From the day his son died in an El derailment caused by an unexpected blizzard, the sun hid behind a sheet of clouds as thick, black and mucky as February road slush. Not until the moment when he realized that it was his own personal anguish that was producing the weeping clouds that kept the sun hidden from the other denizens of Chicago, causing him to laugh, rejoicing in his own power, did the clouds dry up into iridescent vapor and the sun, in a flash, burst into view. Even as temperatures plummeted deep into the minus range, the inhabitants of the city threw open their curtains and blinds to the welcome stranger. But during its absence it had become enervated; rays that during the summer it had hurled through windows, shattering glass, now only slid down the first pane of the triple glazed storm windows.
That night, a million stars danced across the Milky Way Ballroom while the rabbit in the moon sucked the remaining warmth from the land. It grew so cold that every church bell in the state cracked.
Though frowned upon by the AMA, but to the delight of the Sun-Post, on a request from Jesse Jackson, God made a rare house call, sheltering the homeless buried under the snow. God charged double his normal rate. The insurance companies refused to pay and it would have gone to court had the courtroom doors not been frozen shut. God left Chicago unpaid, vowing never to return until all the Michigan Avenue lawyers had turned into pillars of salt. Member of the AMA, ABA, and AJA all reveled together inside steamy Rush Street bars drinking hot Frozen Margaritas until they wandered into the cold and were instantly turned into lemons. Mormons packed the Billygoat Tavern, drinking hot tequila with extra salt.
But the revelry soon died down as winter truly set in. The forty watt incandescent sun shone while the wind battered with sharp shards of frozen Lake Michigan the few airplanes that dare leave O'Hare ferrying refugees from the cold. At night, the moon howled at the frozen wolves. The ozone hole filled in over Chicago and global warming headed south for the winter. He whose son had died laughed at them all.
It was too cold to leave the house, the snow and frozen slush piled too high to be able to open front doors, so they stayed inside, huddled in their homes next to ineffective radiators, buried under a mountain of blankets. But even there they shivered, cracking teeth and bones, and it was obvious that they would all soon perish, until en masseq, they realized that only their own spirit and shared warmth could keep them alive.
During the day, neighbors braved the cold to visit each other. Parents sang children's songs with their kids, then in the evening the children improvised love songs for their parents. The glow of contented sleeping children warmed the city enough to unfreeze every ovary and as the adults embraced their partners, their passion generated enough heat to crack the ice on Lake Michigan. Three million babies were conceived that night.
In mourning, alone, defeated, he wept and the clouds returned. Salt tears rained down all night, but in the morning, his eyes still red and swollen, he vowed never to relent.
The sun was darkened like the face of an old miner just back from the depths of a coal dust hell, while the wind whipped itself to new strengths, transforming the landscape into a desolate arctic scene, turning Soldier Field into one giant snowball and the Sears and Hancock Towers into two prongs in a giant snowdrift, the largest mountain in the Midwest, and the perfect ski slope were there anyone brave enough to step outside.
Winter continued on relentlessly, and even in May, when Minneapolis was beginning to thaw and breed fresh mosquitoes, Chicago remained dead. Spring was skipped over and summer frozen. Fall was the season for avalanches, but the people did not despair. Inside their houses, the women grew heavy, the men horny, and the children inquisitive. There was not a single abortion that year; because of the cold, the men had nowhere to run and the women nothing else in their lives.
After nine months, three million women went into labor simultaneously, but there were no ambulances, no hospitals, no doctors, no midwives, no hot water. The women screamed in agony and he only laughed, happy in his revenge. And when the first nearly frozen child, an undersized black boy, peeked its pleading eyes out of the warm womb and into the frigid air and decided it best to return, his father realized it was hopeless. "He was fathered by the cold, nurtured by the cold, and he will die in the cold," the father muttered to his wife.
He heard that and stopped his laughing, grew silent. He considered. It was true! He was a father again, this time three million times over. He couldn't let his children die again, he was their father and he had to protect them.
Suddenly, the wind stilled and the sun sneezed, ridding itself of its dusty mask. Three million healthy babies of every color were born. Spring arrived in October and to the confusion of the ducks in the lagoon in Evanston, and to the envy of Miami and Los Angeles, never left again.
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