The City Between Us

What if the most important thing you ever forgot wasn't a birthday or an anniversary, but a change-of-address form? Late of Ludlow Street is a dark, funny, and deeply surreal noir fable about a man who returns to his old Lower East Side tenement for one reason: he never forwarded his mail. Originally published in 2025, I’m currently rewriting and expanding its world. In this excerpt, a postman wit...

Bob Forrester trudged through Central Park under a stubborn gray sky that refused to rain despite October’s promises. The air was thick, and the damp breeze carried a faint scent of old leaves and forgotten memories. He thought he’d forgotten where the fountain was—or maybe he couldn’t remember if he’d forgotten where the fountain was. But when he located it, he sighed, took a seat on a nearby ben...

Foghorns moaned low across the Hudson as first light strained against heavy clouds, draped like wet cloth over the tenement buildings along MacDougal Street. On the third floor, in a narrow kitchen with a view of Passanante’s Ballfield, the morning chill seeped under the windowsills, threading its way into the bones of the small apartment where Julie lived. From her window, she saw a cluster of fi...

Marlon Brando: more than an idol to Johnny “The Ram” Rampole —something akin to a saint or a wayward prophet. Since his teenage years, Johnny had modeled himself after the Method great: dressing in torn T‑shirts, worn dungarees, and gritty leather jackets so retro they stood out like a sepia ghost in modern Manhattan. Now in his forties and decidedly out of shape, Johnny looked like a miscast stat...

Jimmy Tong was dead. Eddie Cardone had watched the life bleed out of the only man who’d ever taught him the rules of Chinatown, the man who’d pulled him from Columbus Avenue street corner cons into better-paying hustles. And then, when Eddie needed him, Jimmy had tried to save him, driving him out of Chinatown under fire, but the night had eaten him alive. That left Eddie to run alone, without his...

Vic Martelli’s crew ran uptown, everything north of Central Park. They had the high-end card rooms on the Upper East Side, and all the dope moving through Harlem. Ran it classy, too; never had to shout when cash could do the talking. Carmine Russo’s boys—they had the West Side . Hookers, dockside smuggling, and a bunch of nickel-and-dime street rackets that kept the lights on. Martelli was silk. R...

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February 2, 1981, was a mere 56 days since the world had reeled from the murder of John Lennon, a beacon of peace in a chaotic world, and 56 days before an emboldened hand would attempt to alter the emerging redesign of President Ronald Reagan’s America. It was a day that stood as an equinox between the tragedy and turmoil of epoch-defining events, and, though many worlds away, it was a day in the...

Back at Mission Control, planners, engineers, and politicians were locked in an intense debate over how to handle the " Disaster Zone Ramon Situation ," as it was now officially being called. Senator Johnson , a guest at Mission Control and a member of the NASA oversight committee, leaned in to McDavid. "You realize NASA's funding will be cut in half after this fiasco!" "Yes, sir. Accidents do hap...

Immortality isn’t what it used to be. Take the vampire, that old cliché of eternal life. Say you were “born” in 1300 AD. Your first century or two was easy. Europe was a slow-motion soap opera of plagues , crusades, and candlelight. If a king died, you might hear about it next season, maybe in the form of a monk’s gossip while you drank his blood behind the abbey. Horses stayed horses, swords stay...

Ramon Hernandez was a familiar face at the NASA facility in Houston, having spent nearly two decades as a maintenance man there. At the age of 48 , he had become something of an institution himself, known for his distinctive blend of competence and clumsiness. While he was undoubtedly the go-to guy for fixing leaky pipes and unjamming stubborn doors, his colleagues often shared stories of occasion...

Author’s Note: Originally published last year, “Don’t Let Them Take Your Boots” was Top in Fiction ’s featured Short Story the week of December 13th, 2024, and is presented here with new voice-over accompaniment. Influenced by Italo Calvino and Nikolai Gogol, the story of Giacomo Mazzone—an Italian immigrant navigating the brutal churn of early 20th-century America in New York City—is a folkloric...

Ajay was a collector of miniature trinkets. Every Saturday, he wandered the street fairs along the Upper West Side, searching for something unusual. One morning, something caught his eye. Tucked between a signed Derek Jeter baseball and a crate of sun-faded LPs was an unmarked velvet pouch, musty with the scent of dust. Inside it rested an impossibly detailed six-inch skyscraper. It resembled the...

A gunshot echoed through the New China Arts like a starting pistol for a nightmare. Screams rang out. Glass shattered. Security ducked. Tommy's entourage went for their weapons. Someone tripped, and someone else was trampled. Bang. Another gunshot. Then two more. One of Tommy's men went down. The crowd surged like a wave breaking its banks onto Bayard Street. Lillianne scanned for Eddie, but he wa...

It was opening night at the New China Arts gallery on Bayard Street, where Gangland Visions reimagined Chinatown’s street violence with the solemnity of religious iconography. Well-tailored Shanghai investors filled the gallery, drifting from frame to frame, checkbooks ready, faces unreadable. To them, this wasn’t just art. It was curated menace. A tasteful slice of Chinatown’s underworld , framed...

Eddie Cardone woke to the sound of a teapot whistling. The bed beside him was empty, sheets still warm but twisted like a crime scene. Light leaked through the crooked blinds in dull slats. His body ached in good places. And bad places. He stood, winced, and limped to the window. Outside, Doyers Street had vanished beneath a blanket of morning mist thick enough to swallow the sidewalk whole. A man...

They wandered the aisles like monks in a fluorescent monastery. Warhol, in monochrome black, sunglasses obscuring his eyes against the sterile supermarket light, dragged his feet past shelves of boxes in primary colors packed tight. “A shrine to forgotten mornings,” Dalí murmured beside him. His mustard-yellow suit flared like a torch in the artificial glow, his mustache curling toward the heavens...

Hop Sing’s All-Night Dumpling House was three things at once: a restaurant, a crime scene waiting to happen, and the best place to ruin your life after 2 a.m. Before Eddie Cardone could make his move, before he even slid one foot out of the red leather booth where the soy sauce turned every elbow into flypaper, Jimmy Tong slapped a hand to his chest and said, “Don’t.” Eddie raised an eyebrow, half...

Michael Arturo's "Suttle House" is a Victorian fable set in 1895 New York, exploring themes of evolving female roles, self-definition, identity, and the complexities of relationships. The narrative utilizes rich symbolism, particularly through the shared monocular vision of twin sisters Prudence and Abagail and the triangular architecture of Delmonico's restaurant. The story draws on theatrical tr...

Cole stood near a bullet-scarred kitchen window, preparing to livestream. Behind him, Tristan dabbed bronzer along his jaw like a battlefield stylist dressing a man for martyrdom. “You need more contour, Cole,” Tristan said. “You look like a haunted bagel.” Cole clutched his phone like a grenade of truth, rehearsing lines in his head. “You know,” Tristan said, dipping a finger into concealer, “thi...

Crosstown: After Everything I’ve Done For You: The Absurd War Over a West Village Apartment Darcy and Cole land their dream rent-controlled apartment, a cramped West Village jewel, perfect for unraveling emotionally and Instagramming desperation. But their peace evaporates when Tristan and Juan arrive, a queer couple with a militant Pekingese named AOC and a lease claim tangled in the mysteries of...

A lavender cloud of incense drifted diagonally across the exposed brick like something summoned during a séance for unresolved trauma. Juan twirled in a slow circle , palms out, barefoot on the hardwood. “It’s amazing what a room does without negative energy clogging up the chakra ducts.” Tristan was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Darcy and Cole, who were still zip-tied and gagged like f...

The central premise of Michael Arturo’s story “Skyline” revolves around the transformative power of an unexpected relationship. Elliot Van Alen, a privileged architect from a renowned architectural family, is a "has been" whose latest design has been rejected as "derivative." He encounters Solomon, a blind man who experiences and understands the city in a profound, non-visual way. This encounter c...

The apartment was tiny , but to Darcy and Cole, it was a kingdom. Darcy had already picked out the corner by the sealed fireplace for her yoga routines. There, the light pooled golden for thirty minutes before slinking into shadows. She pictured a bamboo mat, maybe a fiddle-leaf fig, maybe an Instagram post tagged #GratitudeFromTheWestVillage . She would expand her coaching brand, Positive Lifesty...

Subject: Review of Michael Arturo's short story "Down Man, 2084" Summary: Michael Arturo paints a bleak, dystopian future in New York City in the year 2084, specifically focusing on the district of Lower Manhattan, which has been renamed "Down Man" after repeated tragedies and societal decay. The narrative, which the author attributes influences of Orwell, Bradbury, and Phillip K. Dick, explores t...