The City Between Us

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 happen."

"Accidents?! The President is fumin...

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 stayed swords. Fashion was a spectrum of ...

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 occasional mishaps that earned him the endea...

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 meditation on identity, loss, and th...

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 Empire State Building but wasn’t qui...

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 was already gone. Swallowed by the tide ...

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 and ready for the living room wall.

...

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, or what appeared to be the shape o...

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 ...