fiction
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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…
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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…
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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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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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A fraud, they said. But to be a fraud one must first know the real thing.I never got the blueprint, only the ghost of a house.This rope, not hemp but memory, knots me to myself.I dream of Houdini-ing out, each kiss from my wife a lockpick made of breath. I was married once. I think…
BB Grey--musings 