Matt Briggs writes books, code, and posts from between Seattle and Tacoma in the Pacific Northwest.
The Funnel | Fiction by Matt Briggs (Mar 19, 2014)
“I observed immediately that dating was identical to looking for a job. You needed to send out a lot of resumes. You needed to interview to find a promising match. But you didn’t need to make a career of it. I essentially created a sales funnel.”
by Matt Briggs
WHEN PAT TOOK BOARDWALK, PARK PLACE WAS STILL IN PLAY. He couldn’t resist touting his slumlord skills. He would lock us in tenements at the edge of the Monopoly board so foul that he wouldn’t have to call the exterminator because not even vermin would live there. “I’ll charge you a fortune and use the cash to buy useless things like gourmet marshmallows to feed to the pigeons.” In the middle of his rant he turned to Hanna, my wife, and said, “I guess I like women.”
by Matt Briggs
ELISSA NEVER TOLD JASON ANYTHING. Rather Elissa’s texts became shorter and less frequent. At her peak, Elissa had been a three-times a day texter. She sent him a short note in the morning telling him something about her dreams. She had vivid and violent dreams. She dreamt she was a starling that had gone on a rampage against the squirrels in her neighborhood. It was a re-occurring dream and had become a running joke between them. When her dreams were peaceful, she would say her dream had been “starling-free.” She sent mid-day texts in the middle of meetings where she was seized with boredom. Must die. She sent texts in the evening that were vaguely amorous. I am not wearing any pants.
by Matt Briggs
A DEPAKOTE DREAM IS UNLIKE A PAXIL DREAM. It is unlike any of the dreams I don’t remember from before I began my chemical regimen. I don’t remember my old dreams exactly, but I know I had them. I would wake with a flash of something: a boat on a clear lake, the sound of a train on tracks. When I woke from my Depakote sleep, I woke with nothing. I didn’t remember sleep. Rather, the alarm made a noise. I pressed the sound off, and then I climbed out of bed and consulted my memory. With Depakote, I had no idea how I feel. This was a state I desired for those sleepless months before I went to the hospital. I wanted all sensation to end. It was too much. Now all sensation had stopped, and I felt as if my mind was a pond that had been frozen since before the last Ice Age.
by Matt Briggs
MY WIFE MARTY WAS IN AL-ANON. Marty always took my with her on what I thought of as her meet-and-greets. Marty wasn’t trying to sell anything. She wasn’t running for office, but rather I figured she was looking for something about herself in these meetings. These were retired boozers like she was, and they had moved and assembled lives out of whatever was left of their health, of their marriages, families, out of their cars that were still sometimes banged up in inexplicable places because of the type of collisions you have when you are blacked out. We were visiting Ralph and his wife Samantha who went by Sammie. They lived in an actual cul-de-sac in the suburbs. Ralph had a five-year-old Chevy Impala, one of the new editions, and he had somehow dented the roof of the car and then tried to pull the dent out so that it had a metal cowlick.