Author Archives: Chris Petrakos

Roaming the neighborhood on a lonely, aimless Sunday, I stopped to buy a newspaper at the Loyola train station. Through the window I saw a small number of people standing transfixed, particularly a young woman who had covered her mouth with one hand and was pointing in wonder with the other. I turned and that’s […]

Just outside the Belmont station the train came abruptly to a stop and we sat for a minute while the conductor and motorman conferred in low voices. With a tight look on his face, the conductor opened one of the doors, leaned out, and peered into the lightly swirling snow. “Hey,” he began calling into […]

It was morning downtown and the sidewalks were nearly empty except for a few solemn shoppers and people late for work. I was walking east on Adams when a heavyset woman, strolling in my direction with a friend, stopped in her tracks and began to pull violently at her hair. She staggered like a drunk, […]

Walking downtown on a dull, sunless morning I thought I saw a man having a heart attack. He was leaning with all his weight against the back of a truck with a pained look on his face, pulling off a pair of heavy work gloves, and clutching his chest. Sitting near his feet, almost asleep, […]

I was walking through Walgreens when I first heard the voice coming from the next aisle, and I didn’t like it. It was hoarse and demanding, and every sentence seemed like it was meant as a punishment or an insult to whoever had to listen. But when I turned the corner I was surprised to […]

At first glance they looked like an old married couple, out for an afternoon walk and coffee at McDonald’s. Both were dressed in long gray coats and black rubber boots, both moved with slow, uncertain steps. They parted at the door and the man, out of breath and clutching a pair of glasses mended with […]

I never saw her face during the entire time–not more than an hour, though it seemed much longer–that she was being insulted and baited by her husband. We were sitting in Ditka’s waiting for women’s boxing to begin. Chris Kreuz, a feisty local, would be defending her title against a New York challenger. The warm-up […]

It was an empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose that started us talking. I’d been sitting on a bench at a Rogers Park beach when a short, wiry guy in shabby clothes came wandering out of the north. There was a jumpy, rambunctious air about him even though he had a limp that made him […]

They were in love. They were together in the way only teenagers can be: oblivious to the honks and yells of truckers, to the disapproving stares of old ladies and the sad, envious glances of old men. Sitting on a couple of milk crates borrowed from the Jewel down the street, they’d set themselves up […]

There was a small dark island of blood just above his eye. It was no bigger than a button, hard and shiny even in the dim yellow light of the train.

The singing diaper, the AIDS-proof syringe, the see-through vehicle communicator, and other perfect ideas for an imperfect world.

Four Scenes of Heterosexual Intercourse

Two women and a man were sitting under clouds of cigarette smoke at the counter of the Golden Angel restaurant late one night. They must have been there a long time. They were shrill and restless, their voices climbing on top of each other as they all struggled for attention. The women were obviously friends; […]

“Much too slow, never fast enough. Not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet.”