The Voices in Josh Marks’ Head
Chicago Magazine
by Bryan Smith
June 23, 2014
Dusk loomed a few hours away, but as the young man wandered, vacant eyed, through the back streets of his Chicago boyhood, a different kind of darkness, one that had stalked him for months, settled on him like a fog.
Please, he begged.
No, the voices insisted.
The gun had been easy enough to find, even for someone who’d grown up abhorring the destruction that violence had visited on the city he loved.
He hadn’t even had to pay for it. Not that he could have. A thousand dollars plus an iPhone had been the ask. He had eight bucks in his pocket, and there was no way he was giving up his phone, the one on which he had saved every message from his mother as the darkness had descended.
