The City Between Us

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 like antennae.

Warhol didn’t reply. ...

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, halfway to cocky, halfway to stupid. “Don...

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 traditions, including commedia dell'a...

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, “this isn’t the first time my people have ...

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 Omar, the elusive realtor-landlord ...

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 failed escape artists.

“I miss him,” Tr...

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 challenges Elliot's perspective on a...

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 Lifestyle Architect, from this very corner. Ma...

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 themes of technological control, the n...

"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...