The Montreal Project [03]

Chicago, A While Back

He was out walking on the Lakefront Trail near Montrose Harbor where the breakwaters curve way out into the lake and you can disappear into the nature preserve and watch plovers mating and building nests in their apartment buildings made of sand, if that’s your thing, or if it’s evening the little peeper frogs get up their chorus of mating songs like a choir trying to find a common key, but it was late afternoon and just kinda hot out and he was walking off the anxiety he felt in his bloodstream from not having worked in a few months, wondering how he would tell his friends the landlords who lived upstairs that he was going to need another month, at least, but he would figure something out, he would steal from gangsters if he needed to, and they would laugh and say no please don’t do that but they would also be visibly disappointed. The lake was out there doing its thing and there were sailboaters and attractive people in bathing suits all along the dunes and the grassy hillocks and beach balls were being tossed around and he realized without wanting to think about it that he had no idea what the purpose of a beach ball was. Then his pocket rang.