New York is a city of extremes—extreme weather, extreme rent, extreme dreams, and just as often, extreme disappointment. As I wandered through the stories in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood this week, I didn’t land on a clean takeaway like “hope” or “loss.” Instead, I found something messier and more human: a kind of nervous laughter that lingers after the punchline fades. Each story captured a small, strange New York moment, but together, they pointed to a quiet realization beneath the noise: we’re not nearly as in control as we’d like to believe.

In Robin Kilmer’s The Day the World Did Not End, the protagonist braces for rapture—but it never comes. What follows isn’t cataclysm, but brunch with friends and the mundane fuzz of a hangover. Kilmer’s humor is sharp and self-aware, but behind it lies a sincere question: what is it we’re really fearing when we obsess over “the end”? Is it annihilation? The unknown? Or is it something subtler—the threat that nothing will actually change? That despite the headlines and prophecies, we’ll wake up in the same city with the same subway delays and the same ache for meaning?

That tension between expectation and reality surfaces again in Connor Gaudet’s Fruit Man = Bad Man, where optimism—sweet and naive—is quite literally bruised by a rotting peach. The humor stings because it’s familiar: the hopeful buyer, the smiling vendor, the moment we realize we’re not becoming regulars—we’re being hustled. It’s a tiny betrayal, one of a million daily in New York, but Gaudet captures how quickly we recalibrate. Disappointment, in this city, isn’t the end of the world. It’s just part of the rhythm. You take the loss, throw away the peach, and try another cart tomorrow.

In Kurt Rademacher’s Mole Person, the fantasy of escape appears not as apocalypse or scam, but as a fleeting possibility—a mysterious subway train offering a detour from routine. Rademacher doesn’t take it. Most of us wouldn’t. But the impulse is there: a momentary longing to jump the tracks, to invent a life more cinematic than the one we’re living. That he ultimately resists it doesn’t dull the weight of the almost. In New York, even our most absurd daydreams feel like part of the script.

What links these stories isn’t genre or mood, but a shared moment of tension: between belief and disillusionment, fantasy and function, escape and endurance. Together, they offer not a thesis, but a feeling—one that vibrates just below the surface of daily life here. They remind me that New York constantly tests us: Can we laugh at ourselves without losing our seriousness? Can we hold onto our hope, even when it turns out overripe? Can we fantasize about jumping the train, without abandoning the life we’ve built on the platform?

This week’s walk led me through false endings, street-level cons, and ghost trains—stories that resist neat conclusions, but stick with you anyway. Like the city itself, they are strange, funny, and just uncomfortable enough to feel real.

And now I’m left wondering: What other tiny beliefs keep us upright here? What other “almosts” shape the stories we tell ourselves? And how often do we reach back—maybe without even realizing it—to check that our wallet, our balance, our sense of self, is still tucked safely in our back pocket?

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Zoe Kalaw is a Boston native and a student at the University of Chicago. As an intern at Mr. Beller’ Neighborhood, she has been exploring and writing about stories from our archives to mark the 25th anniversary of our publication.