Crosstown

"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-bedroom on a tree-lined street? That's l...

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 ghosts of the past. The influence of ...

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 from behind the translucent canvases. Th...

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 headline that shouldn’t exist.

Arturo’s ...

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 forward his mail from his former address...

"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 ambition. It's a story of a man tr...

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 assistance of two security guards and what...

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 Helix Investment Group. "We are faci...

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 dangling eighty stories above Manhattan, w...

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 for a modern landmark. Instead, the...

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 held him as he convulsed, his muscles lockin...

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 single, haunting photograph.

Fifty years late...

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 Kitchen mirrored his mind: cluttered, org...

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 York’s most iconic landmarks: the Flat...

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 curdled into something heavier, a mood t...

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, walking beside him, grinned. “A proper city...

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 convenient when you want to share som...

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 questioning how Solomon fit into t...

(“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 triumphs of steel and ambition, he now s...