Maggie slogged through the murky gloom of Water Street, her boots squelching in the muck. Gas streetlamps threw wavering silver cones into the darkness. The feeble light only accentuated the inky Manhattan night. Piles of manure and offal cast eerie shadows across the black mire.
Continue reading “Hell Cat Laid Low by Marco Etheridge”
A black and green lamppost, tall with chipped paint, across from Bryant Park, in front of a classic brown and gold twelve storied building, the wind reeking of the park’s dead yellow grass, cigarette smoke, automobile exhaust and blood. Hanging from the lamppost is a half-skinned, large white male wearing only trousers, supported by ropes about his torso, legs and arms. In agony, still alive but barely. New York City is some kind of town these days. He will be dead in less than a day.
Harlan Strundley could sling the bull back in high school like nobody’s business.
I wanted to laugh. I had no idea why. There was no apparent reason, but I had an inordinate desire to laugh.
It had been a strange day.
The New York Art Scene was dead.
Music too.
So Morgan Tripfalter did what he had been doing his whole life.
He watched television.
Born in New York City during the mid-sixties, come of age in the gritty seventies and introduced to the downtown scene in the 80’s, Morgan was no stranger to what Manhattan had to offer. The good the bad and the weird.
“Where are you looking?”
“Sweet Pines Middle School. Riverside Country Day. Ethical Morality on the Upper West Side.”
“All top notch — if you don’t mind me asking… how can you afford that?”
“Oh, Tom just got promoted and we’ve saved a little from his inheritance.”
Zayde died last Saturday. This afternoon we gathered to attend a service over a plain pine coffin and to remember him over cold cuts on rye. I remembered my grandfather chiefly as a madman.
“He died happy,” said my mother. “That’s all that matters.”
Continue reading “The Man Who Lost Everything by Erica Verillo”
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