From the Liqour Stores to the Train Stop Floors

I am ten years ago, a blurry boy in a dirty winter coat, frightened of nothing and full of secret terror as I move through this alien world I inhabit, junkies on street corners begging for a fix of fae glamour, strung-out on forbidden magic and heroin in equal parts. Sometimes their dreams pass into our world. I saw a three-headed dog with children's faces savage a man in the streets of Chicago once. I didn't drink, then, but I stole gin whenever I could; I must have shoplifted from every Osco on the Green Line that year, the never-opened bottles lining the kitchenette counter.

Pigeons used to congregate around the heating lamps at the El stop, but rocs and phoenixes crowded them out, their vast glittering wings folded up tight in Chicago's biting winter wind. I never got too close; all winter long, they feasted on the dead bodies of people desperate enough to try and snatch at their precious plumage. They grew fat on despair, those birds. Even now, I can hardly bear to look at them.

So what does this mean for you now, she asks me, in a disinterested monotone. Are you still looking for a ghost?

Lady, I tell her, there are days when I think the only ghost around here is me.