books
-
Good morning, Thursday. The week is nearly over. January is already in full swing—by next week, we’ll be halfway through the month. I went to the eye doctor yesterday. Doctor M has been my optometrist for over twelve years now. It’s a comfort, walking in and not having to introduce yourself all over again. She
-
The Chapter or: How Pat Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Algorithm It was immediate. It was what was needed. It was a point in a pointillism canvas of a prosaic mosaic rendering of the new times. Pat rushed to get thoughts down in the early hours of the morning. The start was journaling
-
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
-
Sad music creaks from a speaker with a cracked woofer. The record player spits treble and scratches, fizzing on the low notes. She doesn’t mind. She knows this song by heart—could trace every flat and sharp in her mind. The sadness fills the room, seeps into her red-rimmed eyes. Tears well up and sit at
-
Hey. Hey, I said, and wondered when she had stopped saying Hi baby, sweetheart, well hello there—any of the phrases I’d looked forward to hearing as she tried her hardest to make the ordinary less than. I was surprised she answered at all. Ninety-five percent of the time I got her voicemail, which in the
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Today’s Prompt: Do You Have Any Collections? I’ve collected things, sure. Baseball cards, once. Matchboxes, briefly, though I’m still not sure what possessed me to start that one. Maybe it was the smallness of them, easy to gather, easy to lose. Like most things that felt important once and now sit in some dusty box
-
“Some doors don’t open with force. They wait for the right hands, at the right time.” bb grey Yard sales weren’t Robert’s thing. Not even close. But Beth—Beth thrived on them.“Look at this! A whole world of treasures just waiting to be rescued!” she’d say, grinning like she’d found buried gold in a box marked
BB Grey--musings 