You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Williamsburg.”
On a blistering August afternoon in 2012, I visit my childhood neighborhood in Williamsburg after a 50-year absence and approach a teenage girl who sits on a wooden shipping crate in the front of a house on Madison Street. I’m standing in front of a wrought iron fence that forms a boundary between us. She tells me that her name [...]
Lola is whining. I open the door to the dark hallway so she'll stop, so she'll know I'm here. The sunlight reveals a brown present she's left already, its odor mixing in with the faint smell of cigarettes. It’s hardening. I'm not going to clean it up. She's not my puppy. The open bedroom door illuminates the Husky’s crystal- blue [...]
Rollo lived at the corner of Madison Street and Broadway. He was taller and stronger than my father. Rollo would lie down on a bench in his front yard and lift dumbbells every morning. His breathing was heavy, his forehead glistened with sweat. He had large arm muscles and a big chest. His hair was trimmed close on the sides, [...]
"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 from my own, a green [...]