Tabloids Underfoot

by David Peak

It's at this time when the streetlights flicker on, casting their orange glow over the rain-drizzled Chicago streets, and all the swank downtown eateries set plates and room-temperature glasses of Spanish wine on their tables. It's at this time when the hard-working Mexican and Polish and Russian construction workers put down their hammers and their levels and reach for their smokes and their flasks; when the foreman lumbers off to his truck or his buddy’s ride to go to a bar, to drink. It's at this time when two of the Mexican workers wander off to a familiar taqueria down the street; when a trio of Polish men sling their bags over their shoulders and stand and wait for the Northwest-bound buses. It’s at this time when the sky curdles from gray to pink to purple to black, when all the construction workers are leaving the condos they’re working on, in the neighborhoods they can’t afford to live in anymore, when the rest of the working world is scurrying off the trains and the buses, when the morning’s tabloids are being trampled underfoot. This is when Simon Drabinski, a newbie on the construction sight, decides to go home. It’s at this time when Simon Drabinski makes his way home to his new wife.

6S

David Peak is a graduate student and part-time faculty member at Columbia College Chicago. His work has appeared in Lamination Colony, Dark Sky Magazine, Somnambulist Quarterly, and Hair Trigger, and is forthcoming in Willows Wept Review and Doorways Magazine. He blogs here.