A Short Story, excerpt from my published short story collection, Death and the Dream, 2nd edition.

The morning after Christmas, I walk with my Aunt Muriel through a barren park on East Fifth Street, in lower Manhattan. It’s not much of a park. We have to stop every six feet or so for her to catch her breath, and we stand beside one of the rotting wooden benches for a while. It’s more difficult for her to get around now than the last time I saw her. She’s gotten a bit heavier each year.

A whole row of pigeons perch behind us, atop a tall wire fence. Ruffling their feathers. Cooing. Probably trying to stay warm.

I wish I’d put on gloves before I headed out to meet my aunt here for this long overdue visit. She was in front of her apartment building waiting already when I arrived, and so I expect she’s probably cold too. I shove my stiff hands deep into my coat pockets and find a cough drop I don’t need, but no cigarettes – which I kind of really do need.

I pull the coat tighter around me. Look up at the bare tree branches directly over us. Don’t see any pigeons there, for which I’m truly thankful. When I visited last year, we walked so slowly here that the pigeons deposited white droppings all over my coat. And this morning, I’m a little hungover. Fresh pigeon droppings? That would be the end of me.

The police station across the street is quiet this morning. Police cars are lined up, idly parked in a neat diagonal formation. Three officers stand in front of the station’s entryway and laugh together.

“I wish we didn’t have to walk by the station,” I say.

“It’s so we’re able to get to the park, Loretta. Don’t you like the park?”

Ah, no. Really, I don’t. The homeless park, I sometimes call it, but she doesn’t like that.

A man sits motionless as a statue on one of the four benches, where he’s bundled up in gray blankets. White wisps of hair frame his face. No surprise to see him parked there. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.

The park has two trees. They’re enormous, and their branches rattle in a cold breeze. Several empty planters line the fence which surrounds a parking lot, behind the trees. Someone has tied brightly colored tinsel along the fence to decorate. Looks bizarre. I think it should be some kind of violation to hang tinsel in a City park.

I’m surprised to see a young woman is carefully placing burning incense in each planter. The smoke wafts toward us, fragrant in the wintry air. I expect she might have hung the tinsel, too.

Aunt Muriel doesn’t seem to notice her.

I always visit my aunt around the holidays to see how she’s doing, and today I’ve brought her a small gift. I hope she’ll like it. She’s lived alone here in The East Village, some 20 years now. But who’s really alone in the City?

She sometimes talks about the good neighbors when I call her Sundays, so I know she’s able to get out from time to time. Maggie said this, she tells me, or Rosy did that. Shelby had a haircut or he wore a new coat. Little things. Still, I expect some of them, Maggie, Rosy or Shelby might have gone away to see family for the holidays. Almost everyone does, in this neighborhood.

It gets pretty empty here. It was high time for a visit.

Coming down the sidewalk, a heavy middle-aged woman in a puffy down coat walks a large, long-haired dog on a bright red leash. Heading right for us. The dog must be 70 pounds. Maybe part golden retriever and part collie. It stops every two steps to sniff. It sees us, looks up at Aunt Muriel, lowers its head and wags its tail.

“Hello, Mindy, and how are you today?” Aunt Muriel coos to the dog, and bends down to pet her. She turns to me and warns, “Mindy’s a puppy and she’s very playful. You’ll have to be careful of your coat. She jumps.”

I look down at my coat, secondhand but clean. I intend to keep it that way.

Mindy sniffs in my general direction, straining against her leash.

I step back. “Big puppy! How old is she?” I ask, but no one answers.

The neighbor walking Mindy smiles. She pulls the dog along gently but insistently  –  time to go. Aunt Muriel follows them with her eyes as they meander down the sidewalk.

From across the street, the three officers watch us with equal indifference: my aunt, me, and the woman with the dog.

“Mindy says she doesn’t remember you,” Aunt Muriel says, and she turns back to me.

“She said that?” I laugh self-consciously at her joke because yes, it’s been a while since I came by for a visit. A year, actually. “Well, I’m not sure why she would if she’s a puppy. So who walks her?”

“I don’t know; Mindy’s human isn’t talkative.”

 “Mindy’s human?”

A commotion erupts in the parking lot behind the park. A short, young officer aggressively grabs hold of a tall, stooped teenager. The kid’s long, curly hair swirls around as she shakes him. She drags him along behind her, holding fast to the collar of his rumpled, olive-colored jacket. Hauls him across the parking lot, past the police cars, and toward the station.

The boy stumbles. Maybe drunk. Not resisting. Honestly, he just seems confused.

 When they get closer to us, I see his clothes are terribly dirty. He’s underdressed for the weather, too. Must feel awfully cold. Here it is the day after Christmas, he’s so young, and he probably spent the night outside. Maybe he spent it alone. Unfortunate.

“Your miserable butt is arrested! You got that? You can’t read? Look at this! See that? What does that say?” The officer yells at him as she points at a sign on the wire fence.

The boy doesn’t answer, doesn’t pull away. He struggles to keep standing.

“It says ‘no trespassing.’ Know what that means? Means you! You’re going to jail, you miserable piece of garbage,” she shouts. “You’re going down now, you’re going down. You hear me?”

I whisper to Aunt Muriel as they pass by us, “So mean.”

She shrugs.

A somber gentleman with short graying hair and wearing a green plaid wool coat crosses the street slowly, coming toward us. He’s walking an old and stout, white-haired Scottish terrier. The man recognizes Aunt Muriel. One of the good neighbors, I expect, though I don’t remember him.

“Hello, Shelby. How’s Shelby today?” Aunt Muriel asks the dog sweetly. She bends down and starts to hum a little song. She rubs the short white curls on the Scotty’s head.

Shelby stops in front of her and sits down. He wags his tail ever so slowly.

The dog and Aunt Muriel look at each other silently for a few minutes that seem to last a lot longer. It feels as if they’re having some kind of conversation, which is weird. Mind reading?

The gentleman smiles at me patiently; he doesn’t seem bothered. Of course not. He has thick leather gloves, a wooly scarf and a cap.

“Come, Shelby, let’s go,” he says gently after a while. He waits for the Scotty to get up, and happily saunter off with him.

“What was that all about?”

“What was what all about?” Aunt Muriel throws me a frown.

Leaving the little park, the Scotty gathers its energy taking little puffing breaths. It barks at pigeons clustered by the park benches. They fly off at once together in a chorus of iridescent, whirring wings. The birds flap past the colored tinsel blowing around on the fence. Incense smoke swirls wildly in their wake. It drifts around the man who still sits bundled up on one of the benches. Even now, he’s immobile. I begin to wonder if he’s actually alive.

“Is he alright?”

“Oh, yes,” Aunt Muriel answers. “Shelby always comes out this time of day for his walk.”

“No, no. I meant the guy in the blankets there,” I say. “Because, you know, he hasn’t moved at all. In a while.”

“Why, yes. His granddaughter brings him here every day. For the air.”

“She just leaves him there, or what?”

Aunt Muriel looks at the man on the bench with a pained expression for a while before she continues.

“You remember your great-aunt, Henrietta?”

 I nod. Of course I remember Great-Aunt Henrietta. She lived with us for years until she broke her hip, and then we had to find somewhere else for her. Truly bad decision; she died a week after they moved her out.

“Well, he’s in the same place they put her.”

“Here?” I ask.

“No, there,” she nods her head indicating down the street past the police station. “It’s on the corner, don’t you know? And Henrietta wasn’t very happy when she was there, Loretta, you know. No. Not one little bit. No one came to see her.”

 I raise my eyebrows. It was, after all, only for a week.

“But this man, his granddaughter comes. She comes every day.” She repeats in a sing-song voice, “Every day.”

My aunt and I make our way back toward her apartment. My feet are getting increasingly colder in my thin boots. I wish I had woolen socks. I wish we were walking faster. I wish I was younger and stronger. Most of all, I wish I was not hungover.

A tall woman with glossy and straight, auburn hair breezes by us in high-heeled, knee-high boots. She’s wearing a fitted, brown leather jacket and walking her dog. She rolls her hips and shoulders like a supermodel on a runway. Her dog is sleek too, with short, chestnut hair. Looks like some kind of small greyhound. The dog wears a stylish red fleece jacket.

I’m surprised when they turn into the entryway of Aunt Muriel’s building. The model unlocks the door quickly and holds it open for us, flashing a gorgeous smile. We enter behind her. In the building hallway she quickly unsnaps the dog’s leash. It bounds up the first flight of stairs ahead of her.

I expect that dog could be a model too, a dog model in advertisements for dog food, or for dog toys. Obedience training, maybe.

The model shouts sharply, “Wait!”

Her dog stops and stands alert on the second-floor landing. Watches her, motionless. The dog’s left back leg starts to twitch and shiver.

“Best behaved dog I know,” Aunt Muriel says in her loud, sing-song happy voice.

The model turns back to look at us. She beams at Aunt Muriel, and then trots up the stairs herself. Her dog bounds ahead of her, its nails clicking on the wide slate steps.

After I hear a door close upstairs and the key turn in the lock, I ask, “Who was that?”

“Rosy,” Aunt Muriel says as she climbs the stairs. She takes them one at a time, resting between every other step.

“That’s Rosy?” I ask.

“Miniature pincer. Oh she’s very well trained. Impressive,” she says.

“Ah. I meant the woman,” I laugh.

“Rosy’s human? I don’t know, Loretta. I haven’t spoken with her.” Aunt Muriel’s breathing is labored now. “But I’m so glad you got to meet them.”

 “Who?” I ask.

 “The neighbors,” she says, and gives me an odd look.

“The dogs,” I say.

“Yes.”

Well, she’s like that now, my Aunt Muriel. I follow behind her up the last flight of stairs.

“You’ll come in and have coffee, won’t you?” she asks me, smiling hopefully.

I step up beside her and hold her arm to help support her. She pulls herself up using the railing. She’s breathing too hard.

“We should get you something on the first floor. Aren’t you afraid of falling down the stairs?”

She shakes her head, no. “I hold on.”

When we get to the third floor and enter her apartment, I remember how small it actually is. I could extend my hands and touch both walls at the same time if I wanted to, but don’t. A group of cooing pigeons sits clustered outside her window ledge. For the warmth of the building, I suppose. The entryway smells of recently-baked yeast bread, butter and potatoes.

Even though it’s early in the day, suddenly I feel ravenously hungry. Aunt Muriel’s place? Of course I’m hungry.

We sit at a narrow kitchen table together. It’s covered with a clean lace tablecloth. She’s put out a little bowl of fresh, dark red cherries. Yesterday’s paper with Christmas headlines lies unopened beside a stack of colorful junk mail. Yes, I can tell she was alone yesterday, like I was.

“I brought you something,” I say, and hand her my small, neatly wrapped gift. It’s a string of small white pearls I know she’ll open later.

She takes it, holds it a moment and then places it on the table.

“You shouldn’t have. You coming to see me today, Loretta, that was my gift,” she says happily. At the small gas stove beside us, she lights a fire for coffee.

Walking past the police station on my way back to the subway, the female officer who’d arrested the teenager stops me.

“Hey! Your mom alright?”

“She’s not my mom,” I say, and keep walking.

“A very nice woman. Very nice. She likes the dogs around here. I like dogs. Some of the nicest people around here are dogs.

“That sounded funny. I don’t mean people are dogs, I mean the dogs are nicer. Nicer than the people. Sometimes anyway, to some people. If the dogs like you. You know, I got a dog. Big Doberman,” she continues speaking to my back.

“Hey! I’m talking to you,” she yells, sounding hurt.

I turn around.

“You know what I’m saying? Dogs are basically good. A dog ever lie to you? Nope. Dogs do not lie. I like dogs,” she stares at me, lost in thought for a moment.

I shrug and turn to go.

“So, your mom, don’t you think you should move her out of here?”

“Not my mom.”

“Like Upstate? Like me? I moved Upstate. New Rochelle. I used to live around here. A long time ago. I’m telling you, this place? It’s no place for her,” she continues. “This place is a shithole.”

I shake my head, no.

“I watch out for her, don’t you worry,” the officer says. “But you should move her out of here. You think about it. Anyway. You get home safe.”

“Merry Christmas,” I say.

She laughs lightly, and in her smile I am surprised to see the beauty in her. She’s a person who is one of the good neighbors, in a different way than I’d been looking for here. Yes, her lips are like red cherries and her small teeth are like white pearls. And every day, she’s the one watching over my Aunt Muriel.

*****

— Book excerpt from Death & the Dream, short story collection by J.J. Brown, 2nd edition, copyright 2025. Available in print and ebook editions in most places books are sold.

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