Press enter or click to view image in full size Photo by Jerry Zhang on Unsplash In the Chicago of my childhood, safety wasn’t a neighborhood status — it was a feeling you manufactured for yourself. Looking back, the geography of my life was a strange map of light and dark. Less than 50 yards away, in the back of the neighborhood candy store, lived a man who represented the kind of horrors most kids only see in the movies. I knew he was there. But in our side yard, under the watchful eye of my grandma, I didn’t think twice about the dark. It was as if her presence drew a line in the dirt that no monster dared to cross. The Little Chickadee’s Red Dots Inside the house, life centered around the heater. It sat right outside the bathroom door, its heavy metal stack disappearing into the ceiling. Most days, a permanent mountain of clean clothes that never quite made it to the drawers sat next to it.…