Yellow Mama E zine

Welcome to Chicago

 

by C. Inanen

 

       Seth Hellman nervously stepped off the Illinois Central Railroad train in Chicago at Union Station. He’d never been there although he’d grown up in Seneca, Illinois on the Illinois River, just 64 miles away. The station had been erected a few years earlier, in 1925, and it was huge, covering 10 city blocks. He was no stranger to large structures, the past two years he’d helped build bridges over the Illinois River in Seneca and Marseilles. He was an iron worker and could walk casually on narrow beams hundreds of feet in the air, but the city made him nervous. He was a country boy.

 

       Looking upward at the signs identifying which street could be accessed by which exits, he periodically checked his wallet to be sure it was still there. On the advice of his father, he’d safely pinned half of his cash to his boxer shorts. He kept a firm grip on his cardboard valise as he dodged other travelers in the crowded station.

 

       Behind him Mike O’Malley kept pace with him. He’d noticed the regular checks on Seth’s hip pocket. Dressed in a tan suit with wide suspenders and wearing a straw boater his appearance didn’t attract any attention.

 

       Leslie Penny was a different matter. Young and attractive, she dressed stylishly in a gray afternoon tea dress with fringe around the hem which was above her knees. She turned heads as she walked toward Seth. Approaching him on a beeline course as they neared each other, he dodged left and she dodged right. Attempting to avoid a collision he moved back to his right. She moved to her left, smiling beguilingly and then apologetically as they collided.

 

       Mike adroitly dipped two fingers into Seth’s pocket and removed his wallet. Welcome to Chicago.   

 

 

       C. Inanen lives in the Midwest USA. His work has been most recently published in Yellow Mama magazine. During the upcoming months his crime, police procedural, and speculative fiction will appear in the Blue Lake Review, AntipodeanSF, Down in the Dirt, and Straylight Literary Arts Magazine. You can also look for it in the August issue (#117) of Yellow Mama magazine. He is a contributor to The Yard: Crime Blog.

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       Hillary Lyon is an illustrator for horror/sci-fi and pulp fiction websites and magazines. She is also founder and senior editor for the independent poetry publisher, Subsynchronous Press. An SFPA Rhysling Award nominated poet, her poems have appeared in journals such as Eternal Haunted Summer, Jellyfish Whispers, Scfifaikuest, Illya’s Honey, and Red River Review, as well as numerous anthologies. Her short stories have appeared recently in Night to Dawn, Yellow Mama, Black Petals, Sirens Call, and Tales from the Moonlit Path, among others, as well as in numerous horror anthologies such as Night in New Orleans: Bizarre Beats from the Big Easy, Thuggish Itch: Viva Las Vegas, and White Noise & Ouija Boards. She appeared, briefly, as the uncredited "all-American Mom with baby" in Purple Cactus Media’s 2007 Arizona indie-film, "Vote for Zombie." Having lived in France, Brazil, Canada, and several states in the US, she now resides in southern Arizona.  https://hillarylyon.wordpress.com/