Cool City

Excerpt

I was in the kitchen watching The Weather Channel when the girl from two floors down knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to fall in love.

“Total mad crazy love,” she said. “You and me—what do you think?”

I had seen her a few times before on the front stoop of the building, listening to her iPod through giant coconut headphones. You could tell she was proud of her shins by the way she stretched her legs from the stoop to the sidewalk, her black skirt bunched up at mid-thigh so you had no choice but to look. Sometimes she’d shout out random lyrics to whatever song she was listening to, singing in a high, off-key voice that reminded me of a bird that had once lived inside my air conditioner.

“Everything is free!” she’d sing, shooting me a little head nod as I climbed around her. “Everything is me! Everything is free! Sha-na-na-bop-bop…sha-na-na-BOP!”

I’d forget all about her and then wake up in the middle of the night with whatever song she’d been singing rattling in my head. Her musical choices seemed obscure but maybe they were big hits that had somehow eluded me. I’d start pacing the apartment trying to identify the song but I never could; I’d wind up staring at the ceiling until the alarm clock rang and then drag myself to work and sleep at my desk. It was annoying but except for the insomnia and the occasional daydream about her shins we were strangers until that night she knocked on my door.

Chuck Augello

Chuck Augello lives in New Jersey with his wife, three cats, and several unnamed birds that inhabit the back yard. His work has appeared in Hobart, Juked, Word Riot, The Review Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and other journals. A graduate of the MFA Program at Queens University, he is an editor with the online journal Cease, Cows and publishes The Daily Vonnegut, a website exploring the work of Kurt Vonnegut.

Hannah Tinti on “Cool City”

Hurricane Sandy happened almost two years ago, but its effects are still felt across New York City. I’ll never forget the way giant trees were thrown about like tinker toys, and the dread my neighbors and I felt as the Gowanus Canal broke its banks and started flooding sewage into the streets. As sections of the city were destroyed, and others left without power for days and even weeks, from Staten Island to Red Hook we were all shaken. Sandy was a reminder of how Mother Nature can bring civilization to its knees. That kind of chaos and randomness can be a frightening thing, so when Chuck Augello’s “Cool City,” appeared in our slush pile, I found myself both surprised and charmed by the way Augello took those same feelings of fear and uncertainty and spun them into a story about connection and love. Set during a terrible, Sandy-like storm, “Cool City” follows two young city-dwellers, each trying to cope with the randomness and terror of life. One uses numbers and OCD-like behaviors to make himself feel safe, the other uses “Fast Love”—a unique self-help program where love is broken down to an impulse decision followed by immediate, binding commitment. Be sure to read Chuck Augello’s Q&A with us about how he came up with the concept for “Fast Love,” as well as his decision to use Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems in “Cool City.” I was moved and relieved when reading the final pages of this story, just as I was by the outpouring of volunteers and neighbors coming together in the aftermath of Sandy’s destruction. Like these two characters who fall in love during the chaos and wildness of the storm, when the rain finally stopped we found true comfort in each other.