City Sketch

The baby's carriage was too heavy for him to push, too hard to steer through the billowing crowd of people massing around the bus stop. The city buildings hulking over the small boy moaned; the steel beams expanded and retracted under so much swelter, the massive structures swaying ever so slightly, like a monk praying during vespers. He kept pushing though, and as his mother held the hand of his little sister, and she the hand of an even younger sister, the boy's faced was mortared into that ancient rage, that old indomitable determination and will of even Achilles himself, to complete the task set before him: to push his baby brother through downtown Chicago.

The boy's mother craned her neck to read the bus route numbers on the sign, tugging at her little girls, scolding them for dragging their feet, not out of etiquette, but from the pure need for speed, to not miss the bus heading towards Uptown. She realized her bus stopped two blocks further north. She yanked on her child's arm as if it were a cord directly attached to some lever deep inside the bowels of the earth, suspending its rotation and pausing time just enough for her to catch her breath, to warrant the pedestrians and traffic cessative, to get to where she so dearly needed to be.

The girls tripped but couldn't fall down as their mother dragged them along, frenzied, chasing after a bus. The boy was trying to keep pace with his mother, unable to push and steer fast enough, his head lollipopping just above the stroller. He pushed on, still with that stern look on his face of that puritanic and stoic diligence to finish what was asked of him. He could no longer hear his sisters crying, he began to confuse his mother with other people, until finally she was lost in the herd. He pushed on, slicing through the rush-hour commuters who were chasing their own buses. After a while he did not know where to go.

Much later, this story will be rattled off to some judge overseeing the boy's prosecution of some petty crime. The small boy, now a man and a criminal, will cheapen that memory of travail into a puny plea (one the judge has already heard from him) to save himself from jail. But at that moment, in the heat of the city, the boy was triumphant, full of courage and terror.