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Chicago, Illinois, 1893

It was oppressively hot in the attic, but from one of its small windows ten year old Johnny Board gazed out upon the city of Chicago. The city, like a living picture mounted on the wall before him, looked ready to burst out of its wooden frame…too immense and powerful to be so contained.

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Of Chicago, Rudyard Kipling said, “This place is the first American city I have encountered…Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.”

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The city hugged the shore of Lake Michigan for twenty-four miles, as if only the lake could halt its spread. Close to the lake reared a congestion of tall structures, but from the lake’s edge the city spread inland for over ten miles with an almost uniform flatness of roofs. This was an urban wasteland of mills and factories, offices and dwellings, blending together into one homogenous concoction of sooty brick. Above it all hung a gray pall of smoke from a forest of chimneys, smoke that stank of burning coal.

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Of Chicago, German historian and economist Max Weber said that the “whole powerful city, more extensive than London—resembles, except for the better residential areas, a human being with his skin removed.”

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Likes veins and tendons, telegraph wires and railroad lines were interwoven through the city, communicating thought and product to other cities elsewhere across this vast and burgeoning country. Along the Chicago River floated heavily loaded barges. And out there, there, Johnny recognized, lay the Union Stock Yard, where his father had worked up until two months ago, when he too had taken a train out of Chicago, perhaps headed for some other growing city. Johnny didn’t know where that city might be.

In those stockyards, those slaughterhouses, how many animals at this very moment were having their throats cut, Johnny wondered. In the very streets of the city, strewn with uncollected horse droppings, animal carcasses lay bloated and rotting in the summer sun. Swarming with flies. So many flies that their buzzing was as oppressive as the heat.

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Of Chicago, French novelist Paul Bourget had the impression that it had been formed by “some impersonal power, irresistible, unconscious, like a force of nature.”

*     *     *

Johnny turned his head sharply. Had he heard a buzzing from the stairs behind him? A buzzing from his family’s apartment, on the floor below?

No, just a train approaching near the house. Now rumbling past. The walls vibrated.

There weren’t many flies down there, not clouds of them like there were over the animals left to putrefy in the gutters. But Johnny was still reluctant to go back downstairs. He had brought apples up here, their green skins turning brown in patches with their own encroaching decay. He had even peed in a mason jar that belonged to his mother.

His mother.

But he knew he must venture down there again. He knew he couldn’t spend yet another day up here in the attic. He needed water again. He needed to…to…

Johnny crept away from the window, and around the corner to the stairs. He hesitated at their head, as if he expected to see some terrible figure awaiting him in the gloom at the bottom. But there was no one. No one. Stealthily, he began to descend.

The kitchen was silent and empty…empty except for the sound of a single fly, trapped buzzing against a windowpane. Bright dusty sunlight filled this room, but the parlor beyond was murky, all of its curtains drawn.

Johnny cupped his hand over nose and mouth as he neared its threshold. The summer swelter had made the stench so terrible that he had begun to smell it in the attic, and he was surprised the family on the floor below hadn’t yet complained. He both dreaded and hoped for them to investigate its source.

He took just several steps inside the room. But through its duskiness, he could make out the form at its center.

Johnny Board’s mother dangled there, a kicked-over stepladder lying on the floor below her bare feet. She wore a thin nightdress, her dark hair in disarray. Her head was tipped forward, her eyes closed, her tongue protruding from between her lips and the area around her jaw discolored where the blood had settled over the past few days. Likewise, her slender arms shaded from milky white at her shoulders to very dark at her forearms and hands, as though she wore sheer black gloves.

(“I hear birds singing, Johnny,” she had whispered to him before he left for school. “Or maybe it’s bugs.” She was sobbing and laughing at the same time, crouching down and gripping his shoulders hard, too hard. “Bugs in my head…”)

This was the first time he’d looked at her that he didn’t burst into sobs. His sobs had been scorched out of him, his tears evaporated as if from summer dehydration. But still, his chest yawned open like a trapdoor inside him over which his heart hung on its own noose string. He was angry, too. Angry at his mother for leaving him. Angry at his father for leaving her. And angry at himself for not being strong enough to leave the house to fetch help that couldn’t help, angry at himself for not bringing himself to touch her hand or to cut her down (as if, even yet, he might still save her). Angry at himself for going to school on that day, and leaving her here alone…

He heard another train coming, shaking the house, roaring like an animal into this great city that impressed so many writers as the first truly American city, bringing more supplies so that it could grow and spread even more. Like a disease…a cancer of coal smoke, slaughtered animals and sweating, bleeding, rutting human flesh…

Johnny saw a fly skitter across his mother’s forehead, as if it sought some entryway inside her skull.