'Chicagoland' Excerpt: Trust Issues

Moses seated himself in a papasan chair. The drugs must have been still messing with me, because every time I looked, it seemed like the papasan was slowly melting. Then it suddenly dumped Moses onto the floor, and I realized the chair had actually been broken and sagging all along. I couldn’t stop laughing at the reverse irony.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Moses asked.

“I didn’t think you were really sinking; I thought it was a hallucination,” I tried to explain.

“You know I have trust issues with chairs.”

“Yes, I know how three chairs once collapsed on you in a single day. I was even there for the third one.”

“Right. So you should know what a big deal this is for me.”

A couple of years later, I would turn up the volume on a softly spoken background reading in a Moses Marx song, trying to really catch the words that had so far eluded me. “We start in a womb and end up in a tomb and in between we deny the doom,” it said, before diving into a long list of misfortunes we pretend won’t befall us. I nearly lost it when I heard the words “and every chair you sit down on will be sturdy.” This was something that went all the way to Moses’s core.

Disgruntled, Moses shuffled over and took a seat atop a gigantic piece of stereo equipment. “Allow me to introduce the speaker of the house,” he said.

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This was an excerpt from Chicagoland. The complete novel is Kindle format through Amazon.