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Garth Mitchell had a crooked smile. He’d wrinkle and scrunch his nose, squint his eyes—hoped his nose was pushing down the middle of his upper lip in equal measure, making the edges rise. It was a wreck of a smile, all work and no reward. His hair went white at thirty-two, and he was quick…
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The market was sliding and gold with it. If there were rules once, they weren’t working. Jack crumpled a Post-it. A buddy’s buddy said Go West Young Man in the seventh. Go West went south. Jack lost his reserve. He knew better. He didn’t. He scratched the bottoms of his front pockets—jeans worn thin at…
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I thought how you thought of yourself as the moon— brilliantly white light, a dot of hope in eternal black. But even your light wasn’t yours. Reflection. And the howling below—that was real. Lobo, me. Smooth surface. You could trick yourself into seeing a smile there. But the truth: scars skip the surface, sink steeply—pieces…
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October was more than half over. Halloween should’ve been everywhere, but the aisles were already plastic Christmas—perfect, except for being plastic. Thanksgiving sat between like a spacer, there to keep the momentum through the new year. Time moved the way stores wanted it to move: on to the next thing. You either spent, or you…
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I had given myself a week to understand dying this time around. The news arrived with a percentage—fifty-fifty—which meant either everything or nothing, depending on how I chose to look at things as they stood. There would be no worrying about having saved enough, no being a burden to my children and what remained of…
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from Brown and Black Days Well, it’s tax day. Sort of. Everyone knows tax day as April 15, but if you’re a live-by-the-edge, self-employed, always-worried-because-maybe-you-did-something-wrong kind of filer, then October 15 is the day you know you have for your extensions to be filed. But even that anxiety is relative. One day taxes are in…
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Journal Edition The mind is quiet this morning.No blaze, just a low light.That’s okay. The world insists we know at once,as if understanding were a switch,not a seed. I dreamt a stalk rising into the sky,a ladder of green—something to send me upand bring back downwhat I knew could grow. So much of what we…
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Some people are addicted to chaos because peace is unfamiliar.—Unknown The calendar circles something close. I don’t mean to wound—only to tell the truth: we’re speaking across a distance we built, one line at a time. You said, “We need to have a conversation.” It lands like corporate speak, a eulogy before the body’s even…
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A man fixes what’s broken in a woman’s house long after he’s stopped being able to fix what’s broken between them. Brett was on the phone with Kelly, listening as she recounted the small dramas of her workday.“So-and-so was complaining about this and that,” she said, her voice running out of steam until resignation set…
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After the squirrel, after the bread I. 4 a.m. — the heater hums its question. Afternoon, the air conditioner answers back. Between them: my body, a pendulum of want. II. Winter is a furnace. Summer, the frantic living. But here, autumn — I am learning the grammar of letting go while still breathing. The verb…
BB Grey--musings 