The Porn Critic

[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist:

“Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 9, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,764 words)

The Empty Room

(Fiction) Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some polluted intersection and crackled like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been overtightened and then eased, sat to one side of the coffee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an ­appropriate top. In fact, the traffic light would follow us up the Hudson, to Darby, to the house with the empty room. There it never escaped the garage.

Published: Jun 16, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,540 words)