I’m so happy. I was feeling a little blue tonight, wondering what’s real and what isn’t. I typed in one prompt and got this amazing piece, a new dimension to my life. God bless Chat GPT.

The Sickie Souse Club: “An Elegy for After”

The party had decayed into something finer, like a cut flower that smells sweetest just before it browns. Graylyn’s studio—fourth floor of the old Schmidt Building on Kinzie—still pulsed with the fading echo of the Ramones: “I wanna be sedated,” some final, pleading voice bouncing off steel beams and cold cement. The stereo had been left on inside, someone had sat on the remote hours ago, and now Joey’s voice came and went like a dying ghost in a warehouse of neon and shadow.

Out on the back stairs, where the cigarettes were, and the real confessions, the night air was brutal and blue, Chicago December deep into its cruelty. Angela’s breath came in thick little clouds as she pulled the collar of her bomber jacket higher, the cigarette trembling between two fingers.

“Graylyn!” she shouted into the stairwell, “this weather’s committing crimes!”

Graylyn stood a few steps above her, legs bare beneath her father’s old greatcoat, clutching a wine glass full of gin and blue Gatorade. It fluoresced like plutonium. Her laughter was a crack in the night, sharp and unsympathetic.

“You chose to come out here, angel,” she said, her voice a mix of bourbon and ballet lessons. “I told you. The party’s inside.”

“But your stairs are poetry,” Alvin whispered, sitting near the bottom, sketchbook open on his knees. He was drawing the shadows. Not the stairs themselves—never the stairs—but the shadows of the railing as they fell like prison bars on the peeling concrete.

Drake leaned against the wall just inside the door, one foot still in the heat and light of the studio, one foot out in the frostbite, a purgatory position. His coat hung open, his shirt unbuttoned like a poet in mourning, and he was talking—half to himself, half to whoever would orbit close enough to hear.

“There’s something about decay,” he said. “Like, real beauty starts after the structure collapses. Like, no one falls in love with the wedding cake—they fall in love with the crumbs on the hotel pillow the next morning.”

“You’re drunk,” Trish said, but softly, like she was afraid the night would hear her. She had come out barefoot, her heels dangling from one hand like a threatened weapon. Her hair was tangled, and her cheeks flushed from the vodka and the dancing and something else—some kind of certainty that this night, like the city itself, would never forgive them.

Dustin emerged behind her, brushing her shoulder with his as he passed. He lit a clove and blew smoke out hard, his gaze fixed on the skyline cut sharp against the heavens.

“I keep thinking,” he said, “about how the stars are the same ones above Baghdad and Reykjavík and Joliet, and it doesn’t matter at all, does it?”

“Only if you’re alone,” Alvin murmured.

“I feel alone,” Charles announced, suddenly appearing from the fire door, a bag of ice over one eye and a heroic grin on his face. “I just got punched by a guy in a denim vest who thought I was coming on to his girlfriend.”

“You were,” Angela said.

“Of course,” Charles said. “But that’s hardly the point.”

There was a silence, broken only by the echoing loop of the Ramones, now distant and more haunting than it had any right to be. The city beyond them was blue and brutal, yes—but also endless. Somewhere down the alley, a dog barked. Somewhere below, a car backfired. Somewhere inside, someone coughed and laughed at once.

Graylyn held her glass up to the fluorescent light that flickered above them, watching the strange liquid slosh and shimmer.

“Do you think we’ll remember this?” she asked. “Like, actually remember it? The texture of this exact moment? The way the metal’s cold under your ass and the shadows are slanting like an old noir film?”

“Only if we ruin it by trying,” Drake said.

That made her smile.

Trish, barefoot, walked to the railing and leaned out over the edge. Her hair blew wildly behind her, like a prophetess at the brink of a vision.

“Look,” she said. “The lights on the river.”

Everyone turned.

In the distance, the Chicago River glinted like a dark ribbon wrapped around a secret. The El thundered across a trestle, and for a moment, everything felt scored to the sound of it—the clack and scream of the train, the echo of punk rock, the wind through cracked windows.

Drake stepped forward and took her hand. Trish looked at him, then at the river again. She didn’t pull away.

Below, someone shouted. A bottle shattered.

The party would end eventually, like all beautiful things. But not yet.

Not quite yet.