A few samples of award-winning short stories. 

Riding the Train to Nowhere

ONE

Most of the time, naked windows have little to offer; vacant rooms, silent dwellers, and other boring nouns that sadly, make my life seem exciting. Of course, there is the occasional fight or fleeting nipple, each pumping my adrenaline into a cyclonic fervor.

But this alone is not why I choose to ride the train.

I take it to find out what pictures you have hanging on your walls. I take it to see if you have plastic shoe racks hanging from closet doors. Do you dine alone? Scrub the kitchen floors? These are things I like to know about, because the more I know you, the more I learn about myself.

For as long as I can remember, the train has always been there. My childhood was spent struggling over homework under the symmetrical shadows of the tracks.

“According to the story, the protagonist is ---

WHOOSH

The train would fill a mostly empty house with sound and take the correct answers with it. Being brought up this way, makes my commitment to the train, that much easier to understand. As long as there are windows revealing life, I’ll ride, hoping to regain a little more of myself than I had before.

The greatest city in the world lies ahead as we fly past Chinese storefronts and a slumbering Shea Stadium. Big buildings across the horizon climb into the heavens, creating the illusion of the accessibility of opportunity and wealth. There was a time in my life, before this cold listlessness washed over me, that I actually though I could be an angel in the penthouse, making decisions that really mattered. That was until the unforeseen surfaced in a whisper.

My eyes bounce off the walls, zigzagging from window to window. I peer, glance, inspect – hoping that today will be the day I find something to hold onto. The small houses of Corona have nothing to offer, at least not tonight. A well-lit billboard for a major financial institution is the only thing that reaches out to shake me.

“When you drink from the cup of life, chug.”

It takes every ounce of restraint coursing through my veins to resist screaming back,

“What if life’s cup has been drained as I die of thirst and gasp for air, you f**kers.”

TWO

Recently, when I breathe, I feel as if I’m reaching for butterflies. They circle over my head and fly in front of my face, but slip through my fingers like sand. When air enters your body both short and shallow, you wish you could hold it, if just for the moment, and celebrate. I scan the packed train for other butterfly hunters. Seemingly, there are none, and I feel more alone than ever, a lone rider on a crowded train. Destination, nowhere.

We make our way through Woodside, which tonight, is bustling. A large flannelled man eats a bucket of fried chicken with zeal. An elderly couple clings to each other as the ever-knowing and self-important Alex Trebek drones on and on about “true daily doubles.”  A little Asian boy sits at a desk and foils away at his geometry homework. A man is hulked over a refrigerator, the little light bulb offering just enough radiance to display his dissatisfaction with the offerings.

The streetlights line the tracks, bee lining by in uniform succession. We’re between stops -

between lives.

The equilibrium of existence is beautiful, with squares of life delivering my sanity.

We pass over the Grand Central Parkway. Taillights and headlights swirl together, creating a candy cane road. A nondescript warehouse reveals dozens of workers standing patiently as a conveyer belt moves life past their very eyes. I’ve seen this place hundreds of times, but could never get a handle on what was going on inside. I imagined some sort of button factory, or a place that puts the knobby things on top of baseball hats, but had no reason to believe either. Some women wearing long aprons sit on a stoop at the side of a building, smoking their cigarettes and staring up at the sky. I look down at them through a cloud of smoke and suddenly realize that I have no choice but to find out exactly what they are manufacturing.

THREE

On the way home I didn’t even have the desire to watch. My head stayed low as the possibilities of the factory rattled around my brain, quickly putting me down. The next time I opened my eyes we were at the last stop. I shuffled off the train, went straight home and proceeded right to bed.

The babies came right off the assembly line – shiny, perfect, and new. Wrapped tightly in innocence, each was individually packaged and prepared for final inspection. Most make the cut, others do not. What the inspectors were specifically looking for, I have no idea, but when a bad baby came along, they knew immediately. There was a special red conveyor belt for these babies that led to a gray square in the wall covered by thick opaque plastic. I went to find out what happened to the babies once they entered this room. Quicker than I thought my frame would allow, I stealthily jumped onto the belt for the ride, and hoped I would clear the window and make it to the other side.

FOUR

The phone sent me upright and cost me the opportunity to find out where the bad babies go. The factory continued to manufacture thoughts. Rather than waste the day wondering, I decided to hop into my car and find out. Taking the train during these daylight hours was out of the question.

After making a right at Northern Boulevard, I quickly realize that I’m in uncharted territory. There are many factories. Warehouses. Graffiti ridden garage doors. And a serious litter problem. I entered a world that knew no garbage cans.

Rusty fire escapes suffered paint loss. Rooftops sprung unsightly steel from all directions. Ducts, vents and chimneys collaborated. Windows wore wrought iron, as if they had something to hide. Antennas and satellite dishes connected a fragmented world. Barbed wire protected all. Ivy shrouded dark brick walls. Blue tarps corked backyard pools. Sheds melted into the ground. Telephone wires contained unruly trees.

From the train trestle I knew exactly where to begin; now, thrown into the mix, I had no idea where the factory stood. Combing the oddly wide streets led nowhere and inquiries of a foreign population were sure to be fruitless. Discouraged, hungry and more infatuated than ever, the only option was to return home and ride the train again tonight.

FIVE

Practically every apartment on the sixth floor was illuminated. A woman in a pink housecoat tended to the dirty dishes. A shirtless man in shiny Adidas pants drank some OJ right out of the paper carton. His younger brother knelt in the foreground, tapping his hamster’s plastic cage repeatedly. A stove stood wide open. Button down shirts hung off plastic hangers. Window fan. Bronze teapot. A couple eating at a small round table.

Sickness.

It’s a feeling that is difficult to articulate. Somewhere between the backseat of a car and Attention Deficit Disorder is where it sits. With eyes working overtime to capture every detail of the consecutively lit apartments, my body began to reject my body. A stabbing pain developed over my left eye, made tolerable only when I cradled my head in cold hands. There was nothing left to do but shut eyes and wait for the stretch of land that held the factory of dreams, thoughts, and hope.

Finally, we approached the warehouse. It’s amazing how darkness not only hides the world away but shifts everything into the unforeseen. The train was more crowded than usual and all the window seats were taken, leaving me no choice but to stand by the doors and glare from there. Interior train lighting is quickly becoming Public Enemy No. 1 and when presented with the opportunity, I have been removing the bulbs from their sockets, creating a more conducive environment for sight. It’s a maneuver that can only work in the still of the night. In this age of terror, a dozen people will bring you down before you can touch the ceiling. Being such a flat, non-descript area, I needed to find a visible marker to track the factory during daylight hours.

Wow, what a big television you have.
Your kids work well together in the kitchen.
How many apples do you really need?

It struck me odd that a mirror hung over the microwave. Or that you seemed to collect large paper cups from fast food restaurants and stack them next to the sink. Bright red flowers crept out of the flowerpot and hung for dear life.

A beautiful obstruction.

Trickling down the glass panes, a window that once stood starkly revealed was now conflicted by botany.

The houses ended and that’s where I began to count lampposts. 15, 16, 17…

And the factory was there in all its glory.

A concrete smokestack worked the whitest smoke I’d ever seen into the air. Maybe it’s a cloud factory. Hundreds of windows that had earlier revealed much of the room’s composition now appeared shut. No one took a cigarette break and the train passed by faster than ever. I wondered if the factory even existed. The people, the cigarette breaks, maybe they just dwell in my mind. Maybe they help me to believe that such places exist.

Places of wonder.

Places other than my own.

I think I’ll let the factory remain a mystery, I won’t pursue it any longer. I’ll gaze at it every night and I’ll see the women on their smoke breaks looking to the sky, looking to something other, maybe even looking at me, wondering about the man on the train who looks tired.

I won’t crack the mystery. Not today.

Time Is a Marshmallow

“Time is a marshmallow, waiting to be eaten.”

Justine hated reading aloud to the children and I often find myself wondering if my teachers were filled with the same distaste and trite resentment when I was a parochial school prisoner.  Or, is my wife and her young counterparts products of a more selfish and materialistic generation?

Don’t get me wrong, I hate my job just as much as the next guy, but the difference is, I’m not molding and shaping the future, unless of course, clanking on my keyboard dropping advertisements where advertisers want them is vital to our collective success.  Never did I think teachers were saints, in fact, I can count on one finger how many of them earned my respect, but to find out the sheer magnitude of their pettiness with one another and total lack of care, frightens me.

I’m a realist.  I always knew they went home and shopped for pantyhose, celebrated birthdays, fucked their husbands (albeit rarely),  and on and on and on.  However, if I knew they lay awake at night staring at the ceiling obsessing over chalk and book sales and carving pumpkins and school assemblies and fleeting glances, I would have dropped out in the third grade.  Mind you, these late night internal seminars in my wife’s head are not rooted in a deep desire to educate today’s youth, rather, they are grounded in unappreciative female self-righteousness.  And the terrifying thing is, Justine is ten times better than most.

Our home office is littered with a rainbow of construction paper, laminated cutouts of turkeys and a huge letter “T”, each hindering the use of virtually all of the floor space.  Stacks of spelling tests sit on the keyboard disarming the computer while colored pencils spill from the drawers.

“I’ll move everything by the weekend,” she assures me.  “I’m working on our Fall into Fall bulletin board.”

“Great,” I say, knowing all to well that in an academic flash it will be 'Win with Winter,' 'Spring into Spring' and 'SUMthing About Summer' moving into the office for the season.

Teaching, for a teacher that actually cares, is not an 8:30 to 3pm gig, it’s hands extend much further, grasping and squeezing everything in their reach.

“I have to make this one better,” my wife says, extending a conversation that I thought was dead eight minutes ago.  “Last year Denise and Debbie gave me shit for a dated board.”

“Dated board?” I questioned.

“Yeah, I used some old lessons and stuff.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno, I did that “Thumbody” loves you thing for Valentine’s Day.  You know, the one where I imprint their thumbs on a shirt to give to their parents.”

“Sure, I remember.  So, what was the big deal?”

‘Well I also did the “Boo-tiful” thing for Halloween and I could just tell that no one was impressed.”

“Well did the kids like it?”, I asked.

“Sure, but the staff gave me looks.”

Children are rendered second class citizens as adults immerse themselves in a soup of silliness.  Of course, things at my place of work are no better.  The games played in high school hallways cast an ugly muddy shadow on the corridors known as the real world.  The jocks lose strength, but not their ability to be self-absorbed assholes.  Geeks, for the most part stay geeks.  The whores never settle down and certain people will always beat to an off-kilter drum, and I, like yesterday, sit back and curse them all.

We need a retreat.

Justine and I spent the weeks bridging fall and winter tearing down the old wallpaper in the living room.  It seemed to have turned from light beige to an ugly brown overnight and had to be chipped off the wall rather than peeled.  It was a challenge to remove more than six inches at a time.  We always had plenty to talk about, but for some reason, with every foot of glue stained wall exposed, came a new dark revelation of where we were.  Work was draining us, leaving us as white as ghosts and as bitter as bitten aspirin.  More and more I find us embracing the past, reminiscing of our youthful weekends up north, getting lost along the lush weeping willows running parallel to the Charles river, making love on unfamiliar king size beds and most importantly, leaving work a world away.

Pieces of wall snowflaked to the ground, lightly dusting the polished amber floors.

“Let’s go away this weekend,” I asked.  My eyes wide, hopeful, forced on her.  She continued to stare at the wall, performing sloppy surgery on the crispy wallpaper.

“I can’t, I’ve gotta finish their report cards.”

“Didn’t you do them last weekend,” I asked, coaxing my annoyance to the forefront of my being.

“I didn’t fill out the comments section,” she replied.

“James is a great student,” I mocked.  “He has shown great progress but I would still like to see him excel himself –“

“You think it’s easy?” she asked menacingly, for the first time all night searching frantically for eye contact.

We have these constant battles, some lighthearted, some not, on the difficulties of being a teacher.  Unfortunately, teachers spend something like fifty percent of their careers attempting to justify their cushy bankers hours and summers off, an argument, in my opinion, that is never worth having.  It’s like the man with the small penis constantly trying to prove he measures up to the porn star.  We must work with the cards we are dealt.  And even though he can properly operate his machinery, the fact of the matter is, he’s still a thumbdick.  But I understand how we live in our own bubbles where individual events rule.  Ingrown toe nails beat out world hunger, first kisses are chosen over cancer cures and bad haircuts are worse then paralysis.

Justine would not bend.  Her face held the answer, if anything was gonna give, it was up to me to bring it on. And I knew what I had to do.

I swallowed the world’s largest rubberband ball today, and the tightly wound mass sat in the pit of my stomach, itching to unravel, hoping I would allow little elastic bullets to bleed me from the inside out.  But today was my day.  Our day.  On four wheels I rolled under the obnoxious blue and yellow shelter to fill 'er up unleaded regular.  The brown bag of warm bagels crinkled under the crook of my arm as I raced into the florist to pick up as many flowers as the weight of sixteen dollars would bring.  My nerves flared as anxiousness doused whatever calm reality was left.  Under the red glare of the traffic light hovering over Union Turnpike and Utopia Parkway, I envisioned Justine in her classroom.  All of the children are assembled neatly on our old pink oriental rug which is now affectionately known as the ‘reading rug.’

“Miss Michele?”, Judy asked.

“Yes, dear?”, my wife replied.

“Remember when you told us that time is a mushmallow?”

“Marshmallow,” she corrected.

“Yes, mushmallow.”  Little Judy continued, “What did that mean?”

Justine’s eyes shot blanks at the ceiling as her earlobes flushed crimson.  The answer was nowhere to be found.  School bells slashed the giant pause and the children all shot upright, slinging their knapsacks across their backs and heading for the door in one swift motion.  Jody’s small slanted eyes remained fixed on Mrs. Michele as she waited for an answer.

Suitcases in tow, I made a quick left at Grand Avenue and pulled up in front of the school.  My hand sat heavy on the horn as Justine looked out her window and shot me a perplexed look.

I don't think Jody ever got an answer that day.  But I was going to get mine.