack in East Asia. The echo of screams, the gut-punch blast of a grenade rips Stanley from the depths of sleep. Another day of horrors. His eyes snap open, pupils dilated in the darkness, senses sharpened to […]