I'm sharing today at You Are Here Stories for the theme "sound." You Are Here is a collection of stories about roots, identity and place, which are some of the topics I love to write about the most. Here is a teaser, but I hope you can click over and check out the rest of the article on their site!
A fire engine shrieked through the
stoplight, casting a light show in my room and spraying the bare white
walls with color. Even through closed windows, the sound was deafening.
Within minutes, an ambulance from the hospital in the other direction
bayed and bounded through the intersection. I rubbed my eyes. The city
had assaulted me through the night, pushing away any hope of restful
sleep. The thought of coffee propelled me out of bed.
As new college graduates, my two roommates and I were fresh from the
sweetly singing suburbs. Having recently secured jobs in Chicago, we
moved into a two bedroom apartment above a tuxedo shop doubling as a dry
cleaner in Uptown, at the corner of Clark and Wilson. Our landlords
owned the block. The father, an Arab from Palestine who worked
tirelessly at the dry cleaner, was a large silver-haired man with bushy
eyebrows and kind black eyes. He gave us a 10 percent discount for being
his tenants. His burly son lived across the hall from us and owned the
cell phone shop next door, which sold a variety of wares during our four
years living there. The uncles worked across the street at the liquor
store where we dropped off our rent.
Continue reading...
Photo of the Wilson L station by Graham Garfield
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