Unhinged_by_Rick_Reed

Chapter 1-1

Echoes

This story was inspired by a time when I lived in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. I worked downtown, and every day, I’d take the Brown Line into work (for those of you not in the know, the Brown Line is one of several branches of the Chicago Transit Authority’s L system).

And every day, we’d make our stop at Irving Park Road and I would look out the window and see a unique studio apartment almost abutting the L tracks. It was in an old building, but unlike most apartment buildings I’d see on my way downtown to work, this one had an apartment that had one wall that was made almost entirely of glass, floor to ceiling. Inside was what appeared to be a relatively small studio apartment, with a raised area where the bed would go. I had sort of a Rear Window kind of feeling when I looked in that apartment, thinking that it was really cool in an architectural sense, but also wondering, as writers do, about the people who lived there. The strange thing was, in all the times I sat in the station looking at and coveting that unique apartment, I never saw a single person within its wall.

Thus, the blank canvas for this story was born. See, as a writer, I began seeing people in my mind’s eye in that apartment and even began seeing, oh yes, dead people (or at least a dead person). And thus, a story was born. What happened to the people I saw? Read on….