Illinois Lip Service

I’d never felt so embarrassed in my life. I knew I should’ve lied.

The judges stared at me, their mouths in thin lines. Then the leader, a woman with long red hair, spoke. “I guess we have no choice,” she said, “but to send you to Chicago.”

“Chicago?!” I exclaimed. “Thin is my patience for this court, thinner still your peering lips.” I spit on the floor, exaggerating the fullness of my lips. The Judges of Thin. Foul is the stench of their barely existent upper lip, but absolute is their judgment. To the mines I go.

Chicago was worse than I could have imagined, a place of torment and hopeless wails. Yet in the squalor of the mines, I found others with similar fullness of lip, and together we conspired an escape plan. I was going to make those Judges of Thin pay for their tyranny.

We waited until the night after the guards’ pay day, when they were short staffed and hung-over. We broke through a tunnel wall onto the old riverbank. From there we made our way south, in search of a place where we could live freely. Smell you later, Chicago!