The City Between Us

"We just landed our dream apartment," Darcy announced, practically vibrating with joy, to Tristan and Juan—two strangers she and Cole had befriended ten minutes into their first wide-eyed stroll through Abingdon Square. “One-bedroom. On Bank Street , no less.” Cole, her Connecticut-bred husband, nodded, his face molded into a stiff rictus . “Get out!” Juan, leashed to his Pekingese, cried. “A one-...

Michael Arturo's "Flatiron" is a challenging yet rewarding work that utilizes a specific architectural landmark to explore universal themes of human perception and memory. By blending historical events with personal myth and employing a distinctly postmodern style, the narrative creates a disorienting but ultimately moving portrait of how individuals construct their reality and grapple with the gh...

FLATIRON: THE PLAY CAST: * SEÑOR BORGES — Concierge of the building, quasi-omniscient, theatrical. Speaks with a rich Buenos Aires accent and the calm joy of someone who knows everything is a little silly. * JERRY GREENBERG — A painter possessed by the Flatiron. Mostly responds in mutters, existential pronouncements, or from within his canvases. [AT RISE] The loft is dim. A warm amber light glows...

In Hell’s Kitchen , Michael Arturo delivers a haunting, elegiac story about memory, guilt, and the corrosive myth of objective truth. Set in a claustrophobic New York apartment stacked with microfilm reels and the detritus of a life once dedicated to facts, the story follows Leonard Greaves, a retired newspaper archivist whose immaculate record-keeping begins to unravel under the weight of one hea...

His old place was on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. Things had changed quite a bit since he’d left, but there were familiar signs that things hadn’t changed much at all. He didn't know why he had returned—not really. Just that something in the marrow of his bones told him he had to. Then, just as he arrived at the entrance of the old tenement, it dawned on him why: he had forgotten to forwa...

"You're about to meet one Isaac Schwartz—age indeterminate, occupation unknown, forwarding address undeliverable. His story takes place in the not-too-distant past in a tenement apartment building on the Lower East Side in New York City. Once a tenant, Isaac is now a question mark. A man whose identity has been misplaced somewhere between memory and mail. This is not a story of high drama or grand...

To understand how Paulie Macaluso became a symbol—of what exactly, no one can quite agree—you must first imagine him: a sixty-three-year-old window washer with a nicotine-scratched voice and the expression of a man permanently five minutes late to something meaningful. You must then imagine him briefly dangling from the 88th floor of that very skyscraper—a feat he survived with the dubious assista...

The boardroom on the 88th floor of The Helix was decorated in what interior designers call "power minimalism"—all sleek surfaces, uncomfortable chairs, and a view that reminded everyone present just how far they could fall, which, given the current trajectory of their investment, seemed increasingly likely. "Gentlemen, ladies," began Walter Kensington III, majority shareholder and chairman of the...

The story was buried on page eleven of the New York Post, but it spread faster than a Queens fire on a windy day. By noon, it had jumped from social media to the local news, and by three o'clock, the headline "WINDOW WASHER SEES VIRGIN MARY IN MANHATTAN SKYSCRAPER" was flashing across the bottom of CNN. Paulie Macaluso, who had spent his entire professional life trying to be invisible while dangli...

The Helix stood like a wounded animal in the Manhattan skyline—88 floors of architectural hubris wrapped in glass that caught the sun at angles that blinded pilots and scorched nearby buildings. Six months after its grand opening, the tower remained sixty percent vacant, its corridors echoing with the footsteps of maintenance staff and the occasional lost delivery person. The developers had hoped...

The Interrogation Silence. A deep, suffocating silence. Then— a high-pitched frequency , humming just beyond human perception. It dug into Irides’ skull, vibrating through his teeth and setting his nerves on fire. Then— agony. A sharp, electric burst ripped through his head —not through his body, not the kind of pain that scorched the flesh. No, this was different. This was inside . The restraints...

Down Man New York has always been a city haunted by its ghosts, and its skyline is a living memory of tragedies that shaped the nation. On September 11, 2001 , the world watched in horror as the Twin Towers collapsed. But for New Yorkers, one image became seared into their collective consciousness: the Falling Man —a lone figure plummeting through the sky, an unspeakable choice captured in a singl...

Leonard Greaves had always believed in the sanctity of records. For over four decades, he meticulously archived the city's history within the labyrinthine halls of the New York Chronicle . Now, at 72, retired and ailing , he found himself surrounded by the very artifacts he once curated— newspapers, microfilms, and clippings that chronicled the relentless march of time.​ His apartment in Hell's Ki...

Not long ago, I found myself in a forgotten friend’s loft, unsure of how I had arrived. The place felt more like the ruins of an obsession than someone’s home. Paintings were scattered with reckless abandon—against walls, windows, furniture, and across the floor as if the space had surrendered itself to them. Each canvas pulsed with color, fractured yet deliberate, a chaotic hymn to one of New Yor...

In the days following the walk with Solomon, Elliot moved through his Park Avenue apartment like a man caught in a riptide—adrift yet restless, tugged by currents he couldn’t name. The walk had left a residue, a hum that wouldn’t quiet. He’d gone to bed that night with his notebook open on the dining table, pages scrawled with jagged lines and half-formed shapes. By morning, the euphoria had curdl...

The streets were still damp from the night before, glistening in the early morning light. Down here, in the oldest part of Manhattan, the air carried the weight of history—stone, and steel pressed tight, the ghosts of a thousand deals made and broken. Elliot rolled his shoulders, adjusting to the feel of the running shoes he’d thrown on that morning. He was already regretting them. Solomon, walkin...

The stranger in a wide-brimmed hat seated next to me at the bar hadn’t said a word, but it felt like he was doing most of the talking since I was so drunk I couldn’t tell who said what or what any of what was said meant. And I couldn’t remember if he’d sat down next to me or if I’d sat down next to him, which was common in New York bars. Nevertheless, having a stranger as a neighbor at a bar is co...

Solomon came and went, night after night. He never revealed too much about himself—where he came from, where he slept. He seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere at once, slipping effortlessly between the city’s forgotten spaces and its most rarefied heights. There was something about Solomon that Elliot couldn’t quite grasp—something that made him feel both drawn in and unsettled. Elliot stopped...

(“Skyline” was a Top in Fiction’s selection for the month of February, 2025) Elliot Van Alen leaned against the window of his Park Avenue apartment; his forehead pressed to the cold glass. Fifty-four stories below, the city churned—a grid of relentless motion, lights flickering like neurons firing in the collective brain of Manhattan. But tonight, the view offered no solace. Where he once saw triu...

6:42 AM Greta Van der Linden wakes to the sound of music. His music. Thelonious Monk, drifting up through the floorboards from 4B. The notes coil into her dreams, pulling her out of sleep like a slow, insistent hand at the nape of her neck. She stretches, the silk sheets cold against her bare legs. Outside, the February wind howls down Beekman Place, rattling against the generous windows of her br...

Back in his cluttered office, Giordano propped his feet up on his desk, greeted by the unexpected sight of his name plastered across the afternoon paper. Yet, to his dismay, the article painted him as a bumbling fool, courtesy of the sensationalism typical of yellow journalism. According to the piece, the democratization of literature—where books transitioned from exclusive hardcovers to accessibl...

Giordano returned home to his precinct; he told Chief Schmidt his trip was eye-opening, but he still needed solid leads. The Chief advised him to keep plugging. Giordano was not one to give up easily. He returned to his office and did what any hard-boiled detective in his shoes would do—brewed himself a pot of hot coffee. And even though he had preground the beans before he left, and they had gone...

The ride from JFK dragged, the city inching closer in hesitant strides. Rain fell in silver sheets, blurring the skyline into something half-remembered and half-forgotten. Inside the cab, Lena pressed her fingers against the cold glass. She shouldn’t have been here. She shouldn’t have come back. But last week, an email arrived—unexpected, impossible to ignore. It carried the weight of a decision s...

Giordano smelled conspiracy, so he made a rash decision to leave New York and go to the heart where stories were manufactured—Tinsel Town. The idea was to go large early in the investigation and whittle down the possibilities. So he snatched a copy of Nathanael West’s “The Day Of The Locust” off his bookshelf, caught a taxi, and hopped a red-eye out to the coast. As soon as Giordano touched down i...

The air around Detective Philly Giordano thickened with a sense of urgency he hadn’t felt in years the morning Police Chief William Schmidt called him into his office. “Philly, we’ve got a murder case unlike any other. Storytelling! It’s been slain!” “Storytelling? That’s unheard of, Chief! Who did it?” “We don’t know. No witnesses, no nothing. All we know is there’s a cold-blooded psychopath on t...