Nic Shrayber

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Nic Shrayber
Nic Shrayber
The Day the Stars Changed
Stories

The Day the Stars Changed

Part Two

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Nic Shrayber
Nov 15, 2024
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Nic Shrayber
The Day the Stars Changed
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Haymarket Square, circa 1900s

Mama had told me she knew something was different one morning because Pa didn't go to work at the steel mill. Instead, he put on his suit but on a Thursday, the same one he's wearing today as we stand in Grand Park. She told me how the streetcars and trains were packed with people, all heading to Haymarket Square, even though everyone knew what US President Wilson had signed into law the day before, or maybe because of it.

"Your father said to me," Mama had told me while she was pressing my suit, "'Miriam, today we choose whether to be citizens or subjects.' That's how he put it, simple as discussing the weather." She didn't understand then, she says, but she does now. We all do.

I wasn't there when Eugene Debs climbed onto that wagon, that same wagon they say the anarchists used in '86, though Pa says that's just a story people like to tell. But I've heard it described so many times I sometimes think I remember it. The spring air thick with coal smoke and wet lake wind. The way the crowd, already thousands strong by mid-morning, kept growing like a lake after the winter thaw. Workers from the stockyards standing shoulder to shoulder with university professors, their differences washed away by something bigger than themselves.

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