fiction
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a letter to the dead… Hey Dad, it’s Monday again.I’m writing from where the cold snap brokeat 39 degrees, the mountains holding their breathlike a man waiting for test results.I wonder what sky you’re under now,if heaven is a temperature,a feeling of warmth after a long chill. Mom is okay. She still watches the news,gets
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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
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I don’t trust white feet. If they haven’t seen the sun,how could they ever walk in my shoes?Or pretend to. Feet in robes?Think flip-flops—hardly up to the task,if you ask me. Blindfolded,they go where they’re told,peeking only at day’s end,no longer pretendingthey don’t smell,or that they’re a size smaller, larger,girl, boy. Brown, cracked,leather stretched over
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There’s this L-shaped couch—sleeps four if you’ve run out of bedsand won’t surrender to the floor. The seller called it gold.I see beige.It belonged to someone with money—new tech, or maybe just old. It was meant for the curb last Friday,but saved three days later. Now I sit and wonderwhat asses have rested here,what secrets
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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
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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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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
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The head of the tornado is a wide, open mouth—swallowing clouds, light, dust,the stray wing of a passing bird.Some things fall in gently;others are ripped from their roots.Where it touches down,the finger of God stirs the world—a chaos that is also a kind of order. This house is taken, that one spared.The path seems random,unless
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Maybe it’s the telling that makes them live: passed on, embellished, misremembered, or lost. bb grey The old guy had stories to tell and an audience to listen. I was twelve, jumpy, and loud inside from being quiet too long—pressing a pillow over thoughts that didn’t belong. I loved stories. They were television in my
BB Grey--musings 