The Super with the Toy Face
From the anthology Lost and Found, Stories from New York. Note: an earlier version of this piece was published in the literary journal Ganymede Fall 2008 and on the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the ancient, antic super of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, an immense, pre-war slab of yellowed bricks and mortar at the...
Loving the Sinners
Even saints have their purgatory. My mother’s is her bedroom, on the second floor of a sunless two-story edifice that she and my late father purchased a few years after I moved to New York, a house that telegraphs its sepulchral aura as soon as one steps across its threshold. One look inside her room and...
Summer 2005
I don’t like change. Worse than the dawdling crowds of small-tourists jamming every midtown Manhattan corner, this particular eccentricity threatened to topple my sanity. With the first warm days came palpable shifts in the landscape: tiny disappearances, incremental vanishings welled up like unexpected storms. Early warnings came in April, when the Plaza announced it would close its doors for...
