‘Free Milk’

Jack Bordnick's sculptures and photography incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery often with whimsical overtones — aimed at provoking our experiences and self reflections. Aiming to unbalance our rational minds, the predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both living and “non-living” beings, and things that speak to us in their own languages. They are mixed media assemblages that have been assembled,
disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto themselves

Free Milk

“Good boy, good boy… ready for more?” the homeless guy said to his dog, feeding the dog part of the half-eaten pretzel someone had given him the last time they’d worked the crowd.  The other part he’d already eaten.  I thought the dog’s portion was bigger.

The dog wagged its stumped tail.  It, he, was ugly, dirty, skinny; one ear chewed on in some back-alley fight, and scarred bald spots marred his coat.  But he was clever, calm, tame.  Perfect for working a crowded subway station.

He boogied to a tune in his head, doing an effortless backward moonwalk in a broke down pair of Nikes so old the labels had frayed and parted, leaving only the stitching in the shape of the swoosh, like a ghost of itself.  His moonwalk was easy and athletic; he must have had a wicked fadeaway shot, once upon a time.  It made me wonder who he might have been, if things were different.

I was jealous of a homeless guy’s footwork.  

I looked at my watch, an expensive, heavy diver’s thing with luminous hands and dials behind a genuine crystal my girlfriend bought me on a trip to the Caribbean… it had been… what? A year? Close to two, since I’d been diving.  I’d only been diving a handful of times, I was an amateur when it came to diving, an amateur, maybe even a poser, especially with such a fancy diver’s watch to prove I went diving.  But it was a great watch.

I’m late.  I’m late.

Dina was late, too.  Late.

The bum homeless guy (I was trying to be charitable… or at least nonjudgmental… sometimes I’m more successful… I guess I should have asked him his name, if I’d truly cared, if I wanted to go out of my way to acknowledge our mutual humanity, our shared brotherhood…) and his chewed eared, stumped tailed dog approached the growing crowd waiting for the next train.

Many of the people waiting were women; women made hard by the city and their commute on the subway and their jobs in some impersonal office building like mine.  Maybe by each other.  Some of them wore running shoes, out of place with their business clothes, their pumps or their flats or whatever carried in a plastic shopping bag or in an oversized handbag, depending on their maturity level or how far they’d let themselves go.  The older, married ones carry their work shoes in a big handbag, the intermediates use the plastic bag and the young, fresh faced ladies still bother wearing their semiformal work shoes home. 

The homeless guy got to the edge of the crowd and started begging, begging for change, begging for food for his dog, begging for forgiveness for the intrusion.  The crowd parted around him like the sea might have split for Moses, most commuters so numb to this routine that they melted and flowed out of his way.  A few gave him money, some coins here and there.  No food, this round.

A train rumbled up the tunnel and a few seconds later its headlights shone at the wall behind the edge of the platform, getting louder, horn sounding before the train itself appeared in a shower of sparks, rocking as it slowed down.

Not my train.  Another local.  I’d taken it from the station by Dina’s after I’d left, taken it down here so I could switch to the express back downtown, back to more familiar, posh, familiar settings.  The two bedroom condo right off Union Square where I lived with my girlfriend, Amanda.  

She was waiting for me to get home and change into a tuxedo so we could go to her father’s 60th birthday party.  I had a wedding ring, in its fuzzy velvet box, in the outer pocket of my trench coat, waiting for the right time, late, probably after the cake and coffee but before everyone was trying to get home, to propose.  I would perfectly mix precisely the right blend of charming theatricality and smarmy sincerity coupled with my ability to stay loose in front of a crowd.

I touched the box reflexively, like Pavlov’s prized pooch, stroking the fuzzy velvet with my index finger, trying to force it open, worm my way inside, run my nail over the cool metal and the impossible smoothness of the stone, but the spring-loaded hinge was surprisingly strong and resisted my probing.

I’d gotten quite good at worming my way into things.

A few weeks back, my boss called me into his office in the early afternoon, closed the door after I’d seated myself and poured me a small glass of whiskey from the ornate decanter on a tray behind his desk.  The good stuff.

Was I in trouble? I hadn’t done anything.

Except Dina.  

I’d done her plenty, but her temp agency had transferred her months ago and I’d been so paranoid about a meeting such as this one that I’d covered my tracks… 

…like a murderer, my mind had supplied, and I’d sipped some of the whiskey.

Then my boss poured a glass for himself and I relaxed as he circled his way back to his overstuffed chair and sat down.

I wanted to ask him what was up, but the way he was looking me up and down from behind his desk suggested I wait, and I waited, until he seemed satisfied with something, took a drink and said, “You’ve been drinking an awful lot of free milk, guy.”

‘Guy’ is what he called me when he wanted to dole out gentle instruction.

“Free milk?”  Puzzled for the first time, I almost added ‘sir?’ but I caught myself in time.  The need for high level obsequiousness had passed years ago and would make me look weak.

“That’s right.”  He grinned.  “You know the saying?  Why pay for the cow when you can have the milk for free?”

“Sure.”

“Now, I’m not calling my daughter a cow, but believe me, in thirty-eight years of marriage I’ve called her mother a lot worse, once or twice even to her face, but we’re married and so we’re partners.  Even give and take.”

“And…”

“I’m not saying that you’re being a pig…” he frowned… “too many animal metaphors there… anyway, my point is that you’re enjoying a lot of the… benefits of your relationship without assuming any of the risks of a… permanent partnership.  You follow my meaning?”

“And you think-”

“I think you and my daughter make a fine, fine couple, guy.”  He’d raised his glass then in an air toast that didn’t require me to lean forward and actually clink his glass, and we both downed our remaining whiskey together.

The train hissed to a stop and people pushed their way out to the platform while others pushed their way into the train and I watched the press of bodies intently, like slow motion football players or wrestlers or even live action chess pieces, watched the rocking and the shoving and the murmured excuses here and there and I lost sight of the homeless guy and his dog.

When the train pulled out and the crowd cleared I saw him holding a donut, no, not a donut, one of those pastries that looked like a cross between a donut and Fibonacci proportioned seashell without the hole in the center.  He ate most of it and then gave a piece to the dog who licked at the glazed sugar it left on his nose.

Diabetes probably wasn’t one of their chief concerns.

I checked my watch.

I was very late.

How’s the tux going to fit?  I didn’t own one yet, despite Amanda’s quiet insistence that I was going to need one; between work and other petty obligations and aggressive sexual encounters with Dina I hadn’t had the time to buy one, so Amanda had taken my best fitting suit to the tailor to use as a template, telling me it made me look dashing and handsome, whispering in my ear that she’d help me take it off later tonight.

Thinking about sex with Amanda made me think about sex with Dina, and thinking about Dina because I’d been thinking about Amanda made me feel bad.

Amanda.  

Amanda was good to me, she handled the little things, like taking my suit to the tailor; she had the good nature to do these things because she wanted to, because they were the sorts of things a marrying woman would do, her end of the partnership her father had talked about, a small sip of the free milk I’d been drinking.  The fact that her father owned my firm and I could legitimately claim I hadn’t originally started dating her as a strategic career move helped me like her, too.  But I didn’t love her and I was about to propose to her in front of a crowd of our… crowd.

The homeless guy was back at the edge of his crowd, regrouping, sipping clean water from a Perrier bottle, the emerald of the heavy bottle in contrast to the dirty grays and browns of his clothes and skin.  I’d seen him here over preceding months, always after leaving Dina and waiting for my connecting train. 

I’d given him money.  

Tithing? 

I always gave him money and had never smelled liquor on his breath, which is how I knew he was drinking water.

He started dancing around again for the amusement of his dog, who barked, and hopefully for his own amusement, wide-eyed and crazy.  Maybe not crazy after all.  Maybe just unwilling to keep his crazy under wraps, the difference between the guy singing and dancing in the shower versus the guy singing and dancing in the middle of a crowded subway station.

My firm had ordered a bunch of these ergonomically designed, high wing-backed modern art office chairs from Italy that bespoke quiet sophistication and a nouvelle money different than the old money that the rich mahogany of a gentlemen’s lounge suggested, but money nonetheless.  Not my boss’s decision.  The chairs cast a shadow that made them look like horses, when the sun hit them from a particular angle.  The perfectly contoured headrest looked like the horse’s head, the rest of the chair formed the neck and body of the horse, the horse shadow so real that I’ve wondered what it would be like to jump on one of them in the middle of a meeting, seize the headrest and ride it into the sun like Icarus or Pegasus, knees flexing, arms tensing, ‘Hya! Hya! Hya! Faster! Faster boy!” 

I’d be in the subway station next to this guy.  But I can keep it together, smiling a little when I see the chair’s horse shadow.

Amanda wouldn’t get it.

Would Dina?

I don’t know.  I didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t get wistful for Dina, imbue her with properties she might not have possessed, make her too special, the one who got away.

I’d met Dina working late one night on a hard deadline, having identified her as smart and capable from among the temps my company rotated through the office.  She’d caught me checking her out, leaning over a table, and instead of blushing or looking down she’d returned my look with an eyebrow half lifted and the hint of a smirk on her lips and I’d returned the smirk and we’d stayed, challenging each other, raising the ante like a dimmer switch being slowly turned up until…

…the intercom buzzed and the moment came to an end that wasn’t the end of anything.

I’d caught up to her in the elevator a couple days later, grinning as I ambled in, briefcase swinging, the two of us alone as the doors closed.  With another hinted smirk all she’d said was “Nice tie.”

A clandestine lunch with her a few days later, and up to her place in the Bronx a couple days after that.  The tension from our initial moment never forgotten, made better by the wait.

This afternoon was supposed to be a repeat of our little routine, amorous emojis exchanged, showing up at her place after work, saying something smart and getting a smart answer in return, eyes never leaving each other, clothing shed, flesh pressed, relief felt if never directly expressed.

Because seeing her was so different, so freeing from everything else.  She was Dominican, she’d told me, and today her wiry hair had red and white yarn braided into it, falling around her brown shoulders, hanging down to the center of her lighter, smooth back.  This little flare of carefree self-expression enough to get me going.

Had she done this just for me?

I didn’t know and didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to think about this too much, didn’t want to overthink it, certainly.  My neckties were always one single shade brighter than conventional and I chose them purposefully to try and rival this same, carefree effect on a smaller scale, and my efforts were usually rewarded, by Amanda, who thought they made me look Alpha, and by my boss, who found my efforts amusing.  

Compared to Dina’s hair the necktie was a noose that I couldn’t wait to shed when I got to her apartment.  This was the only place I could relax and be myself, an unremarkable apartment in the Bronx with a view of nothing but the next identical building across the street from her bedroom window.

Was it because she was brown skinned and below my station?  Could I relax because melanin content had taken her out of the running for serious?  Could I be myself with her because I was the phony white Alpha wannabe everywhere else?  It was stressful, playing the master of the universe role to its fullest, wearing the slightly too bright tie to show I was confident enough to appear not to care in the first place.

And everything changed this afternoon when she pushed my pants out of her way as she grabbed a t shirt to put on, the cold making her nipples hard. 

The velvet box the ring was in fell out of my pocket and onto the floor and lay there at the foot of her bed like an embarrassing dog turd and cold gripped my heart, which had picked up its beating pace as the adrenaline flooded.

She put on the T shirt with harsh jerking motions and leaned over to retrieve the ring and I couldn’t even enjoy the sloping fullness of her ass while she did.

Dina had opened it, stared flatly down at the ring, turning the box a little bit back and forth in her hands as she studied it, the ring worth at least as much as her entire everything, a ring which could probably purchase me her entire village back home.

“Nice,” she finally said, the spring-loaded hinge snapping sharply as she closed it.  “Very expensive, I’m guessing.  But still… tastefully understated.  Classy.”  She tossed the box onto my pants.

This moment stretched out.

I thrummed with tension.

Because all of a sudden something became very clear to me, something which probably should have been clear to me all along but had been obscured by the sex and the illicit thrill: this was where I’d been guzzling the free milk.

And now it was curdling in my mouth.

Dina’s manner changed.  She had just made a decision.  Probably a decision I wasn’t going to like.

“We need to talk.” Her teasing, playful sexy smirk long gone.

“Do we?”

“I’m late.”

“Late for what?”

“You think you’re the only one with important things to do?  But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what?”

“I’m late, this month.  To start bleeding.”

I nodded, remembering a few weeks back, Dina on top of me, hips slowly torquing and twerking, stopping, teasing, starting, only to discover after that the condom had worked its way off my cock and I’d drawn it, wadded up, partly inside out from inside her.  The memory of her fused to me, hair covering my face made my lip twitch into an involuntary smile.

“You’re not taking this serious.”

For an even icier second inside this already long, cold minute, I’m Gandhi for not correcting the English of a woman I’d carelessly knocked up.

“Ly.”  Her eyes started watering up.  “You’re not taking this serious-ly.”

“I…”

“Just don’t, please don’t, no matter even if you thought it, just please don’t ask if it’s yours, okay?”

“I… I wasn’t.”  

No? 

Hadn’t I, somewhere in there, wondered if a girl this carefree and body confident and brassy was really only giving it up to me, and only me, and not hedging her bets the way an uptight, guarded… well, the way I would?  The way I was, in fact, doing right now?  I couldn’t say it and take it back, couldn’t unburn that bridge, so I hadn’t voiced that ugly, ugly question she was calling me out for thinking but wisely not asking.  

“That’s not what I was thinking.  At all.”  Now overselling it.

“No?  What, then?”

“I… don’t know.  I guess I’m wondering, you know, I don’t know… what… what’s the… next… step, I guess?”  

“The next step?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know, I’ll… I guess I’ll…” and she made a wavy motion with her hands at her waist like she was brushing away accumulated crumbs from a crease in her shirt, tears flowing, mouth working but not saying anything.

She hadn’t planned anything.  Not yet, not until she’d talked to me about it first.  Waiting for me to tell her it would be alright, we’d stay together, I’d take care of her and our baby and that she didn’t have to…

“I guess I’ll get rid of it.”  Shaking her head.

Had she gone through this before?  Had a younger, dumber, less self-aware version of herself done it before, maybe allowing her to stay on track and finish school, her city college diploma framed on a wall in her living room, promising herself it would never happen again as a grown woman?  After this cold appraisal I wondered if she was going to say anything religious, and, to top it off, maybe in Spanish.  

She’d never spoken to me in Spanish.

“What do you want me to do?”

Without looking at me, sad, disappointed, angry, though mostly at herself, she said, “My mother warned me that you’d just… do what you want, in the end.  So, I guess just do what you want.  You will anyway.”

I’d left, dressing hastily, wanting to get out before the steadily mounting pressure I sensed inside her like an emotional seismologist erupted into the white hot magma hatred I deserved.

I’d quietly stuck the ring, snug inside its velvet box into the outer pocket of my coat instead of back into my pants pocket.

Then, I slinked to the subway station.  

Slinked.

Definitely not Alpha, though there was no one to see my walk of shame.  Certainly not the way Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson or any of those other great heroes of white American capitalistic self-indulgence would have left the slave quarters, head held high, strolling back to the plantation mansion. 

Couldn’t I have them both?  That’s what a true stakeholder, master of the universe, captain of destiny, gentleman farmer would do.  Marry Amanda, sire an heir or two, gleefully continue with Dina, brown babies or not, having both women in the same state of harmony a sports car and an SUV would have, parked side by side in a heated garage.

Or…

Wouldn’t I be better off without either of them?

Better to dump Amanda, quit my job, hock the ring for a one-way ticket to India where I could seek out my guru and find peace under a lotus tree, arms and legs folded up like a pretzel?  Or, I could go to Tibet, apprentice myself to the Dalai Lama.  Or apprentice myself to a plumber or a carpenter someplace rustic and really work for a living.  Even better, I could become one of those leathery surf bums in Hawaii.  A scuba instructor.  I already had the poser watch; now I could embrace the authentic lifestyle it represented.

Mars.  

Mars was the place to go.  I’d be the most Alpha, rugged conquistador mover and shaker on the entire planet.

Headlights and screeching metal telegraphed the arrival of another train.

My train.

I shook out my lapels and flexed my calves, gearing up for the pushing and shoving ahead as I made my way toward the edge of the platform, preparing to jockey for a position as close to a set of doors on the train as possible.

So, no.

No.

What I was actually going to do, was get home late, rush through a shower and a sloppy shave, put on the tux and propose to Amanda at my boss’s 60th birthday party, and in due time inherit my boss’s job and my boss’s office and my boss’s nonequestrian office chair.  And his decanter of good whiskey, too.

Maybe I could do it all without showering, subversively proposing a lifelong partnership to a woman while still stinking of my mistress and this subway station.

Which made me think of Dina and what she was probably going through, and the mischievous thrill withered and died.

The homeless guy and his dog were cued up as well.

I guess I wasn’t going to be seeing them anymore, since I wasn’t going to be seeing Dina anymore, and would have no reason for being in this particular train station anymore.  

Wasn’t he the free one?  Free to dance in the train station all he wanted, while I couldn’t ride my shadowy steed into the sun, shackled by… what? Money, society, expectations, inborn hierarchical presuppositions… And here my powerful plantation owner fantasy morphed into a vision of myself as the victim in all of this, the sadly abused straight, white, healthy, male American Jesus, martyred on a cross of comfort, heroically self-indulging so that others might not have to.

No.  

I was not jealous of a homeless guy because he didn’t have to pay rent and bills and taxes.

Though he did have better footwork than me.

The train got closer, louder, brakes hissing, the platform live beneath my feet, the people clustering around me, clumping up, readying themselves for the great mundanity of getting home, the homeless guy and his dog providing me with room to maneuver since no one else wanted to stand next to him.

With the train about a quarter of the way into the station, the Perrier bottle slipped out of the homeless guy’s pocket and landed with a clink, the heavy bottle unfazed by the concrete platform.

Instead, the bottle rolled, and he stepped on it and tripped right as his dog pulled on the leash a little.

His coat flapped like the sail on a boat as he passed me.

I grabbed at it and missed the frayed fabric by inches even as I lunged after him.

The homeless guy fell into the tracks, landing in a puddle of filthy water between the ties.

I flung myself onto the platform and reached out for him, wriggling as far over the empty space as I could get and teetering there, seesawing.  There was a support pillar behind me, and I hooked it between my legs.  The stability it provided allowed me to reach out a few more precious inches, my arms extended, my hands extended, even my fingers extended as far as I could stretch.

If he reached up to me, I could have taken his hand.

Dazed from the fall, by the time he acknowledged the train, it was too late.

I had a second, a single split second, to pull myself back from the edge before the train would have hit me; it clipped the edge of my hand as I rolled to safety.

But I was front and center as the train smacked into the homeless guy’s face.  He didn’t scream.  Thick blood looped through the air, splattering the support pillar, the far wall and some of the other commuters.  I was too low to get the worst of it, but later I found some smeared on my lapel.

I laid there, my heart hammering in my chest.

The train stopped maybe fifty feet ahead.  

People were shouting, minor commotion ensued; an older woman puked, leaning all the way over until I got a good look at the scuffed heel of one black shoe inside her tote bag, along with a Tupperware container, and I smiled at her when we made eye contact, but she didn’t smile back and ran up the stairs, hand over her mouth.

Everyone had their phones out, taking pictures.  

Taking pictures was reacting now, instead of reacting.  

When had that happened?  Who was I kidding?  If one of my friends had pictures of something like this I would have swiped through them and been disappointed there weren’t more.

And then everyone left.  By the time I got to my feet, shakily grabbing the support pillar I’d clung to, the downtown half of the station was almost completely empty and the uptown portion across the tracks was lightly peopled.  

Everyone was probably right up top in the fresh air, jostling to get on a bus or into a cab, all of them breathlessly talking into their phones about what they’d seen.  I would be doing that, too.  I’d call a car service, though.  

My wallet and my keys and all my change had fallen out of my pockets, and I retrieved the wallet and keys, not bothering with the change.  

Was it a memorial for the guy, the way ancient Greeks put coins on someone’s eyes to pay for their trip across the river to Hades?  Or were my hands shaking too wildly to pick up each individual coin?

The ring was safe.  That ring, that ring…

The engineer and the conductor left the train, inspected the front of it and then both lit cigarettes.  A little later other transit workers appeared, but none of them talked to anyone but each other.

Eventually the cops and then EMTs showed up, carrying a stretcher.

By then I was one of the only ones left, me and a few others.  And the homeless guy’s homeless dog, who kept wandering around between the two nearest support pillars and sniffing at the space between the train and the edge of the platform.  Eventually he sat down, and put his head onto his paws but didn’t fall asleep.

The police taped off the stairs to the platform with bright yellow tape and took a lot of pictures with a real camera and jotted notes onto a pad.

Then two different transit workers boarded the train, powered it up, closed the doors and slowly drove it out of the station, back the way it had come.

Two EMT’s went into the tracks down a short stairway at the end of the platform after the one remaining transit worker swiped them through a gate.  They rolled the homeless guy’s headless body into a body bag and humped it up to the platform where two more grabbed and tossed it onto their stretcher.

They looked bored and would have been more careful with a sack of potatoes.

And then the police questioned me; two uniformed officers, a tall, thin Asian man and short, stocky black woman.

How little I really knew surprised me.

Why had I bothered staying in the first place?  Because I’d attempted to rescue him?  Because I’d seen him dancing on the platform for no one else’s amusement but his own? Because I didn’t want to go home?  Because he’d had an effortless moonwalk and I wondered if he’d been good at basketball, before he’d become the homeless guy in the train station?

I didn’t know his name, just that he was homeless and always stayed in this same station.

No, he didn’t jump on purpose.  No, he wasn’t trying to push someone else and missed.  I described the Perrier bottle he slipped on, and one of the cops located it, lying in the tracks now with all the other accumulated garbage.  I thought maybe it was evidence and they’d get it, but the Asian officer jotted something in his pad and then snapped a picture of it with his cellphone.

There had been a bloody smear, but a transit worker wearing a hazmat suit had sprinkled something on it and then swept it up.

It was like the guy had never existed in the first place.

Maybe he hadn’t.

This would last one local news cycle and then maybe a blurb in the newspaper in a day or two, when someone identified him.  If someone identified him.  By his fingerprints, since he didn’t have a face anymore.

If I’d jumped into the tracks and gotten killed too, it would have generated more interest.  If I’d jumped into the tracks and successfully saved his life and survived, I’d be a hero and would get to shake hands with the mayor or something.

But I hadn’t been heroic, had I?

One of the cops told me I could go, after I gave the female officer my business card.  They got ready to leave, pulling down the tape they put across the stairs.

Where am I going to go?

If I’d gotten killed trying to rescue the homeless guy, cut in half, bifurcated into two symmetrical halves down the length of my body, both women could share me.  But I was still very much alive.  

Back uptown to Dina?  We could embrace and I’d weep about the homeless guy and the impending baby and maybe shed a tear for my previous selfishness while I promised to make things right.  I could propose with the very same ring I’d intended to give Amanda. 

As tempting as that was, knowing it might be the rightest thing to do, as vividly as I could make the vision of our reunion, I wasn’t, in my heart of hearts, going to do that.

I could go home.  My tux was undoubtedly on the bed, Amanda was at the party and I would have a bunch of messages from her crowding my inbox as soon as I got out of the train station.

When she inevitably asked what had happened I could tell her the whole truth, why I was in the subway station in the first place, Dina and the pregnancy and the homeless guy I hadn’t rescued and then throw myself on her mercy.

Or pretend none of this had happened and try convincing her the bloodstain on my lapel was ketchup from a burger I’d grabbed.  It looked brown, not red, not ketchup.  Barbecue sauce, then. Worcestershire?

I shed my jacket even though I’d be cold, and threw it away.  Then, looking down on it in the middle of a trash bag full of coffee cups and food wrappers and discarded newspapers, I remembered the ring, which I put into my front pocket.

The Asian police officer grabbed the dog by the leash, the female holding out doggie mace in case the dog snapped.  He didn’t, simply making a noise as he allowed the cop to lead him.

“Hey.”

They turned.

“What…what’s going to happen to him?”

The female officer shrugged her powerful shoulders.  “He’s headed for a shelter.”

“Do you want him?” The Asian officer asked me.

I hesitated.

“Unless someone adopts him quick, he’s probably going to end up getting… euthanized.”  Something about the way she said the word told me this was a term she’d been trained to use, a politically correct word for ‘put to sleep,’ a euphemism for ‘killed.’  

“Do you want him?” The Asian repeated.

“Yeah.  Yes.  I’ll take him,” and I took the leash when the cop handed it to me.

Then, together we trudged up the stairs, out of the station.

His tail started wagging.

We were headed to Mars.

Alexander Jones has an English/Creative Writing BA. After graduating he went to trade school for metal fabrication. He’s placed short stories or poetry in Akashic Books, Bastion Magazine, Crack the Spine, DASH, Eunoia Review and other publications. Several of his short stories have received honorable mentions in Writer’s Digest’s annual contests, and one of his essays won GoRail’s 2012 contest; he got to meet his congressman in Washington DC and sit for a second in his comfy office chair inside the Capitol as his prize. He’s slowly earning a Master’s Degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He works as a welder for a metropolitan transportation agency near New York, and lives with his wife and son in New Jersey.