creative writing
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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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I feel the air against my face,tugging the hair from my eyes.The sun sings its same old refrain,assuring me the day has no end,and this kingdom of dirt and lightis mine to rule. Come here, friend, I tell a ladybug,and study her through the glass,a tiny iced donut from Winchell’s shop.When I stare too long,wings
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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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The sun is practicing its escape,pulling a blanket of cloudsover its tired shoulders.I watch it go. This gray afternoon has been a thief,lifting me from my own life,leaving me with thoughtsthat don’t fit my hands. I’ve been counting victories,stacking them against the losses.The sky holds its own scale—evening will be the judge. There is a
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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
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It’s Friday, which is supposed to mean something—and I suppose it does, to those people. The ones I imagine still belong to the Thank-God-It’s-Friday congregation. Their voices rise like smoke from a distant fire I can no longer smell. But at fifty-seven, when there’s so little left to kill, Friday arrives like fog along a
BB Grey--musings 