Parrott recently graduated from the MFA program in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is her first contribution to our pixel heaven.

Who of you hasn't sat on a porch on a summer afternoon in Chicago, reading that chock-full-of-the-same-city tome by the man whose name is the same as his sentences sound, interrupted by the pesky, persistent ringing of a bell? Another Chicago sound: a man with straw hat and sun-toughened skin rides by on a bike fitted with a bell and a basket, a cooler bolted on the back. Peddles sweet, frozen stuff, the good stuff, the kind that spreads its freeze through veins and into brains, all of it melting at a glacial pace as long as the lid stays on.

It's hard to go back to the black-and-white page, hard not to fixate on the bell that the man keeps pressing his thumb against, its quickened one-two beat, stressed-unstressed, like the rhythm of the cyclist's heart, that pedal-pumping prompting a swift increase in the parallel pumping of blood, or the soliloquy of a Shakespearean on speed, speaking in accelerated iambic. The bells lose volume at a slowly metered rate, until, abruptly, they stop. Not a stutter, not a second of rest, but a dead stop, planting morbid ideas into your head.

A peek over the balcony wall relieves. Not a heart attack but a kid asking for a cone. The coins nestled in the kid's tiny palm catch the sun, and these spots of light change hands, like a new kind of currency, the price of a frozen ice: a rip-off or a steal, depending on how you see things. The kid picks out his flavor, tears paper, licks away, knowing full well that the thing will do its best once ripped from its cold, insulated heaven to escape in runny trails down fingers and wrists, disappear in sticky drips that pool against rubber reservoirs of flip-flopped feet.

And just as soon as the ringing resumes, it fades to nothing. And hasn't it occurred to you, one floor up and indecently dressed, to chase that cyclist down? Haven't you imagined how good a nice, cold chunk of frozen ice would feel, pressed against the insides of your cheeks inside a mouth full of grimy, humid heat? Who among us has not been stuck jonesing for a frozen fix, forced inside to stick our thick tongues under the tap, wait for the water to run cold, to slurp the inferior liquid with its chlorinated, rusty-pipe-laced bitter taste-the taste of true regret?

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