You are currently browsing the stories about the Long Island neighborhood
Settling
by Abby Hofstetter 08/11/2019Neighborhood: Long Island, Queens, The Catskills
I broke up with my first boyfriend one month, two weeks, and four days after I found out he was fucking his neighbor. I never told him that I’d overheard them. He never wanted to fight; he didn’t want us to be the couple who fought. It was important to him that we maintain a […]
The Hedges
by Joseph Scalia 02/16/2014Neighborhood: Farmingdale
I don’t know when it happened exactly, but it happened. I have become a cranky old man, closed and rigid and fixed in my ways, despite the fact that in my youth I’d resolved never to grow up, never to become like all the grown ups who lived in my world when I was growing […]
Look Homeward, Brooklyn
by Robert Weinberger 09/07/2012Neighborhood: Brighton Beach, Gramercy Park, Long Island
We move the summer before ninth grade from our four-room apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to a four-bedroom Colonial house with a two-car garage on the south shore of Long Island. A town where every street is a drive or a place or a court. A place where kids play softball in the street and […]
The Balcony
by David M. Sandford 02/03/2012Neighborhood: Long Island
We moved into our apartment on a cold, windy April day. April Fool’s Day, actually. Susan and I didn’t know many people in town and we were looking forward to making new friends. As the movers struggled to get the bed and sofa up the narrow stairs, I looked out the tiny window in our […]
Where Have You Gone, Amelia Earhart?
by Joseph Scalia 09/22/2009Neighborhood: Across the River, Long Island
For decades my libertarian desire for privacy kept me lining up with the teeming hordes of commuters at the Verrazano and Throgs Neck Bridges because I didn’t want “them” to know where I was going to or coming from, and how often. But eventually, against my better judgment, I silenced the screaming voices in my […]
Old Nuns
by Anne Meara 06/08/2009Neighborhood: Across the River, Long Island
I’m watching a documentary on the Sundance Channel, Sex In a Cold Climate—the source material for the fictional film, The Magdalene Sisters—and I’m having a flashback. It’s 1936. I’m six years old in St. Joseph’s boarding school in Monticello New York. My mother is ill and recovering from an operation for “lady problems.” About fifty […]
Squirrel in the Birdfeeder
by Joseph Scalia 01/19/2008Neighborhood: Across the River, Long Island
There has always been something about the change in seasons, something that has stirred me to make changes in my life. I was married in winter and divorced in the spring, started a new job in fall and quit in the summer. That’s probably why it was in the beginning of winter when I decided […]
Dreaming about Jones Beach, 1944
by June Coleman Magrab 10/27/2005Neighborhood: Long Island
Oyster crackers lump like floating islands in blood. Tomato soup looks like that when Father wears big boxers at the beach, and we stroll the boardwalk hanging onto my brother who wiggles the way that worms try to—away. I could never wait to get there, once peed my pants in the car the line was […]
Until It’s Over
by J.B. McGeever 05/09/2005Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Long Island
A good map will not only show where you are, it can also tell which way you’re headed. I’ve always resented the way New York City claims such a large portion of Long Island, its landscape and culture, the layers of people and the stories they keep. Does Queens have anything to do with Montauk? […]
Camp Camelot
by Diana Halle Gordon 07/20/2003Neighborhood: Long Island
When I was fifteen years old I went to Camp Camelot, a romantic name for a Fat Camp. My family had always called me “big boned.” My classmates had other terms for me, and they certainly were not half as nice. In my elementary school gym class there was one record used for special occasions […]