My sweater was new, striking red and ugly. It was May 12th, but the temperature had suddenly dropped to ten degrees and, after shivering for four days in shirts, I covered myself hastily with a well-known brand's offer instead of sorting out the accumulated winter clothes. Spring in Chicago.
Inside my burlap-covered desk, I was absentmindedly staring at my computer screen. My piece for today was a relatively dark story. Four children, aged from two to six years old, had been found locked in a room on the South Side, with half a liter of milk and a couple of tuna sandwiches. They had been abandoned there for three days, mixing food and filth on the carpet like little chicks. Their mother had gone out for a puff from the hookah and lost track of time. It happens sometimes. No cigarette burns, no broken bones. Just an irreparable slip.
I had seen the mother after her arrest: Tammy Davis, twenty-two years old, blonde and fat, with pink blush on her cheeks, two perfect circles the size of shooting glasses. I could imagine her: sitting on a dilapidated couch, her lips on the metal, a strong puff, a blow of smoke. And then everything a blur, and her children disappearing somewhere in the background as she was thrown back to high school years, when boys still liked her and she was the most beautiful, the juicy thirteen-year-old with lip gloss who sucked on cinnamon sticks before kissing.
A stomach. A smell. Cigarette and stale coffee. My respectable, bored editor-in-chief Frank Curie, with his worn Hush Puppies. He was rocking back and forth on his heels. His teeth were soaked in saliva brown from the cigarette.
“Where are you with your piece, kid?” On my desk was a silver thumbtack, with its tip pointing upwards. He pressed it with his yellowed thumbnail. “Almost there.” I had 150 words written. I needed five hundred.