The Man in Blue Green

Excerpt

The officer in the ill-washed uniform forgets what my rights are and tries to fake the arrest, mumbling gibberish, straddling the bike path in a John Wayne way. Over his quivering shoulder the George Washington Bridge is visible—a silver arc all the way to the brown of New Jersey. The sky is colored with para-sailors participating in an Olympic trial. The Hudson pitching with info-barges and the path jiggling with joggers that grunt and gasp as they pound past, shoes leaking gel.

Ben Miller

Ben Miller’s prose can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of The Kenyon Review, Agni, Salmagundi, The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, Raritan and Gulf Coast. His nonfiction has also been included in the Best American Essays anthology. The recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in New York City with his wife.

“The Man in Blue Green” is part of a recently completed novel set in a sixth New York City borough called the Dronx, a decrepit purgatorial refuge for citizens who have failed to succeed in other boroughs. The book—consisting of interlocking stories, monologues, essays, and twenty-five line drawings by the artist Dale Williams—provides a panoramic view of a shadowland inhabited by residents struggling to recreate themselves amid history’s vast wreckage. Numerous visuals from Meanwhile, in the Dronx… will be on display at the reading, and every attendee will receive their own map and skeleton key to New York’s newest borough.