Meet R.M. Schneiderman. He Wrote the Captain's Rescue Story For NYT Website, And This....

How many nights did I lie naked on the floor in my bedroom, mourning my own shards? How many days did I spend in Union Square, dreaming of buttresses, trembling at the thought of another faceless moon?

Now every morning you lay beside me. You sleep late. When you wake, you lend me a groggy kiss. Your lips taste like mortar, like concrete. And when I look in the mirror to brush my teeth, there is no sign of a shattering.

My face grows rich with architecture.

Yes, that tasty bit of prose comes from the pen of R.M. Schneiderman, whose byline can be found all over the NYT website this afternoon. A NYT web producer who has drawn Sunday duty at the website, Schneiderman also writes fiction for Copious Magazine, where his short stories range from "Dusk In Calcutta, Italy" (excerpted above) to "A Ride on the 7-Train," the account of a young man who gets a bit nervous when he sees an Algerian-looking man on the subway:

It was his eyes that caught my attention. They were red, almost sun burnt. His skin was the color of charred tobacco and a thick mustache reclined between a long, narrow nose and a pair of thin, dark lips. He looks Algerian, I thought, though I didn’t know why; it was the first word that popped into my mind. He turned towards me and I immediately looked down; on the tracks below me, expired cigarettes lay motionless in fetid puddles of water.

Woohoo! Da bomb diggity fo sho!

Schneiderman, whose first name is Ross, follows the grand NYT tradition of abbreviating his first and middle name into initials; some stellar predecessors include A.M. Rosenthal, A.H. Raskin, E.W. Kenworthy, and of course, A.O. Sulzberger Jr. and his son, recent NYT arrival A.G. Sulzberger.

Welcome, R.M.! As of today, there would seem to be no more reason for you to be mourning your shards.