Neal Pollack

The driver began rocking from side to side in his seat, his fingers tapping anxious rhythms on the steering wheel. The Police Superintendent gave him a sharp look and he pressed his shoulders into his seat.

“Kiss him once for me, would you?” Ward said to the Police Superintendent.

The Police Superintendent turned around in his seat and gave Ward his familiar look of disgust. He shook his head slowly. “Who would have ever thought,” he said.

“Certainly not you,” Ward said.

The ride was otherwise uneventful, the streets specked with people, black forms silhouetted against the snow.

“Here.” The Police Superintendent dropped a ring of keys into Ward’s lap, letting them fall from his hand with the highest form of disregard. “The keys to the city.”

“You’re so thoughtful.”

Ward quickly deposited the keys into an inside pocket of his coat. He looked over and saw that the young officer who had kept vigil outside his door was snickering into his upturned jacket collar. When they made it to their destination, this same officer pulled Ward from the car and rudely bumped and shoved him into the snow, but in such a way as to make the action seem accidental, an inadvertent trip over the curb. Ward regained his feet, brushed snow from his clothes, retrieved his scattered thoughts, and checked his pockets to make sure the keys were still there. His outer garments were thoroughly soaked through.

The Police Superintendent took a firm hold of Ward’s gloved hand and led him forward like a child on the first day of school. They walked some fifty paces. Ward’s breath coming a little harder as they went. The Police Superintendent stopped as if on cue and spun Ward in front of him like a practiced dance partner. “Please sign, here and here.”

Ward did as instructed. The Police Superintendent slipped the damp paper into his jacket and stood before Ward under his white derby, the hat tiny on his massive head like some ghastly baby bonnet. “I would be lying if I said it has been a pleasure,” he said.

“Spare me.”

The Police Superintendent turned and headed back for his car and left Ward to the snow and wind. Ward vowed to take away with him some memory of the man. However, the weather being what is was, he was already having trouble remembering exactly how the man’s features fit together. So much so that Ward considered calling out to him and requesting a quick but comprehensive physical inventory, fully aware that, in all likelihood, the Police Superintendent would not even rebuff him with an insulting refusal. So he looked through the neutral and colorless distance and saw an old five-story walk-up building slanting away from the ground at a precarious angle, snow swirling around the leaning structure as if to lasso it upright. His appointed destination. What was keeping it standing? He turned for a final look at the Police Superintendent, who was now leaning against the car, white derby snugly atop his head. The two young officers were huddled over sharing a cigarette while uniformed men from supporting vehicles worked to cordon off the street with brass barricades they took from the trunks of their own cars.

Ward reached into his coat pocket for the ring of keys but fumbled them against his chest into the snow. At once he dropped to his knees, biting at the ends of his gloved fingers until his hands were free of the leather. He stuck his bare fists into the snow and began clawing about, reacting to the cold in an almost clinical way. The snow both surprising and mundane. He scooped up two fistfuls and weighed them in each palm. Snow was actually rising up from the street and fleeing into the heavens, but the domed sky would allow no escape. That thought took hold of him while he was kneeling at the very center of the world, its cold icy navel. He trembled to shake himself free.

No sooner had he done so than he noticed twenty feet ahead a familiar figure trudging through the snow toward him. He stuck his hands back into the slushy mounds and worked more frantically after the keys. Heard the snow-crunching approach of the two young officers behind him. Looked up and turned his head to see them bobbing forward with pistols drawn. He thought about shouting, “The keys! I dropped the keys! ” Instead, he burrowed down, trenched in this place that had already started to corrode beneath him, to melt and puddle around his knees.

DESTINY RETURNS

BY ACHY OBEJAS

26th & Kedvale

Destiny scratched the back of her neck with her left hand, the glistening pink nail on her index finger digging into the skin until it almost hurt. With the other hand she held a short, slim, and brown Romeo y Julieta to her thick, rubbery lips and breathed in. The tobacco indulged her, sweet and vaguely spicy, and she rocked for a moment, savoring her refuge from the freezing Chicago winds outside her window.