Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

I walked for a long time, but eventually, not far from the bright early hours of the morning, I approached the subway that would take me to the train station. Fretful over the weather, I hoped that everything was still on schedule. I stepped off the sidewalk and began to descend the staircase. Halfway down, a crumpled pile of rags was heaped against the wall, and if not for the solitary hand that reached out of the mound and held onto the metal railing, I wouldn’t have known that I was passing at least one, if not two, human beings. Yellow bulbs glowed against the wet walls, but even so, it looked darker at the bottom. Shortly, commuters would be crowding along the passage in their morning rush. My God , I thought, but I went down nonetheless, aching with every step.

THE END

Michael James Rizza has an MA in creative writing from Temple University in Philadelphia and a PhD in American Literature from the University of South Carolina. He has published academic articles on Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera, Harold Frederic, and Adrienne Rich. His short fiction has recently appeared in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Switchback , and Curbside Splendor . He has won various awards for his writing, including a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. His current projects are a book about the theories of Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault, and a novel tentatively titled Domestic Men’s Fiction . He teaches at Kean University. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Robin and their son Wilder, who was named after a character in DeLillo’s White Noise . He welcomes you to visit his website: mjrizza.com.