An image floats into his mind. He’s lying on his bed, the padded quilt beneath him. In the black of his closed eyes, he sees. He remembers. A row of flashbulbs goes off, bright white sugarcubes exploding as one atop the black and blue plastic frame of his mother’s camera. He’s at the head of …
It’s amazing how fast disappointment fades into acceptance. How I could be so distraught one day then over time lose hold of that feeling. It slipped from my fingers, like a cliff’s edge, and I tumbled into the abyss of routine. The boy is 4 tomorrow. He started preschool a few months back and of …
His wife had become more and more reclusive. She sat by the crib, gazing at her child over the top of a magazine. The same page facing her for hours and hours. She was thinner now than she had been before pregnancy, save the life-giving swelling of her chest. Her face was gaunt and trifold …
They returned early the next morning, still smiling but crumpled from their second night at the hospital. A pile of mail greeted them, drooling out of the slot onto the floor of the entryway. They ignored it, instead both focusing on the tiny bundle of joy in her arms. The father set about building a …
The husband stood nervously in the hallway, picking at his teeth and studying his fingernails as though the resolution to his anxieties lay crusted beneath the yellowed tips. He had been up all night. His hair was a greasy brush, short and dark and sticking off his head at odd angles. Two light brown eyes …
Hi all. The last one’s theme, as you may have noticed, was that of life in New York. My life, specifically. I realize that this may have led to some more opinionated and less-fictional entries, but I was taking a page from the book of the field of Creative Non-Fiction, a concept introduced to me …
I’m in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—the ironically beating heart of hipsterdom—because an old friend asked me to help him move a mattress. After 20 minutes of negotiating the monstrous sponge of Tempur™ material down winding stairs, we had a couple of beers and went our separate ways. He to the van in which his bed now resides, …
The cool came before the rain, not afterwards, as it so often does. The morning was cloudy, the skies breaking in the mid-afternoon. Droplets fell in bursts, chilling the skin and summoning umbrella salesmen to their posts. They stood on corners, duffle bags stuffed with portable protection from the elements, capitalizing on the kindness of …
Every building radiates waves of heat, each brick a miniature sun. The wind picks up and suddenly the kiln of the city is transformed into a convection oven, making me squint against air that feels like it would turn my eyes to raisins if given access. This is summer in the city. I awake, dry-nosed …
Candidness is an unfortunate side-effect of this type of endeavor. I sit on a futon, which was the subject of some debate upon moving in, eyes stinging and cold, hands cramping from clenching and unclenching. Normally I would couch this in metaphor. Bring in a character, perhaps an addict or a struggling artist who was …
