The Park by the River

Richard is standing at the trail’s edge, one he would often run when he’d lived in the Bronx, before moving to lower Manhattan. The turns are unfamiliar, winding in directions he doesn’t recall. The trees are out of place. But, somehow, Richard understands that he is running the trails of the park half a mile from his childhood home. The main paths are paved with fine gravel and wood planks that run from left to right, creating long steps. Anyone might soon feel lost but eventually find a way back to the parade grounds. Though there are no signs, the paths are marked with subtle blotches of green or blue spray-painted on some trees, fostering in hikers and runners a sense that they are in the woods, in the wild.

In the conscious world, Richard used to see deer. Every so often another runner or walker would pass by and they’d nod to each other.

It’s warm. Richard is not wearing gloves and his arms are bare. The dream is filled with the songs of birds—in the conscious world, Richard almost always ran with music but in these dreams, he does not and in this version of the dream, he hears the sharp, aggressive warnings of a blue jay. The tops of the trees explode with leaves. He stops and looks out, through a bright opening in the trees, and walks over. He stops and looks down into an open green field, quiet and sunlit.

He sees her, glowing. He feels himself smile. But then he feels the smile leave. A frown forms. He’s upset. They are late. They have an appointment. But he’s been running.

She is with a friend. June? Janice? He tries to recall the name.

His mood does not fit the vista. His smile, gone. His mood, angry. He is shouting to them. The dream, of course, is in the first person—he does not see himself—and there is no dialogue. His daughter and her friend are gone. So is the field. He is, now, alone.

But he had been saying things that he could not now recall—now that he was awake, lying in bed, miserable, uncomfortable, too tired to move. What he did recall was anger, feeling anger, too much anger, more than the anger he normally felt so strongly that he was compelled to go for a run and only after running would he start to feel the anger dissipate. Which was why he was in a funk about the dream. After running, in that dream, he is enraged.

Some form of that dream used to recur when the semester was ending and some of his more promising students no longer looked so promising. They were good students, some of them acting, unwittingly, as confessors, and it was not like suddenly they no longer had the ability to write or speak—they just could not balance school and work. They were kids, really. Too young. They worked too many hours and carried too many burdens and school was the first burden they shrugged off their shoulders. Who could blame them? Richard thought. They are told to go to college and then left to figure it all out for themselves and school administrators seem more interested in enrollment than in education—Richard stopped himself here.

He did not have to convince anyone that sometimes some students were just playing around. Nothing flustered him more than the ones who went missing for two or three weeks only to then say they had booked a vacation, sorry. What many students did not often consider was that they were one of many and that when many had family emergencies that always seemed to happen around the time that an in-class essay or final presentation was scheduled, things started to look suspect.

He stopped himself, again. Try to focus, he told himself. Focus. Exhausted, so exhausted, Richard thought, staring at his screen. His eyes burned.

He, of course, had a mantra—which he’d suggested to Morton, to no avail—for when his sorrow over and cynicism toward the state of education collided: snowflakes, snowflakes, snowflakes.

No two snowflakes are alike, he reminded himself. He did not know, for a fact, whether that was true but he was sticking to it and keeping that in mind. Banal as that was, it kept him from opening his window and either shouting out of it, into the morning, or jumping out of it, confirming gravity, ending sorrow. No two students were alike. Many had similar challenges because they lived, ostensibly, in the same society. Students were humans. Humans experienced tragedy and faced obstacles and had lives outside of school. Students were humans. Students experienced tragedy and faced obstacles and had lives outside of school. Perhaps the mantra was too long. But it was logical. And Richard, most times, was logical.

He started to well up. That dream troubled him, still. He started to cry. He let himself cry as he stared at the screen. He could not write.

Logical.

At least, he thought so.

He stopped crying. He stopped himself from crying. He needed a cup of coffee, bad coffee.

Before that day, Richard often slowly walked through the main door, frowning. The smells. The mist, the acrid smoke in the air. Was it even legal?

But these days—and especially that day—he took in very little.

Hank’s was a dive when Richard moved to the area. The place had not changed since. The coffee rarely tasted right and occasionally tasted deadly. The food was on equal grounds. The specials were nothing special. Richard would usually find a seat toward the back corner, order coffee and a muffin, and sit for a couple of hours, reading papers or newspapers or, when he had the time or was between semesters, a novel.

Sometimes Richard would write. When he was stuck and could not write, he would look up and watch people, taking note of the customers who came and went, surreptitiously sketching as he stole furtive glances, or stare out the window, absentmindedly stirring the swill that Hank called, without irony and with way too much pride, the best cup of joe in the neighborhood.

He glanced down at his coffee and welled up.

He turned his head up and to the left. The windows looked out onto Broadway and thick, moving traffic. People walked as though they had places to go, things to do, money to spend. And there was Richard, dressed in hoodie and shorts and looking nothing like what he’d always imagined he should look like as a college professor. He saw two of his colleagues walk by but did not bother to knock on the window to get their attention.

Hank often talked about not knowing how much longer Hank’s would last. Hank was a nice man but he was also a hard man. That he did all the cooking was strange enough. Hank looked more like the guy who should be a customer here. But there was his certificate, with a much younger, thinner Hank, faded, testifying to his expertise in food safety. Most of the patrons were not local—there were far fancier, and less deadly, places to eat breakfast or lunch or early dinner. The place operated Tuesday through Sunday and Hank was there all the time. Richard knew this because every time he passed by—on a run or a between-classes walk or walking to the bar just down the street—Hank was there, at the grill, hand on hip.

“More coffee?” Dawn asked, pulling Richard out of his thoughts. Dawn had waitressed for Hank back in the nineties and then left after she’d become engaged. Her last day of work was a memorable one. Her boyfriend turned fiancé, a real tough guy named Vic, created a scene and insulted Hank. Hank came very close to meeting Vic outside. Dawn came back two years later, after she had divorced Vic who, no surprise to anyone, had turned out to be abusive and dishonest. Richard knew this from hearing Dawn talking outside, on her breaks, smoking a cigarette. She’d miscarried. That’s what she told everyone who listened. But on one especially slow day, Dawn was on the phone, the payphone near the bathroom, which was four feet from Richard. He was using earplugs but could still hear. She talked in a timbre alien from her waitress voice, all signs of her chirpy disposition gone, and, on that especially dull day, the conversation with Mom darkened. From what he’d heard, Richard was able to piece together a different story. They were in the middle of what sounded like an ongoing dispute about what Dawn ought to do legally after what Vic had done to her physically and emotionally. The parts he did manage to hear turned Richard’s stomach.

Richard looked up from the essay he was pretending to grade and smiled. “Yes, please. Thanks, Dawn.”

“Where’s your girl?” she asked, her voice higher than usual. “I haven’t seen her in a long time?”

Richard smiled at her, gently. He was not sure what to say—was not ready to talk about—still after all these years. He had heard, over and over, that talking, sometimes, helped. But did he want it, the help?

She smiled down at him, expectant. She leaned in. “It’s the food, right?” She winked.

He opened his mouth to answer with something like, ah, you know, she’s a teenager, now, and likes to hang out with her friends, or something like that, but Hank called to her. “Your customer,” he barked, playfully, “is starving and the order’s frozen again.”

When they turned the corner, she took a look at the place and stopped and stared at him.

“Here we are,” Richard said, rubbing his hands together.” He looked at Dorothy. She looked ready to cry. “Y’all right?” he asked, smiling.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No, Dad. No.” She turned to walk away. He rushed up to her and put his hand on her shoulder.

“What’s the matter, Hon?”

She pulled away and turned to him. “Look at this place, Dad. It screams ‘I’m unhygienic.’”

Richard thought of her mother and frowned. He said nothing.

“Do you actually go in there?”          

“Of course—I’ll admit,” he said, throwing up his hands, “it’s not Javier’s or Balthazar’s but if you stay away from anything Hank cooks and put enough sugar in the coffee, it’s not that bad.”

In the cutest way, Dorothy stopped, threw her hands up like a mini-Woody Allen, and rolled her eyes, “I don’t drink coffee, Dad. I’m ten?”

He placed the unread essay on top of the stack of essays. He couldn’t stay. Rolling his eyes to keep the tears back, Richard got up to leave. He fought the urge. No one who nodded to Richard whenever he came here knew about what happened to Dorothy. It’s what he loved about the place, the anonymity. But, now, he could not sit there.

He was not ready. He never would be. He should not have come.

He walked, slowly, inattentively, back to his apartment. He did not want to make the call.

Dorothy has a sense of humor after all. She is nothing like her mother, Richard thought. Thank goodness. She didn’t appear to like Richard very much, a feature she had in common with her mother, but she did have an ability to see absurdities in her own little world and, like her father, mock them.

“And you think that is funny, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. I really do.”

“You did not say that to her, did you? You didn’t actually encourage her, did you, by saying what she did, what she’s orchestrated, is funny?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, beaming with pride, “I did.”

“Great. Nice example you set for your daughter.”

“Please, don’t start with that. It is possible,” here Richard paused, finger in the air despite being on the phone, for the effect and affect he aimed to engender, “that she is able to think for herself and that what she did came from her—because she is very creative—and not from me.”

He would’ve loved to take all the credit but their child, the only connection the two could ever openly and happily admit to, was a joint project. Joy didn’t carry humor but she overstocked outrage. And, admittedly, Dorothy’s stunt was outrageous.

“She hears you, Richard, when you’re talking to your colleagues. Over the phone. She told me. She said to me, ‘Mom, Dad can be really funny. But I can see how you could grow to hate him for it.’”

“Wait. She calls you “mom?” She doesn’t call me ‘dad.’ She usually looks at me and says ‘father.’”

“Richard, this is not a time to joke. Can you please, for just this once, be serious? Our daughter is in big trouble.”

“I’m funny,” he said, smiling. “She said that about me?” Thank god they were “talking” to each other over the phone. Tears of joy, of pride, welled up. He took a moment, turning the mouthpiece of the phone away from him and coughing. “That is so sweet.”

Joy sighed loudly, theatrically, into the phone. He could hear her take a deep breath. “You really are a prick,” she spat. “You know? I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand? Tell me.” Richard looked out the window, the sky darkening, rain beginning to make little tapping sounds against the glass.

“You treat our child like she’s your friend. You set no boundaries. Is it true you gave her beer?”

“Yes, it was. Three days ago. It was a holiday!”

“Jesus, Richard,” she sighed. “She’s fourteen.”

The rain started to hit the pane louder, like someone throwing cups of water at it.

“Relax, I had beer with my father when I was twelve and I turned out—she will be fine, fine. What are you freaking out about?”

Richard had no problem with drinking. He drank often but never, or rarely, in excess. And he earned a post baccalaureate in writing! And was gainfully employed!

            “She’s—”

Richard and Joy had had these conversations before, though centered on other problems their daughter brought to light. He heard this before and was not interested in entertaining Joy’s sudden worry about her daughter’s wellbeing. Joy. What a misnomer.

“She’s a straight-A student,” Richard sighed, loudly. “She’s on the chess team. She plays oboe. She has friends and reads voraciously. Have you read her poetry?” And, so, so what that she is involved in creating a rumor about the principal running a drug cartel, he thought. Though, of all the things that she could have started, a rumor about a drug cartel is pretty outrageous, he mused. But he would not admit that to Joy. The best—the most outrage-inducing part of the whole crazy story was that the principal had had a drug problem and was recovering, sort of.

Apparently, and this was just another rumor, he now was trafficking in stolen school supplies—mops, brooms, cleaning agents of questionable chemical makeup about which, ironically enough, the school’s parent-teacher association ended up back-handedly complimenting the principal, whom, in perhaps the only moment parents and teachers agreed, they all hated for a slew of reasons. If the story sounds unbelievable, Richard thought, the listener who doubts undoubtedly does not work in any capacity in, nor at any level of, education.

“Richard!”

“What?” he shouted. Had he spaced out again?

“Are you listening?” She let out another loud sigh to signal, in case Richard was too dense to get it, that she was annoyed with their daughter and tired of his enabling her. “She’s a gossiper, a teller of tall tales.”

And so? Richard could not help but feel personally attacked.

“And so? Why do I feel like I am being attacked here?”

Richard smiled, sadly. That March felt like decades ago. Before their many quiet discussions about funeral arrangements.

When had he entered his apartment? Richard looked at the phone. He needed to move it from that table. The rain pounded the window. Richard looked out, blinked and stared at the cascading drops. Too neat, he thought. Too neat.

After yet another conversation with Joy about their daughter that led to nowhere, Richard found the notebook. It was left open and on the dining room table and facing up. It was not really spying, he convinced himself. And what he saw amused and then horrified and then worried him.

Why hadn’t she said anything about a boyfriend?

Should he tell Joy about this? Maybe not. If Joy knew about the boyfriend, she had not let on, and if that was the case, then Richard would not bring him up to her. She ought to have said something. Richard relaxed his shoulders. No use getting angry. What if she did not know? And then there was the whole thing about spying. Dorothy would feel betrayed, spied upon, and Joy would certainly nurture accusations of spying. She’d have done the same thing, of course—what parent wouldn’t? But she’d use his “spying” against him and make herself the champion of their daughter’s privacy.

Richard hated keeping things from anyone. He preferred that everyone knew everything. Indeed, he wished people could just intuit it all—or read minds. That would be great, he thought, until he thought about the thoughts he had that made him redden.

Why can’t people just accept things? he mused.

He looked down, quickly, at the page—the out-in-the-open page.

What have I done to be so happy? J has made me so crazy with life-affirming joy. There is no one else that matters. Just J. J is all that matters.

“J?” Richard scratched his head absently. Who is “J.” What does the “J” stand for? He paced the room, tripping on a cord but catching himself before he hit the floor. Wasn’t there a Jonathan and was there also a Jimmy—a friend? They’d had pizza. It was a group of them. He went back to the table and leaned over it, careful not to touch the book. He read on.

Here is my poem to J. Forever D and J. Haha. DJ.

We sit at the table

You smile at me

I melt like the cheese

On what the sulking lunchlady

Calls

Grilled but I call slop

I love you, cheezy it

Maybe to say to you

I didn’t have an ear for poems, and I should have worked on it. This kid, thought Richard. This kid’s going places.

J, my J, I miss you all the time. I love our walks home together. I wish I could live with my dad only so that we could meet up all the time and be together.

He lives in the area! Richard’s mind raced to think of all the boys whose names began with J who lived in the area. What is that area? What is the circumference?

My dad has no clue and he cannot even read the obvious crush we have on each other. But I

He looked around the apartment. Furtive glances left and right, up and down. I’ve met J, Richard thought. Right in front of me? But I don’t recall seeing her with Jonathan or Jimmy or J-Something-or-Other. This was going to drive Richard to madness. He looked over to the stack of essays on happiness from his composition class and sighed. He stepped away from the book. He’d read to the end of the page but dared not touch it.

Eight months had passed since that day. He never did find out.

Richard turned from the window. The rain had subsided and he was still dressed to go out for that run. He looked over at the table, the notebook still open. He hadn’t touched a thing on that table since Dorothy’s death. Why did he keep the phone there?

Such heavy, dark days like this one compelled thoughts about it. He wanted to but wouldn’t—couldn’t. But thoughts remained.

He was impelled to, the urge came from deep within, but could not do it. He was not ready to know what would follow it. He didn’t have the energy. Didn’t have the temerity.

He’d written and thrown away and written and thrown away all night long. Apologies. Manifestos. Declarations. Admissions. All felt wrong. They explained. Some said too much. Those had to be thrown away. Some said too little, almost nothing. Those, too, thrown away. Who would read that anyway?

The rain fell biblically and then stopped, dead. It started up again. Richard looked out the window, down to the street, and sighed. He ran in all types of weather, but today he did not want to run in the rain. He wanted—needed—clear skies, a hint of sun. Just today.

It was the sixth anniversary. He’d not heard from...

No one, in fact, had called him. He convinced himself that he was fine with that. There was nothing special about the number six. The telephone rang. He did not want to answer it, did not want to walk up to that table. He stared at the phone. It continued to ring. He had no answering machine.

After six rings, he picked up.

“Hey, Buddy,” said the voice at the other end.

“Morton,” he sighed, a burning itch creeping just behind his eyes.

Morton and Richard had had many conversations over the years, usually over drinks. They agreed on little, arguing constantly. They never bothered with formalities or small talk and continued conversations exactly where the last one stopped because one of them had a class that had already started or the department meeting had ended. In the days when they had endured department meetings in that horrible echo-chamber auditorium, seated like freshmen nodding off through a lecture delivered with the spirit of Sisyphus in mind, the two held forth on a range of topics outside of pedagogy and departmental concerns.

“No way, Rich.”

“Come on, Mort. You don’t see it?” Richard turned in his seat and looked into Morton’s ear as he addressed him.

“No, Rich. I don’t.”

“Sheesh. I mean, come on.”

“Rich, Richard,” Morton turned to him, looking over the rim of his glasses, smiling. “Repeating something doesn’t make it true.”

“Faith No More’s albums—especially Last Cup of Sorrow—do not,” Richard thought about how to put it without repeating himself and without returning Morton’s sarcasm, because this mattered, “stand alone. The speaker wants to leave his devoted—this word is key and means what it really means—audience with the impression that he, and by extension, the group—the actual band—it’s meta, as the youngsters like to say—the band is calling it quits.”

Morton, chin to chest, shook his head.

“The song,” he shouted, causing two new and therefore more serious colleagues to turn around, aghast, from opposite ends of the hall, “is about suicide!”

Richard thought about it the way he thought about not running, a fleeting idea, one that lasted a moment and was replaced with the horrors of reading “revisions” and crafting whimsical committee minutes from an alcohol-muddled memory.

Morton did not know about what Richard had been writing and throwing away for years now. Richard never talked about it, about the thought of what it was always and only about: it. Knowing too well what might follow—the worst, he imagined, a possible referral to some intervention service—Richard kept this part of his life—like most of his life these days—to himself.

He crumpled up and threw the paper at the pile around the wastebasket.

Not today, he thought.

He rose from the chair, slowly, and walked over to the round black basket. He looked down into it, mounds of paper staring up at him. He reached into it, grabbing with both hands a bunch and stuffing it into a paper bag. Later, he would languidly cross the highway, quickly pass the flowers at the site and even more quickly pass by the school, to the park by the river. There were plenty of places where no one at this time but potheads bothered to venture. He would toss the burning bag into one of the metal garbage cans, just as he had done numerous times before.

“Hello, Mort. Thanks for calling. It means a lot to me.”

On the other end of the line was a sharp intake of breath. “What? No one else called? Has anyone written to you? A text? No card from the fucking Sunshine Committee?”

“No,” he sighed. And quickly: “It’s fine, it’s fine. Everyone’s busy. We could open a daycare, Mort, just for our department and run a successful business. Who isn’t a mother…a fath…” Richard paused to swallow. He looked out his window, rivulets of rain cascading down, down, down.

“Come on, Buddy. Get out of that apartment.”         

“I’m suiting up for a run—dressed, actually,” he lied. “On my way out. Want to join?”

Morton did not run or jog. He avoided walking as much as he could get away with. He made sure all of his classes were down the hall from his office and never in either of the other two buildings merely two blocks away. But Richard always invited him out for a run, without any sign of judgement (he hoped), but Morton typically had an excuse, something about not having the time at the moment.

“I can’t. Not today—got a date.”

“It’s nine thirt—” he turned to the clock “—forty, it’s nine forty. What do you have, a breakfast date?”

“Another time. Listen, get out. Run—call me when you feel the need to, okay? Seriously.”

“I appreciate it, Mort.” Richard paused, tears falling down his cheeks. He kept his voice even. “Thanks.”

“What the hell, that the fuck are you saying?” asked Morton, looking at the  lamppost outside.

The bar was empty. It was a Tuesday afternoon, cold, rainy. Classes were not in session, winter break having begun yesterday. They submitted their grades and neither was teaching for the next six weeks. The jukebox constantly sang out song after song, selections made by bar owner (and apparently failed late sixties arena rock singer) Jake. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” played. Again.

The news was everywhere. The driver of the vehicle was found guilty of charges of terrorism. News that the Department of Justice would seek the death penalty flashed again and again across the obscenely huge flat-screen television. Six years after his daughter’s death, Richard still wanted to beat that man to death. But, he told Morton, he could not support the death penalty. Of course, he personally wanted revenge but he also had his doubts.

“I think,” Morton said, looking Richard in the eye, “you’re intellectualizing.” He leaned back in his chair and threw his hands up.

Staring at Morton, Richard brought a fist down on the table.

“The whole point of being against the death penalty is to be against it in all cases.” He felt ridiculous as he lightly pounded the table after “against” and “it” and “in” and “all” and finally “cases.” “I’m not running for president, Mort. Jesus, I—”

“—We are talking about the psycho who killed,” Morton stopped. He sat back and inhaled. He looked out the window and exhaled loudly. “Rich, come on. This is not a thought experiment in comp one. What are we supposed to do, give this guy a comfortable bed and gym membership for the next fifty years of his life? What is he, twenty-five? Are you kidding me?”

“I am saying,” Richard paused, staring at Morton, his colleague and friend of ten years, “that I cannot agree to this. I know what I think, what I feel, doesn’t matter. But I have to write this.”

The other thing Richard was writing, a letter to the current attorney general—of the United States—would probably not even get a response. He wondered whether The New York Times would publish an open letter in the paper’s editorial pages.

“Now why would you do that, Rich?”

Richard hated “Rich.” And Morton knew that. Morton hated being called “Mort.” At least no one called him “Dick” or “Richie.”

“Do what? Express myself? Take some fucking responsibility? Speak out against this murderous ‘justice?’ Do you not know me, Mort?”

It hit him. He paused. Coldness surrounded him. He felt nauseous.

Justine. She came up to Richard after the ceremony Dorothy’s school held for the victims. The mayor was there. Richard was outside, shaking hands, blankly taking in a “thank you” here and a “sorry for your loss” there. People expressed their “appreciation” for his “moving words.” His department chair hugged him. He nodded, lips pursed, tears pressing into his skull. He now recalled that moment, the one like that moment in his dream. Justine is walking with Dorothy. They are walking—no, not walking, skipping, side by side, toward him. He is annoyed. Dorothy smiles sheepishly. He’s been waiting forty minutes. He now sees their hands fall away from one another.

“Didn’t we have a dentist’s appointment?” he whines.

Justine grabs Dorothy’s hand. Again. He thinks nothing of it.

“It was her,” he said, his eyes smarting. He was at once overcome with embarrassment. He did not even…the notebook…

“I am so sorry,” she began to cry. “I don’t know what to say. I miss her so much. I loved—love her. I’m, I’m,” she shook her head and slowly walked off. He watched her walk off. Dorothy had friends. They loved her. Justine loved her. She was loved.

Richard felt a smile, a small, sad smile, form. The smile widened.

Morton looked at him and said nothing. And then, “This is serious, Rich.”

“So am I. But—”

“But what?” Mort sounded like rocks against a wall. The bartender looked up. “But you want to leave this guy in prison for the rest of his life? But you have principles that are unshakable? Christ, you sound like one of them.”

“One of them who?”

Morton looked at Richard. He was about to say something but stopped. His shoulders dropped and he shook his head. He looked at Richard.

Richard stared. “But.” He thought of them, holding hands. He smiled, again.

“But what, Richard?” Morton asked, his voice softer now, now like pebbles splashing into a still body of water.

“Not sure.”

“What do you mean? Not sure? Should he be out on the streets?”

“We have plenty of deranged people living on the streets,” Richard said, smiling sadly. “We don’t know the whole story.”

“In this case we do. At least we know what we need to know. They,” Morton pointed absently out the window, “did not drive a fucking truck through crowds of innocent cyclists and pedestrians. They did not kill Dorothy.”

“Down the street,” Richard said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, “plenty of people make tens of millions in bonuses for selling things that kill tens, hundreds of thousands of people—”

“—oh please,” Morton threw up his hands, “don’t start that shit—”

Richard was not interested in debating. He wanted—he did not know what. His daughter’s memory “honored” without violence? Richard often seethed with rage, craving to run the man over with a Sherman tank.

But she had been happy. They were together that day.

For now, he would write the letter. He felt useless.

“—people and they are not locked up and certainly will never face the death penalty.”

The tavern was quieter now. The soft thunk of a glass placed on the bar or the thump of the music, now turned down, was all he heard. In his periphery, Richard saw heads snapping toward their table and turning away slowly. There were only a couple of other people, one looking at his phone and the other staring at the television. Richard looked up. One of those television talent competitions was on. The camera’s eyes lunged from a panel of washed up artists and a solitary person on stage, smiling, it appeared, nervously. The bartender, looking away and up to the screen, continued to wipe the same spot on the counter.

---

Domenick Acocella, a grateful SUNY and CUNY graduate, holds an MFA in fiction from The City College and has the privilege to teach composition and creative writing at BMCC, where he is also faculty co-advisor to a student club and magazine. He is an editor's assistant at Fiction. His work has been rejected by many great publications but can be found in VIA, Promethean, and the online publication Fleas on the Dog.