Chicago gets a parade.
Four of us, shoulder to shoulder on a sidewalk built for two, and the city notices. Traffic slows. A jogger passes us twice, and the second lap wasn’t for cardio. Two women outside a café stop mid-sentence and don’t pretend otherwise, which I respect. A man in a suit stares long enough to clip a mailbox.
A kid stops dead on the sidewalk, looks up at Rayner like he’s a building, and says, “Are you guys superheroes?”
“Yes,” I tell him.
His mother hauls him off before I can take questions.
It’s unfortunate.
We make it half a block before a woman with a yoga mat steps directly into our path. Hand up, palm out, like she’s stopping traffic.
She’s not wrong.
We are the traffic.
“Okay. Sorry. Hi.” She’s talking to Rayner. Her eyes make the full trip up him and take their time coming back down. “I have to ask. What gym do you go to?”
Rayner blinks back from wherever he’s been all morning and stares at her long enough to make it everyone’s problem.
“I walk,” he says. Complete sincerity.
“You—” She recalculates. “You walk.”
“Long distances.”
“Is that, like… a program?”
“No.”
She waits for more but there is no more. Rayner’s already looking down the block, gone back to wherever he spends his time lately.
“I also walk,” I offer.
She does not look at me.
She looks at Brock instead, who hands her the smile he keeps for civilians, and she visibly forgets what day it is.
“Have a good one,” Brock says, and steps around her.
We leave her on the sidewalk holding her yoga mat like a life raft.
For the record, I was right there. Available. Tongue ring. Did I mention available?
The universe has no taste.
Erik doesn’t slow for any of it. He’s got a door to buy and a woman to get back to, and he sets a pace that says so.
The hardware store is a temple, and I mean that as a complaint.
It’s big enough to stable all four of us shifted, and every single thing in it is a version of another thing. There are forty-seven kinds of screws. I counted. Somewhere, someone decided this world needed forty-seven kinds of screws, and they say I’m insane.
An employee spots us coming through the doors, lifts his radio, and says, quiet, like the four of us can’t all hear him perfectly, “Dave. Front entrance.”
Dave never comes. Smart man, Dave.
Instead we get a kid in an orange vest, nineteen at the outside, who plants himself in our path with the courage of the recently trained. “You guys finding everything okay?”
