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You are currently browsing stories tagged with Paranoia
Brownies
by Paddy Boom 01/02/2016Neighborhood: Manhattan, Midtown
There were very few places to score any weed in the suburbs of Chappaqua, NY, in the winter of 1986. Feeling itchy and bored during my Christmas break from the School of Visual Arts, I hopped into my orange 1974 VW Super Bug on a mission to get ‘baked’ with some school buddies. My main […]
A Picnic in Eden
by Manuela Silvestre 09/01/2014Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Williamsburg
“No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” — Elizabeth Bowen There’s a man across the street. He’s seventy-five, maybe eighty years old. He comes out of a red door in the apartment building kitty-corner […]
Scented
by Melissa Bouganim 08/26/2014Neighborhood: Financial District, Manhattan
I’m not the girl who woke up from another one-night-stand. But I could be, in the view from the Sephora window. It’s raining: The dull Saturday too-early morning pitter-patters against the makeup counters; my nerves, pounding on the exposed brick. I feel like a quasi-well-dressed spy. Partly because “quasi” is the word that won me […]
Christmas Morning
by John Oliver Hodges 05/26/2014Neighborhood: Forest Hills
This morning I made Ramen noodles with extra veggies in it, and peanut butter and Korean bean paste. Then took a walk, crossed Grand Central on over to Queens Boulevard where an Asian woman walking a little dog caught my eye. She saw my eye was caught by her, so when she got up close, […]
There Will Be Blood
by Thomas R. Pryor 04/23/2014Neighborhood: Yorkville
At 16, my dream job was working behind the deli counter at Daitch Shopwell. As a stock boy this would be a coup. Watching Milton or Marty cut thin slices of rare roast beef and Jarlsberg Swiss, I cried with pain. Pain that some son of a bitch was going to eat that tasty mound […]
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 […]
Will Probably Be Late to the Party
by Marta Troicka 01/21/2014Neighborhood: East Village
I am apologizing to Michelle because I’m crying and I don’t know why. I’m not sad or anything, I’m actually having a good time. This is one of the first times that Michelle and I are hanging out outside of class, and we don’t know each other well yet. But tears keep running down my […]
Uptown
by Jules Barrueco 01/08/2014Neighborhood: Harlem
“Uptown or Downtown? UPTOWN OR DOWNTOWN??” Mark sputtered, drowning out the Oasis tape in my little red Honda, as he downshifted to take the curve. My spiral-permed hair fluttered in the breeze as I flicked a Marlboro Light out the window. We had just popped out of the Holland Tunnel – Manhattan side – and […]
That’s Mad Creepy, Bro
by Joseph Rauch 01/01/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
I’m on the E train and a child who isn’t mine is leaning her head on my left shoulder. She is sleeping and I don’t quite know what to do yet. Her mother is to her left daydreaming, completely unaware that her daughter’s head has shifted onto a stranger. I decide to let her rest. […]
That’s My Daughter In The Water
by Trevor Laurence Jockims 03/27/2013Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Getting your two year old daughter into a bathing suit in a men’s changing room can be a bit like stuffing an eel into a pillowcase. For some reason I thought the smart move would be to undress myself first, get my trunks on, my flip-flops, grab my towel, then shed Hana down to her […]
It’s Not A Cult
by Zola Acker 10/10/2012Neighborhood: All Over, JFK/LGA, Letter From Abroad
“I have to get to New York” says the woman in front of me at the Portland, Oregon airport. “You don’t understand, I have to get there.” She repeats this urgently, in a slightly hysterical voice to a man in uniform behind a counter. I smile at her sympathetically. The flight to JFK has been […]
When the Therapist Lost Her Mind
by Raanan Geberer 10/03/2012Neighborhood: Gramercy Park, Stuyvesant Town
My wife Sarah and I had been seeing our therapist, Brenda, for years – both separately and as a couple. When I met Sarah, she was already seeing Brenda, who was then in training to be a psychiatric social worker after a long career as a high school social worker and Spanish teacher. After we […]