BB Grey–musings

 

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The scratching of his pen filled the room, frantic, almost desperate. Ink bled into paper, curling into letters that barely kept up with his thoughts. The desk lamp buzzed faintly, casting a cone of light that barely held back the dusk seeping in through the window. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside him, forgotten, its long tail of ash bending under its own weight.

She sat across the room, one leg draped over the arm of the chair, scrolling absentmindedly through a screen that barely reflected in her eyes. A message chimed. She responded with a flick of her fingers—”reply all”—the words as effortless as breath, weightless, drifting into the digital void where they would be skimmed, ignored, forgotten.

“You don’t even read what you write,” he muttered without looking up.

She exhaled, slow. “Neither does anyone else.”

Outside, the world was folding in on itself. Autumn had stripped the trees bare, and the streets were littered with what was left—paper-thin leaves curling at the edges, sidewalks veined with cracks that no one bothered to fix. The sky hung low, the color of an old television tuned to a dead channel. It was the season of dying. They lived in it without question, without ceremony, as if the slow unraveling of everything had been agreed upon long ago.

He kept writing, jaw tight, as if he could force meaning into a world that had stopped caring. She shifted in her seat, aimless, picking up a remote but never turning on the television.

“You ever think,” she asked finally, “that none of this matters?”

He paused, his pen hovering over the last word he’d written.

“Of course,” he said. “That’s why I write it down.”

She smirked, a flicker of something close to amusement before it faded. “We’ll probably die quoting some B-movie garbage. Some half-baked one-liner nobody remembers right. You realize that, right?”

He let out a breath—maybe a laugh, maybe just exhaustion. He put the pen down, leaned back, studied the way the light cut across the room, carving it into halves.

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

The cigarette finally collapsed into the ashtray. The wind outside rattled the windowpane, whispering something neither of them cared enough to decipher.

And somewhere, far off, a television droned into an empty room, playing a movie no one was watching.