The Woman Downstairs

Chicago is where the woman downstairs starved herself to death last summer. Her boyfriend Ted ate hot dogs and wept with the gray rats out on the fire escape. In a thrift store chair I drank cases of beer and dreamed of lying down on the el tracks. The trains roared by under smoke-gray skies. Lake Michigan rose and fell like a bird. And when the wind screamed up Ashland Avenue, the corner bars were full by noon and the old stewbums sliding down their stools ate boiled eggs and fed beer to the dogs. The woman downstairs lost all her hair and wore a beret in the laundryroom. I borrowed her soap and bought her a Coke, but she left it on a dryer. She died in June weighing 82. Her boyfriend went back to New York. The cops wandered through her dusty rooms. One of them stole her TV.