When I moved into Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhood, I was not scared. A few miles from work, I walked every day. 2 AM, a knock on my window. Now I’m scared. Should I? Of course. I open the shade.
“Last stop,” a shadow says. “Told you a white man lives here. Pay up.”
Found him the next evening on a nearby stoop.
“How much you make?” I asked.
“Fifty-five bills. Why?”
“Starting tonight make me the first stop on the tour. I’ll come out and greet your tourists. Just want ten bucks for my time.”
The deal was done.
| Copyright © 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
I admire how you phrase it so that your readers just know that when the shadow says, “Last stop. Told you a white man lives here,” he’s saying it to his tourists.
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