last year of high school. I got into running, especially cross-country, because I enjoyed the brain-clearing solitude, and because it gave me access to a locker room full of sweaty, naked, well-endowed jocks. I am not on the team at college because the demands of the frat boys take up all my time, but since I roll out of bed earlier than any of them I can still get in enough of a run to keep my self in shape. I am not muscled at all, nor particularly handsome, and certainly not well-endowed – 5”-6” tops. But, I am not horribly ugly, either, and I am lean and shapely, if not hunky like them.

I had taken an internship at the downtown corporate headquarters of a major bank, and so had become familiar with a local landmark – the Medieval Market. It was an urban development project that actually succeeded, which is a rare thing. It had been a church building, all stone and arches and rooftop gargoyles and stained glass, built in the 1870’s. As the congregation dwindled, the church eventually signed it over to the city – of course, after stripping all the stained glass and the good wood and the statuary and the pipe organ out of it for their new suburban church. The city got the huge, echoing, empty stone shell with the leaky roof and that was about it. The church people even dug up the graveyard and made the city pay to move what remained there out to their new site, so the city could build a parking garage for the Market.

All things considered, the city had done a remarkable job with the building – they kept the exterior mostly intact but power-washed 125 years of soot and smog off of the granite, so that it was back close to its original look. Inside, they divided the huge vaulted space that had been the sanctuary into smaller areas for retail shops, and put a forest of poured-concrete columns in a double row down the center, so that they had a second and third floor for more shops and a few offices. They broke through the back wall where the altar had been, and made a glassed-in food court above the parking garage. All three floors were connected by escalators and by the old carved wooden stairways on either side of what had been the sanctuary, leading up to what had been the choir loft (the church people couldn’t figure out a way to take the twisting staircases with them, so they made the city – and thus the taxpayers – pay extra for leaving them in place. Such generosity…)

The Medieval Market had been in business for about 8 years, and was an immediate hit with the downtown office crew. The food court was always crowded, and most of the shops were too. The ground floor was high-end retail – Hart, Schaffner, & Marx, Victoria’s Secret, A & F, that sort of thing. The second floor – which was supported by the double row of concrete columns (that were textured to match the original granite) was split by an open space down the center, which gave some light and air to the place, as did the replacement of the stained-glass windows with clear glass. Both sides of the second floor were occupied by a major-chain bookstore, one side for their usual selections, and the other side for with children’s books and a juice, coffee, tea, & biscuit bar.


The third floor was all the