Challenge: Write about something that happened yesterday.
Unreal City
Lizzie and I took the bus north to Michigan Avenue, where throngs of people wove around each other like marine animals, drifting schools of fish, startling in and out of the glittering stores as if into coral reefs. The tides pulled us, relentless, block after block, through towering shoals of commerce. In a crosswalk, while shark SUVs nudged the stream, nosing a gap into the fleshy current, two boys nipped and tumbled and darted at each other, a pocket of chaos ignored by their family pod. “Don’t scootch in the middle of the street,” Lizzie snapped, as we swept behind them to the curb, saying the human thing, voicing what I’d half been thinking, deep in the wreck of my mother brain, waking me at last from my cold sea dream.
