fiction
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Hey Dad, How’s the view from where you are? Is Jesus keeping you company, sharing stories over some cosmic equivalent of coffee? Yesterday was your birthday—eighty-one, if time even bothers to count where you are. Do you celebrate, or is that date just a faint echo of a life left behind? I wonder, sometimes, if
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“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
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Fiji, 1980s. The sun’s a smug bastard, grinning down, reminding me it’s summer here while Los Angeles shivers. Waves lap at the shore, warm as a lover’s whisper, every thirty seconds or so. I’m eighteen, cocky, standing in nemo-print trunks—pre-movie, mind you, maybe I inspired Pixar. Signed up for this swim-snorkel-underwater-cave deal. Sounded like a
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How do I unwind after a demanding day? I sit.I breathe.And sometimes—I remember. Back in 2008, when the Great Recession was battering my business and life felt like it was unraveling one invoice at a time, I developed a small ritual. After a long day—clients yelling, banks circling, friends and subcontractors losing homes—I’d pull into
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Billie Holiday cries softly, somewhere between here and the past—her melody warms the corners of the roomlike the heater humming in time with my breath.A cappuccino cozies the center of me,and I write—to life,to you,across this ethereal threadspun of digits and light. I weave thoughts and feelingslike a tapestry—yarns pulled from memory and moment:scratchy and
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The desert doesn’t care about your plans. This was the first lesson Jack Write learned when he traded his graduate thesis on Kierkegaard’s concept of despair for a tool belt and a 1998 Ford F-150 with questionable AC. The second lesson: heat warps everything—glass, metal, morals. Palm Springs at 3:17 PM was a study in
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The dashboard clock read 6:38 when I pulled into the gravel lot. Eight minutes late – early by my standards, when considering Luna’s habitual tardiness, but for Luna, this might as well have been standing her up entirely. She leaned against her Honda, arms crossed, one foot tapping. Stein, her 110-pound mastiff mix, sat obediently
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The bartender polishes a glass that’ll never be clean – appropriate. I’m on my third bourbon, neat, the kind that burns like regret. Sully Erna’s growling through the speakers about devils and crossroads, which feels about right. Another night unraveling at the seams. You’d think by now I’d have learned – the world doesn’t give
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Marylyn murmured “good night” through the phone, and Hank fired back a curt “Night,” thumb smashing the end call button before her rejection could hit—just a silent void now, no echo of the old days when a handset’s clunk marked the end. Gone was the heft of plastic in hand, the small speaker and microphone
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“The years apart folded into a single breath,and the greater homecoming—to her, to Him—lit the universe with a quiet, unending hello.” It’s been twenty-five years, give or take a shimmer,since I last saw your shadow spill across the floor,a silhouette I knew for thirty-three tender turns of the earth.I’m older now—older than you ever carved
BB Grey--musings 