On the near north side of Chicago any September day between 85 and 45 degrees you will see a number of people in down coats and several in shorts and the expressions on all will evince their perception of the utter appropriateness of their sartorial selections. You will also see at least one poodle tied up outside a Starbuck’s and imagine the future lamppost mugshots with the boldfaced type saying: PLEASE! HE’S NOT A FIGHT-DOG! REWARD! So you will sit down next to him on the sidewalk as he sniffs your open-toed booties, appropriate only approximately twelve days per year, tingling your gleaming perfect pedi-ed toes. You’ll watch the frail and frumpy tourists with their purses dangling on their thin yet flabby arms like low-hanging fruit and the bicyclists on the illegal sidewalk, ringing and ringing and when you turn to glare they smile and wave and say no, you’re good, you’re good, as you imagine a stick in the spokes of all that feckless folly, because really you are not and neither, of course, are they; no one can live up to all this perfect, overwhelming, wrought iron, Greystone, lakeside, Midwestern, urban beauty.

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Julie Benesh’s writing has been published in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review, and Florida Review, among others. She has received an Illinois Arts Council Grant, earned an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, lives in Chicago and is a professor and program director at a school of professional psychology.