By Alessandra Calderin

I step inside and take a seat. It is snowing today. I have an ear bud in one ear. I have chosen Bon Iver for today’s ride. “Come on, skinny love, just last the year,” Justin Vernon beckons. I wish for the same. Just last the year. The rattling of the El fills my other ear. It clanks and shuffles along the curving tracks. I can see my reflection in the train window as I gaze into the snow and city. I am happy and at peace.

Little car, you connect me. You soothe me. When I am with you, I have no other responsibilities. How could I? I am moving. You are transporting me. You are not the most comfortable or prettiest, but you are mine for an hour at a time and I love you. You set me free, if only for a little while. You may malfunction, or run late, but you won’t hurt me. You keep me safe from the world. You are my refuge between departure and arrival. I wish our rides didn’t have to end and I could stay behind your spastic sliding doors forever.

By Angad Chadha

“Seven months. It’s only been seven months, sweetie. The doctor said it could take years until she starts comprehending even the slightest ones.”

“I know. I know. And I’m not complaining. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. I’m not. It’s just tough.” Craig stopped and stared out the window. “It’s really tough.”

“I know, hun.” Maris breathed in deep and sighed, her hand tracing figure-eight patterns on Craig’s shoulder. “How was work though?”

Just then, their daughter popped out of the bathroom.

“Mommy!”

“Rose! Sweetie! How was school? Did you make anything new finger paint drawings?”

“No, but the teacher said that I was… I was making a drawing but she said it was time for storytime.”

“Well then I’ll just have to have a talk with your teacher, won’t I?” Maris feigned upset and swooped up her daughter for a tickle fight.

It had been seven months since the doctors at Children’s Memorial Chicago had ablated a troublesome tumor in Rose’s amygdala. She had consequently lost her emotional capabilities and was now in the tedious process of redeveloping a reflexive, primal art form over which she had no cognitive control.

“Mommy wait! I learned something new today at school. Ms. Carol showed me.”

“Ooh! What?”

“Wait.”

Rose ran to her room and returned with a plush dinosaur. She held it at arm’s length and said “I love you.”

“And what about mommy and daddy? Do you love us too?” Maris leaned in, urging her on.

Rose thought for a second. Too long. “I dunno.” She shrugged and skipped back to her room.

Craig let out an almost inaudible “damn” as he breathed out.

“It’ll happen. It’ll happen. Honey. Look at me. I love you.”

Craig sheepishly reciprocated. “Love you too.”

“Dinner?”

“Let’s go out. It’s Valentines Day.”

By Caleb Melby

Marcus sprawled on the couch, soaking the already matted upholstry with tears and snot while his roommate button-mashed three feet from him. The roommate wasn’t the sympathetic type, and he had just purchased a new video game, which didn’t help matters. Marcus had been in love and that love was over, but that wasn’t why he was crying. He was crying because it wasn’t supposed to end this way. Vases were supposed to be thrown, hateful things were supposed to have been said, a passionate kiss was to be stolen and returned with a slap. Movie shit. But neither he nor Clara, who lived on the South Side, harbored any sort of resentment toward the other. Rather, it had been determined that they simply didn’t have time to date across the city. There were classes to ace, clubs to join and networks to build and did they really have anything that was all that special? If they did, it could wait.

It had been Marcus’s first love, which explained the PBR cans, the excessive eating and the urge to watch Friends on DVD (an impulse quelled at the insistence of his gaming roommate). A cynic by nature, Marcus couldn’t laugh off the fact that his entire body ached in a way that the beer couldn’t begin to remedy. How did it get like this? It seemed that he and love were already sleeping in separate beds, that love was in the shower while he was pooping and both had grown far too hairy and flabby. His affair with love suffered from a mean case of limp-dick. He thought: “I am too young for this.” Then he moved for his plate of chili and rice.

by Dan Camponovo

Logan Square.

I check my watch and I’m running a bit late, cursing myself for not catching an earlier train, but then again it’s mid February and it snowed this morning and there’s no way her plane landed on time. We’re both running late, like always. My hands are shaking. My knee is bouncing. I am a kid looking into the window of a candy store.

Montrose.

She’s been abroad the past quarter and this will be the first time I’ve seen her in months. School for her doesn’t start again for another week. Her flight lands in seven minutes and I’m still fourteen minutes away. I feel like I could get out and run there faster. The woman across the aisle notices my excitement and looks up from her book, asking if I’m late for the airport. Something like that, I tell her.

Jefferson Park.

I feel around in my bag to make sure the music box she brought me from Prague is still in the front pocket and that the ring I brought from Jeweler’s Row is right next to it. My dad told me we were too young but I say fuck it. You’re only twenty once.

Cumberland.

My phone vibrates as I get a text saying she’s landed and she’s going to get her luggage right now. I tell her the cheapest way to the city is the subway underneath the airport. I don’t tell her I’m coming.

O’Hare.

I get off the train and wait for her on the platform. After a few minutes I spot her across the way, putting her CTA card through the machine incorrectly the first time like a true tourist. I forgot she’s never been to my city before. She passes through the gate and finally sees me and stops in her tracks, a smile creeping across her face. She walks the rest of the way up to me and hugs me and breathes a deep quivering sob of a breath and I can feel her chest rise against mine and I don’t think she’ll ever let go. “Let’s get you home.”

Chicago.

by George Elkind

The Bean sat before her, a gleaming hunk of stainless steel, reflecting with a dim opalescence the bases of skyscrapers, the only part of the strange spires visible in the noonday fog.

“Why are people so fascinated with this thing?” June looked up, only to see that her friend, Nola, impatient as ever, had wandered off.

“Well, if I were to guess,” said a stubble-faced man a few feet away, black pea-coat hugged tightly against himself in the cold, “I think it’s what it reflects.”

“Well, obviously it’s pretty, but isn’t there something else? Something beyond the postcards and shot glasses and art prints that’s so transfixes people? To me, it just seems… totally unremarkable.”

“Well, scholars say that it embodies the tension between the male and female, or that it blurs the boundary between the infinite and the limitless; but if you want my honest opinion,” he paused, debating whether to continue. “I think it’s all in the city itself.”

“What do you mean?” Her gray eyes drifted to meet his.

“Well, it all depends.” He returned her gaze with a wistful, blue intensity. “What do you see when you look at the city?’

“A place. I mean, it’s big, but how’s that any different from New York or L.A. or any of those places?”

“When I look at those places – or really, any other big city, I just see places where dreams go to die. But here,” his eyes suddenly gleamed. “Even in the fog, I just see all this potential and opportunity, this real working-class accessibility about it.”

“To what, though?”

“I don’t know. Anything, really.”

She bit her lip. “It sounds nice, but… I just can’t see it that way. I want to, I’m trying, but I think it’s just beyond me.”

He smiled a little. “Don’t worry, maybe on a clearer day.”

Her eyes shimmered softly in the muted sunlight. “Yeah, maybe.”

By Hayley Altabef

It was one of the cold days, but I had finished my legos and I needed to take them to the park. Mom said that if I wanted to play outside, I would have to get dressed like all men did with my hat and mittens. I told her that lego men didn’t need mittens because their fingers were built together, but she told me that we couldn’t all be that way. So, I put the mittens on and built my hands together, too. I shuffled out of the house, swinging one foot in front of the other in my big dinosaur jacket, and looked up high to catch Mom’s hand when we crossed the street. Then, we got to the park – my best place where my best friend met me every week. I waited on the swings for her but she wasn’t there.

Her name was Elizabeth. She had long yellow hair that stood up straight and shocked me when we played on the slide. She was the prettiest part of my Winter when she wore her pink coat. And smiled. And gave me her extra skittles. I made her a lego heart for Valentine’s day, because Mom told me you celebrate Valentine’s day with someone who has your heart. I worked all week on it, so that I could give her my best thing. Finally, she walked into the park. And I handed it to her. She gave me all of her red skittles, and told me that her heart wasn’t ready to be given up. I told her that’s fine, because I still liked her more than any other part of Winter. She said maybe she would be ready by our Spring.

By Hilary Rasch

Tonight is another Thursday, so I’m back at the Adler Planetarium to see Capella. I’m not sure what it is about her that makes me come back and come back and come back. It has been three years since I first saw her, and still I am here every Thursday.

On Thursday nights Adler Planetarium holds an event called Adler After Dark, which is the only time that visitors can look through the Doane Observatory telescope. The first time I went it was freezing outside, and the line to look through the telescope was really long, so I knew that the whole thing was probably a mistake. By the time I got to the front of the line, my fingers were numb and blue, and my ears were raw from the cold. I couldn’t believe that I had not worn a hat, and I was mad that the planetarium had taken my money so that I could have this miserable experience.

But my feelings all changed when I looked through the telescope and saw the bright yellow star Capella. She shocked me, and I stared at her. Eventually, a planetarium employee, Tom, had to drag me away from the telescope so that other visitors could have a chance to look through it. I know Tom pretty well now because I see him every Thursday. He knows why I come to the Planetarium, and he thinks I’m crazy because of the way I feel about a star. I don’t blame him for thinking that, and I feel a little embarrassed, but I also can’t change the way I feel. And I could never stop coming to see Capella.

I look up through the telescope and smile as I see her. Capella Capella, my heart pounds. Already I feel the sadness of having to walk away from her wash over me. ‘Til next Thursday, Capella!

By Hira Khan

“A table for two,” I said to the young man at the front.

He looked up and his gaze slid between me and my date before it finally came to rest on me. “Are you expecting someone?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just the two of us.” I smiled at Nemutan. I had worn a navy blue suit and a tie decorated with red and pink hearts for the occasion, but the beautiful girl in my arms was more casually dressed. She wore a light blue bikini and golden ribbons in her hair. I pulled her close when an open door brought a breeze of Chicago winter into the restaurant.

“You mean you and…?” He gestured at Nemutan, his face scrunched up in confusion.

“Yes,” I answered. “Me and Nemutan.”

The kid shrugged and led us to a table.

Nemutan and I had been together for two years, ever since I saw her in the shop window in our hometown of Tokyo. She had been looking out the window with her bright blue eyes and a gentle smile that seemed like it was just for me. I had walked into the shop, and a few minutes later, I had walked out with her in my arms.

I helped Nemutan to her seat before I took my place across from her. The young man awkwardly placed a menu in front of Nemutan, handed me mine, then left us to decide our meal.

I know what these Americans see when they looked at my Nemutan – a body-sized pillow with the drawing on an anime teenager on it. But Nemutan was my savior, she was the rope that had rescued me from rock bottom and, once we return to our home from this short vacation, she would be my wife.

By Jake LaRaus

Her eyes were luminous that night – shining discs of radiant blue piercing the dimmed lighting. He smiled at her and lifted their joined hands, her fingers intertwined with his. She looked at him from over her glasses, those amazingly bright eyes bearing deep into him. He loved the way she could deliver so many feelings with just one look. He loved so many things about her, had always loved them, and would continue to.

She raised her other hand and touched his weathered face. The crevasses of age seemed to disappear with the tenderness of her touch. They again locked eyes, and her eyes spoke volumes. Love, dedication, devotion: these were things that were not foreign to their relationship and in spite of difficulties, had endured and grown. Even when things had been hard, there was still love. There was always love.

He in turn lifted his hand to brush away the rogue strands of her hair that seemed to be perpetually out of place. Maybe she let them hang on purpose, because she knew he loved to put them back behind her ear. In spite of her age, her hair had grayed only slightly, retaining most of its original vibrancy. He loved to toy with it, the curls and dangles and ringlets, and she loved it because he loved it.

By this time, the toast was finished and the Drake Hotel ballroom broke out into applause. Together, they rose to accept their congratulations, dually modest and proud of the testament to their long-standing love.

At this point, the old man was satiated. He pressed the pause button on the remote, and the screen froze, framing her beautiful face. He had loved so many things about her, and would always love them. There would always be love.

By Jessica Tackett

Wednesday. Today I’ll see the artist. We dine together every Wednesday at 12:15 in the Chicago Diner. He always orders one of their home specials. I love that the Diner is perfect for him: a vegetarian restaurant with meals that are imposters. The “meat”loaf always look out of place sitting in front of his blue highlights and nose ring. I think he misses home.

I fell in love with him two months ago.

He was reading a book while he ate, when suddenly he dropped his fork, violently rummaged through a backpack, whipped out a sketchpad, and started drawing furiously, the polenta lasagna left to grow cold on his plate.

I was in love again. With his passion. The way he brushes his bangs out of his eyes when he’s thinking. His chewed-on pens. I can’t say for certain if all of these things are reasons to love him more, or reasons to justify my love, but I know my feelings are true. I returned the next week at the same time in hopes of seeing him again and now two months later each week I find something new to love.

Tomorrow, I look forward to seeing another love on the El ride home. I’m on the red line every night, but he’s only there Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes not at all. The worker. He worries about the dirt under his nails, constantly picking. I always want to reassure him that no woman will notice. That I never notice. That the calluses on his hands are nothing to be ashamed of, but a beautiful metaphor for the pains he has suffered and overcome.

Friday – the dancer at the corner of Michigan and 11th.

Saturday – the philosopher with all his notebooks at the library.

Sunday – well, Sunday is Valentine’s Day.

By Kathryn Dennett

“What stop do you think we should get off at?” she asked after they sat down.

“I don’t know, it’s your friend’s house,” he replied closing his eyes and leaning back as if to sleep.

“Yeah, but I’ve always driven there.”

“Yeah, now I know why. You didn’t say she lived all the way South when I suggested we take the train.”

“I like taking the train.”

“That’s because you’re insane.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“You aren’t even touching me.”

“Well the seats are divided.”

“Oh no! There’s an inch of plastic dividing us. Don’t cross it, who knows what will happen.”

Without opening his eyes he reached one hand over and grabbed hers.

“Are you happy now?”

“Yes, but your hand is like a block of ice.”

“Well, we waited for the train for like twenty minutes.”

“Why aren’t you wearing gloves?”

Ignoring her, he asked, eyes still closed, “Why are we even going to this thing?”

“Because Mel is one of my oldest friends.”

“I’ve never heard you mention her in the entire year we’ve been together.”

“Year and three months.” He opened his eyes and turned towards her.

“Right, in all that time, I’ve never heard of Melanie and now we have to get on the train and go all the way to the South Side for her engagement party?”

“You’re just mad cause you’re cold.”

“Well it’s freezing.”

“It’s Chicago, and I bought you that nice pair of gloves, and you never wear them.”

“They’re too small.”

“They are not.”

“They’re too fancy.”

“They’re gloves.”

“I just. I didn’t put them on, OK?”

“OK.”

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the announcements play through a couple of times.

“We should probably get off at Garfield,” he said closing his eyes again.

By Lindsey Kratochwill

She got on at the same stop everyday: Argyle. Past intoxicating, stifling oily air that clung to her clothes and hid within her curly hair. Waiting on the platform, as she did any other day, feeling the strength of the wind peeling at her face and searing her legs and hands.

With a sudden clamorous cry, the train roared through, carried by the groaning tracks. The doors lurched open, as they typically do, slamming against the well-worn sides of the car.

She crossed the threshold, stepped into the pale yellow light and slid into a vacant seat facing the back of the train. She typically tried to avert eye contact with her travelling companions. Watching the patterns her feet make in the grimy floor she dreads her destination. The same thoughts flash through like tired reruns on the Oxygen channel.

Her stop neared and she looked up to check her surroundings. At that moment she locked in with a pair of deep eyes, situated in the despondent face of a man who sat across the aisle, facing the front of the train.

The corners of her mouth twitched into a smile that carried such thought. He reciprocated, afraid to look away. A distraction through the window, a vibrantly painted building, stole her gaze abruptly.

She was shoved back into reality when the CTA’s disembodied voice announced the impending stop: Roosevelt. Doors open on the left. She passed him on the right, unsure whether she should reengage.

They both watched her dusty shoes propel her toward the door.

By Matt Connolly

I hear a few of them complaining – her cousins, I think – about the weather. Funerals are sad enough, they whisper. Is a little sunshine too much to ask for? If it weren’t for the setting, I’d laugh. I know how much she loved the snow.

She grew up on the South Side; emotionally, she never really left. No one was surprised when she stayed close to home to teach, but her parents were a little taken aback when she got a job in the public school system. They were a proud Catholic family, and she had the education to prove it – I think she just felt more of a connection with those inner city kids.

We’re supposed to be singing Amazing Grace, but my mind is drifting. Her brother and I fought after she went. He wanted to get her a big, cross-shaped headstone, to be placed after a big, religious ceremony in a big, gaudy church. As if giving her a proper Catholic send-off would make up for her mostly faithless life.

The legacy she leaves, of course, has nothing to do with the piece of stone that’ll be sitting on her grave. Her memory lives on in four decades worth of students. She knew when to retire, but that doesn’t mean it was easy for her to leave. We moved out to the suburbs – the open space and peace calmed me, but she always wished she were back in Chicago. Though we’d visit from time to time, it just wasn’t the same.

I let her brother plan the ceremony on one condition – that she be buried in Chicago. He takes solace when the priest tells us she’s with God, but I’m just happy I could bring her back home. Casket and concrete, she’s a landmark now – in death as in life, a part of the city she loved.

By Mia Warren

The Feeding Frenzy of ‘08 consisted of a slimy pizza that O and S brought back to the hotel room in a cardboard box. The four girls had only half an hour before they had to leave for a Steppenwolf show. It was the school trip to beat all school trips – “Theater Week in Chicago” – but they were so hungry that they couldn’t appreciate the novelty.

O slapped the pizza onto the waxy surface of an ironing board.

“You okay, S?” asked K. Using the thumb and finger of her right hand, she carefully lifted a slice of pizza from its casing and took a bite.

“Yeah,” said S. “I’ll be fine. I’m just relieved.” She sunk her heels into the carpet.

“Pizza and a pregnancy test,” said O. “Now that’s a combination.”

They gobbled the pizza, the light from the bedside lamps stretching over the carpet in shaky beams. T stretched out across one of the double beds, her fingers wet with grease and speckled with crumbs of the pizza crust. She held her hands high above her head.

“Now what?”

“Now we dress up for the show,” said O.

“What are you guys wearing?” asked T.

“I love you guys,” said S.

“We love you too,” said K. “And we just want you to be okay.” S nodded. She went to the closet and pulled a black dress from a hanger. She sat down again, the dress crumpled on her lap, and she began to cry. The other three moved to her and wrapped their arms around her. T pressed pizza grease into the back of S’s shirt. It smelled like cheese in the room – cheese and unwashed clothes. S clung to the others, a black mascara tear twisting down her cheek.

“It’s going to be okay,” said O. “It’s going to be okay.”

By Nick Castele

When you hit that cold ground, ain’t nothin’ feel so good. You freeze yer ass so hard you think it’ll stick to the ce-ment like a tongue on an ice cube, but closin’ yer eyes is so damn sweet you don’t give a fuck. Just roll yerself up in that doorway & — shit, yer dreamin’ of cornfields and little pale ol’ mom and pop. That’s where I like it – cold ce-ment on your face and the sleepin’ bag rufflin’ all around your body, some big nylon woman squeezin’ you like a fetus. You smell yerself in that bag, soak up your own musk, that careful stack of sweat and shit and city smog builds on you. Gives you a soul, gives you what makes you you, what makes nobody look at anybody else the way they look at you.

When you wake up, sister, catch the bus to Hinckley – it ain’t hard, ask the teenage boys for money. They’re scared of women like you – women they ain’t got cause to want to get somethin’ out of. Get on that bus and look up one more time at that Sears and that Hancock and you flick ’em all off. And you get yerself here with me, sister, here where buildings don’t block the sky.

This is America, sister! This is real Abe Lincoln grain and soybeans America – scrape yer fingernails on the rustflake combine. Sleep in the dirt of cows. You’ll close yer eyes, like me, that pit in yer belly you ain’t fed in two days squeezin’ you and that sick inflamed knee dyin’ just seconds ahead of the rest of you – each step along the state route washin’ the ragged rubber shoes from yer feet, each cornstalk a needle juicin’ yer veins with horsefly summer haze.

By Nick Merrill

I walk through a spotless white hallway. The sterile walls glow with the light from the afternoon’s sun, glowing with the glistening light shimmering off of the city, and outside the window, a metallic rosebud blooms beneath a canopy of glass redwoods.

Inside the museum, I find a collection of photographs from the Columbian Exposition. In rich black-and-white, a statue of a woman hails toward a blossoming metropolis. Baroque domes and Roman arches sprout up around a manmade lagoon. Chicagoans strut through the riverside, all dressed in their finest suits and dresses, chatting and waltzing and looking so proud to be of this city. They’re all so proud.

In a few of their faces I can just barely read,

“I wonder what the future will be,”

Or,

“At least I am young, now,”

Or,

“I wonder what he’s thinking of me.”

On the train home the sunset burns red into the skyline. If you told me the sun would burn through the glass right now, I would probably believe you. It’d light the rosebud on fire and the rosebud would wilt, hot orange metal flowing through Millennium Park like lava through Pompeii.

I think about the familiar sadness of looking at old photographs. About how the world I saw was an alchemy of memory and fiction and frozen moments. A promise coated in silver chloride.

I feel the guilt of seeing a world buried where our world stands. A world that couldn’t see our world coming.

If you told me the sunset would burn through the buildings I would believe you.

By Rachel Hoffman

Gun shots ring out amidst a chorus of shrieking Comanche calls. Dust weeds roll casually, stream through the sandy Hollywood set of “American Western frontier, stage 4”, unsuspecting of the drama afoot. Why, they should clear the path, cower and crumble in the presence of John Wayne! The John Wayne. Tall, broad-shouldered, squinting John Wayne. He stomps across the glowing screen of the TV set with heavy, leather boot steps in his characteristic wobbly gait. His masculinity oozes into the sitting room of that cramped house on E. 83rd Street and Colfax Avenue. It sends the 11-year-old child into a blissful daze.

Curled up beneath a worn knitted blanket, the figure is consumed by the fifth John Wayne movie played today on the television marathon – The Searchers. Leaning a tousled head of red hair on an open palm, leaning closer and closer to the screen to soak up his all-American glory and chiseled jaw, biting a lower lip till it hurts just a little. What courage, what determination, what strength of moral character as Wayne searches tirelessly for his abducted niece, captured by savages. How glorious to be saved and scooped up by those strong, tanned arms. To be the dewy eyed, plush-lipped niece with colorful feathers now woven into her hair. What raw beauty in his hard stares, sweaty brow, and firm grip of a smooth gun. His love of people and country is pure. No one is better than he.

“Henry! Stop watching those violent westerns and come get your supper!” The piercing call of a mother tied to a grease-splattering stove rings out.

“Alright, Ma, I’ll turn it off,” replies the child, for now.

By Shaunacy Ferro

He preferred New York style pizza, and put ketchup on his hotdogs.

“I can’t love you,” she almost said, still more than a little tipsy, but the Brown Line was running at its typical inopportune moment. It thundered by overhead, drawing out any vocal attempt she might have made.

It was one of those days when cold starts to take on an entirely different meaning, when your snot starts to become icicles in your nose and your face freezes just like your parents always warned you it would. He took her hand and pulled it into his coat pocket. It was softer than he had imagined, even if he could barely feel his hands anymore.

“I made you a mix,” he said. He fished a cassette out from his jeans and slipped it into her jacket.

Her forehead wrinkled. “I don’t have a tape player,” she told him, wondering if this would be symbolic of their entire future relationship.

“I know.” He reached over and gently tugged one tassels hanging off her hat. “Neither do I.”

“So what’s the point?” she asked, trying to make him into a wind block.

“I don’t know. Maybe because it doesn’t matter as much what’s on it,” he shrugged.

He was stuck in the clouds. So not her style. “Well, how am I supposed to listen to it?” she asked.

“You have to find someplace to play it. It’s an adventure now.” When he grinned, his smile was crooked.

“But how did you even make it?”

“I found a way. I’ve found you can actually do a lot of the things you never thought you could, you know?” His voice was cheerful, even freakishly optimistic.

“Maybe,” she thought.