short-story
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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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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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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
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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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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
BB Grey--musings 