On the grass and on the benches, men slept. The soapbox speakers were gone, and the summer night crowds of strollers who were not habitués of the square were long in bed. Two o’clock of a summer night, and Bughouse Square had quieted down. I mean, it’s bright with lights but dark with the shadows of the defeated men who sit on the benches, all night long. Vertically speaking, it’s quite a bit nearer hell than heaven. It is between Clark and Dearborn Streets, just south of the Newberry Library that’s its horizontal location. Bughouse Square has another name, but the other name is much less appropriate. No more, perhaps, than the average for his age of the bums who live on the near north side of Chicago and hang out, when the weather is good, in Bughouse Square. His full name was Godfrey I say his full name advisedly, for no one, not even Sweeney, knew whether it was his first name or his last. God was a tallish, scrawny old man with a short but tangled beard, stained with nicotine. Sweeney rather liked God, although not many people did.

Sweeney sat on a park bench, that summer night, next to God. But if you’re still with me, let’s get back to Sweeney. There’s murder before the story proper starts, and murder after it ends the actual story begins with a naked woman and ends with one, which is a good opening and a good ending, but everything between isn’t nice. It’s got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication. If you don’t, maybe you’ll be sorry, for it isn’t a nice story. But that’s about as near as truth ever approximates a pattern, and if you won’t settle for that, you’d better quit reading. His name really was Sweeney, but he was only five-eighths Irish and he was only three-quarters drunk. Like – well, a drunken Irishman named Sweeney that’s a pattern, if anything is. Now we’ll have to hedge a bit, for truth is an elusive thing. Maybe, by most people’s standards, it wasn’t a good resolution, but that’s aside from the point. He made a resolution, and he had to wade through blood and black coffee to keep it, but he kept it.

A guy named Sweeney did it, once, in Chicago. I know that that’s incredible, but it happened. You can work on down and down to things that get less and less likely, and eventually you might hit the rock bottom of improbability: He might make a resolution and stick to it. You can work down the list of possibilities he might buy some green paint, chop down a maple tree, do a fan dance, sing God Save the King, steal an oboe.

The likely ones are easy: He might go after another drink, start a fight, make a speech, take a train. You can list them in the order of their probability. You car make a flying guess you can make a lot of flying guesses. You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do.

The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown