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You can put your strength down. / I'm sitting here with you, at the kitchen table. / You don't need to say anything.
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ACT I, SCENE I WINNETKA, IL 1999
[Lights up. The backyard of an inner-city apartment complex, mid-summer.]
A yawn pries June's airtight maw wide open, and the fervid breath of summer spills across a Chicago suburb, vast as an empty belly: remarkably expansive, stretched-thin, humid and pink and so, so hungry. At the solstice's peak, when famine persists and exhaustion ceases, July swells at the base of its throat, sticks to the gum-covered sidewalks that snake through the city like wandering tongues, and the towering, stern-browed buildings that line every downtown street like rows of bone-slick teeth. Before long, it is August. The cycle of digestion proceeds.
[Enter MAIREAD ERICKSON.She is five years old, and it shows: in her pigtails, secured with baby-pink ribbons, and in her gap-toothed smile, and in the Minnie Mouse bandages crisscrossed across her kneecaps, and in the way that her weight barely disturbs the uneven soil below her. She is five years old, and it shows: particularly, in her resolute attentiveness to the mud pie that she's spent the last hour meticulously crafting.
