The Windy City Chronicles

Chicago Nov. 2009

(Well it's technically 24th-but night of 23rd)

It's a foggy and chilled evening. London-esque (not that I've ever been there-but I've heard). The dampness is fall trying to hold on before winter hits us head on. Thanksgiving is around the corner, and whereas the leaves have mostly fallen and the trees mostly bare, the bitter cold has yet to present itself. But back to the foggy night on the streets of the Windy City...

The streetlamp casts an eerie yellow glow on a vacant street that is all but abandoned due to construction. Filled with orange cones, huge cememt cylinders that will eventually be sewers, and silent bulldozers and dumptrucks we here the steps of someone walking. It's a confident and steady step. Not in a hurry, not dallying, deeper than a woman's high heel click clap, but not the sound of a rubber sole. As the sound gets closer a shadow starts to appear on the ground. A long shadow of a man, a tall man, a tall well toned man, the sound was obviously his cowboy boots, as his shadow showed a man with a stetson on his head. As he stepped directly under the light, it was like watching a cowboy from an old movie western walk right off the screen directly onto the Chicago street. The stetson shadowed his face but she could just make out the dark tresses that brushed his shoulders. His very wide shoulders, that were very clear in his long cowboy trench coat (did this guy just get off a cattle run or something?), which hung on his 6'2" body and stopped right around his knees, opened at the front-clearly the cold and wind of the city didn't bother him. He turned away from her, responding to a sound from behind him that he didn't like. She could see his shoulders tense and tighten the fit of his coat on his upper body as he turned around. He scanned the block and the mounds of dirt and gravel until he was certain no one was there and turned back around to look right at her. He was staring right at her. How could he see her, how had he known? But he saw her, she was dressed all in black and tucked into the shadows, behind one of the giant wheels of a dump truck. He tried to hide a smirk as he walked towards her. There was no hiding now. She looked for a route of escape; she could crawl under the truck to the other side and try and make a run for it, but it was up against a fence and she knew that of the 2 directions she could run once on the other side, one was blocked with cememt cylinders and the other would just point her toward him. She had no choice but to come out of the shadows and face the music. As she stepped out of her hiding spot and into the light she gave her fiercest glare and braced herself for the assault.