Leaving the apartment turns into a checklist. Every item gets confirmed before anybody touches the door. Kimberly’s bag shows you who she is better than any description could, so I’m going to open it. What Goes In Food and water first. A first aid kit. Two MREs for trade, because on the street food opens…
Most of the lights go out at once, but not every object stops working. Some of the most important things in The Severed City are old, mechanical, and slightly out of fashion. I wanted to find what a real New York apartment building would hold that could survive a blackout, and then make those things…
Money stops working almost at once. Nobody announces it. Cards fail, registers go dark, and cash holds its value for about as long as it takes someone to realize that nobody behind the counter has anything to sell. After that, the city has to work out a new way to decide what things are worth….
Start at the corner of West 84th Street and Columbus Avenue. Kimberly Sterns lives on that block, in an apartment with a view of the avenue. Everything in The Severed City happens within walking distance of it. Real Streets, Real Routes Fiction set in New York often treats the city as a painted backdrop. Names…
Natalie Oliver is 22 years old. She’s from Indiana. She saved up for two years after high school, packed everything she owned, and moved to New York City at twenty to start college. She had never lived anywhere bigger than a midsized town in the Midwest and she took to the city like she had…
Kimberly Sterns is 17 years old. She lives alone in a two bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. She works part time at a GameStop on 86th and Broadway. She goes to high school. She makes her own dinner most nights and waits for her father to come home on weekends. On the surface,…
It’s a Friday evening in autumn. New York City is doing what it always does at that hour. Restaurants are full. Subways are packed. Somewhere over the Hudson, the lights of Newark flicker against a sky that’s just starting to turn cold for the first time since summer. Then at 7:03 PM everything stops. Not…