Morning came like a pothole at sixty miles an hour—sudden, jarring, and hard to blame on anyone specific. The rooster down the road, probably unionized by now, took turns with his feathery co-conspirators alerting the neighborhood that the sun had clocked in. Matt rolled from his stomach onto a suspiciously angled hip and blinked at the red LED display of his ‘Zeneth’ clock—a misspelled promise of peace if there ever was one. The numbers glowed 06:00, unmoving and accusatory, like they’d been waiting all night just to scold him.
Fallbrook was the kind of town that got forgotten between cities that didn’t much matter to begin with. Too far from the coast to catch a sea breeze, too close to the desert to pretend you weren’t living inside a convection oven set to “slow roast.” It was the kind of place that dared you to dream small.
The ad in the paper had read, “Work for lodging and pay.” Matt figured he’d been doing the “work” part for thirty-five years now, and the “lodging” usually amounted to different variations of a lumpy mattress. Might as well try it with a roof attached.
He swung both legs over the edge of his twin-mattress-high bed setup—one too short, one too soft—resting on a splintering wood floor in what used to be a shed and now went by the dignified name of “the lodge.” He sat there for a minute, eyes on the wall like it might blink first. Fallbrook. The name alone felt like a cosmic shrug: a life stuck somewhere between the chaos of a falling waterfall and the peaceful pretense of a brook. He knew he was overthinking it—he always did—but irony was a hard habit to break.
He pulled on a pair of two-day-old Wranglers—Levi’s “Signature Edition,” which was a fancy way of saying “Walmart Exclusive”—and shoved his feet into a pair of Dickies work boots, size 11, broken in and flattened by years of bearing the sort of weight you don’t write songs about. His arches didn’t reach for the heavens; they barely reached the sole.
The bathroom sink sputtered like it had a grudge, coughing up molasses-colored water before reluctantly clearing its throat. Matt waited for warmth, then gave up and slapped cold water onto a face lined more by worry than laughter. He ran wet palms through his hair, finger-combing it back with the kind of care reserved for court appearances or church—neither of which were on the schedule.
He opened the door and the day punched him square in the pupils. Light flooded the shed like it had a score to settle. Before stepping out, he gave the place a last once-over: a worn backpack half-full with the sum total of what he considered “valuables,” perched on a milk crate beside his mattress tower. The door swung shut behind him with a clack of finality—self-closing hinges, as if even the hardware knew not to dwell.
Matt headed toward the barn.
Yesterday, Mackie—who looked like she hadn’t blinked since ’94—gave him instructions for setting fence posts eight feet apart, two sacks of concrete each, to corral Laurel and Hardy—her two donkeys who had a real taste for anything chlorophyll-based. It wasn’t exactly restoring the Sistine Chapel, but it was honest work. The kind he’d prayed for. And received.
Details mattered. That was the thing. The distance between doing a job and doing it right could often be measured in inches or attitude. Matt squinted at the sky, half-hopeful, half-suspicious, and muttered with a crooked smile, “Thank you… and good morning, Jesus.”
BB Grey--musings 
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